Published on the 09/06/2016 | Written by Newsdesk

Here’s a thing: most of the technology that’s going to disrupt your business has been around for decades. It just hasn’t made its impact felt yet…

As a consequence, it really shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise when that moment of disruption comes – and it surely will come. Among the observations made by Stefan Preston at the CIO Summit, which took place in Auckland this week, was that the technologies which are driving disruption are not new.

Preston is an entrepreneur, innovator and director of various companies, some of which are lumbered with legacy infrastructure (Westpac CIO Dawie Olivier prefers to call it “heritage infrastructure”), others of which are startups.

But first, Preston put his finger on an issue which surely besets many businesspeople as they acknowledge the necessity of ‘transformation’. “There is frustration as, while there is pressure to transform, there is also an inability of technology frameworks to deliver on priorities.”

He said there is “An ‘us and them’ thing between technology and marketing and that there are very few people who have a foot in both camps”. The end result, he said, “Is an inability to adapt which sees billion dollar companies going into the bin”. Preston helpfully illustrated his point with the logo of video chain-store Blockbuster, among other names possibly including Kodak, in a trash can.

Which company will be next? Will it be yours? Preston said that today, many companies are “buckets of assets”, with dated value propositions, and that means they can’t survive in their current incarnations. “Companies which were designed decades ago have locked in their operational methodologies. While that was an entirely reasonable thing to do, as you needed those methodologies to safely and predictably get a result, it simultaneously restricts the ability to change. That means you can’t deliver to what is going to happen tomorrow.”

As the exponential curve takes hold and drives increasing performance and capability from the range of technologies underpinning the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, the disruption of industry of every kind is inevitable, Preston said.

There should be no excuse for getting caught with your pants down, either: the wave is coming and, as noted by Ray Kurzweil at Tibco’s recent conference, it is entirely predictable.

But doing something about it won’t be easy, either, and it will be risky (speaking of its digital transformation, former NZME boss Jane Hastings said “We had to change because we had no choice”). Preston said it won’t be achieved with off-the-shelf vendor software or management models. Even good old inductive thinking has to go the way of the dodo.

Instead, it is necessary to look to innovation and “abductive thinking“; innovation, said Preston, is about coming up with new ideas and then figuring out how to commercialise them. Do that and “achieve freedom from the tyranny of legacy infrastructure and the ability to execute like a digital company”.

What’s not to like.