Digital Ecosystems era – the big bang inflation of the Internet is now on !

Extract from forthcoming new book “Spheres”

The emerging convergence of technology in social media networks, cloud computing, big data, mobility, sensors and Internet of Things have pervaded into business and markets. IT is now recognized as not just a cost center but also a significant driver to business value and competitiveness.

This combination of business and technology in all levels of the operating environment is establishing a new set of principles and relationships that create new “digital ecosystems” of products and services.

This is placing new challenges on the C level Board to address how technologies and the business strategy are to maximize and position best use of technology and the emerging digitization.

Physical Workplaces to Digital Workspaces

The web of interconnected IP address, networks of devices and objects are growing at an exponential rate creates new “clusters” of associations and co-presence that merges physical and virtual worlds.

The workplaces of the physical world in our homes, office, towns and locations are being digitized into ecosystems of where social and enterprise connections are automating supply chains, marketing channels and digital content.

The physicality of location and time is shifting to new forms of online spaces that provide access and services potentially anywhere and leveraging new combinations of technology and content.

These are the new “Workspaces” that are pervading all walks of life and industries where devices, products, content and transactions are blurring the boundaries of services and positioning for enterprises.

These present a unique set of new ideas and challenges that not only raise security, privacy and compliance issues but also present new forms of competitive advantage.

Value Networks to Digital Ecosystems

Digital Workspaces represent a new way of examining supply chains, working practices and social connections enabled by technologies. The value networks created by these connections are nested into a set of systems that can connect people, objects, rooms, locations, transport, knowledge and context into “communities of association”. These can be found in many industries with examples that include:

• Smart Retail

• Smart Cities

• Smart Buildings

• Connected Automotive and transport

• eGovernment

• Tele-Health

• Wearables

• Embedded product digitization

• Crowd sourcing and innovation

And Many others

New Digital Ecosystem Era

These are connected workspaces that share common characteristics that enable communities to emerge and evolve over time. Whether this is online retail, smart buildings or crowd sourcing and intelligent automotive systems, these all represent a new era of “combinatorial computing” that combines customer experience (CX) and User Experience (UX) design into a new level of interaction and potential value.

Digital Ecosystems are the workspaces of the future. They are connected across the physical and virtual world that represent value networks.

Digital ecosystems are how combinations of data, devices, networks and platforms are being developed to support human activities.

From “Walled gardens” to “Everywhere connectedness”

There are examples of integrated platforms we see in major IT vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Apple , Facebook that have built integrated vertical and horizontal platforms that have grown their own digital ecosystem of specific products and services. Indeed many “virtual businesses” only exist in these platforms and they represent a major shift in how business and IT may work today and continue into the future.

Yet with the expansion to a multiplicity objects and things being digitized and automated into a network, the concept now spans across multiple –platforms. Potentially no one platform can service all market and service needs. Even as google and Facebook and others are investing in connections in retail, automotive and environments to expand their foot bring into new digital ecosystems, the era of interconnected workspaces.

The early development of TCP IP and UDP networking standards led to a foundation for internetworking that has evolved into mobile and mesh networking across a wide variety of spectrum. These include radio, infrared , microwave and a increasing diverse range of frequencies to support connectivity from satellite to wifi, bluetooth and sensor connectivity.

The W3C web of services and web of devices early vision and the work of the IETF, ICANN, IANA and others have successfully developed a global internet but faces new growth and challenges from security and domain management.

The Semantic web design has continued to be a thorny issue in establish commonality of terminology and meaning. Yet technology is still pushing ahead with voice and facial recognition, cognitive computing and large scale data analytics become increasingly part of the next wave of information technology.

All these developments are in motion and seeking to define some kind of grand unified view of all these technologies to create sense will always remain partly speculative. But never the less there is a convergence of connected technologies that are enabling a platforms of mobile, social , data and collaborative workspaces. The physicality of consumer products and services are increasingly digitized as a matter of course for physical and online customer experience.

The present and near future will see more convergence of the physical and the virtual worlds. Big innovations and large buyouts of new technology start-ups will continue to shift the boundaries of the digital ecosystem. However it will be in the development of a range of digital workspaces in the digital ecosystem that will shape the future of work, employment, markets and industries.

The big bang inflation period of the Internet

We are no longer in the early stages of the Internet, that had a brief birth the adolescence period in at the end of the last decade. Its more akin to a “big bang” of rapid inflation of data and technologies that are now only just forming clusters and patterns as shapes in the connected places, people, devices and objects are forming enabled by the “glue” of the internetworks.

Welcome to the Digital Ecosystem era…

Note to opinion setters

Many leading Journalists in cloud computing, social, mobility, telecoms and digital strategy are seeing these changes in the technology market and impact. The book aims to establish how the current technologies of cloud computing, social, mobility, big data , Internet of things and show how these are now on a journey that are “clustering” not just people and relationships but also across these technologies pervading into new way of working and digital models of service.

Industry analysts, notably Gartner, IDC, Forrester, Ovum and 451 Group are already describing these convergences. A new language is needed to reinforce how companies and consumers need to prepare in their industry sector.

Many start-ups and incubator platforms are emerging and seeking ways to define and build value in the emerging digital ecosystems

Many dramatic shifts in the incumbent cloud providers (Google, Amazon, Facebook for example) and large IT providers (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle for example) are either building out there scope and scale of digital platforms to support their ecosystems. These companies are sensing a watershed moment of a shift to cloud ecosystems, revising and seeking investments in capabilities that are putting pressure on skills and organizational planning.

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