In light of this situation, all “traditional” businesses are feeling like they need to be digitally transformed. All of them want to reinvent. It’s not difficult to find evidences glancing over the economy pages. A big Bank creates its own Analytics Department, or this centenary newspaper concentrates its efforts in the digital format, abandoning the material one. The fear to see how this transformation impacts over his waterline is a strong wake-up call to start walking.
But while they do the first steps to nowhere, anybody forget to safeguard the access to its own dairy cow. Mr. Rifkin warns about the logical reaction provoked by the natural aversion to change. This means, in capitalist terms, as many monopolistic practices as you can. And that’s a brake. You can’t lead the change and, at the same time, wants that everything to remain the same as long as possible. That’s something easy understandable for the big worldwide companies, whatever their business was. These companies have a big bicephalic problem. Instead of putting the efforts, the money and the time in the correct box before the wave came, they prefer to define unreal plans oriented to self-convince that they can swim as Michael Phelps and keep their clothes dry.
Now, more than ever, it’s the time for Strategic Innovation. There’s no other alternative for existing big companies to have the chance for an easy adaptation to Third Industrial Revolution. There’s no other way to innovate than through strategic design where people, in its condition of user, customer, citizen, employ or whatever, must be in the center of all processes. And there’s no other method away from understanding carefully the user experience of any product or service we’ve got the temerity to launch to the market.
We must reward tech knowledge, inspiration, creativity, talent, abstraction and all that means get out of the comfort zone to visualize conveniently where we want to go.
We must dismantle all to build again. We must question all and direct the processes to the source of any decision, the new prosumers. Asking and testing from minute zero. Erring and learning along the way. It’s our obligation. That’s what anybody politically correct expects. But the margin to make mistakes is shrinking dramatically each passing day. The mistake today cannot be the result of a lack of resources, means or willingness. The mistake born today from stagnant attitudes, narrow-mindedness or impulsive decisions. If we have the right tools to got it… Why we’re still taking so many things for granted? Why we’re prioritizing the old ways of doing business in front of the new crushing logic of doing things?
Once this critical thought is brought to light, I turn my eyes to a very familiar world and I question to myself, is the Water Industry able to resist the assault of this Revolution too much time? Definitively not…
The chasm between the current technology state of the art and Water Industry tech level is huge. Compared with the rest of Utilities, Water has always been the poor brother in many aspects. A place where the technology adoption speed never has been very fast. But the exponential acceleration we’re feeling during this Third Industrial Revolution in terms of tech evolution have showed the obvious need of investment in IT to simply guarantee the water service.
