Everything digital becomes physical, eventually resulting in changing human ability

Virtual is one of the premises of digital thinking.  Turning physical atoms into virtual bits and selling those bits sits at the heart of digital thinking.  

Digital supporters believe digital bits enable superior performance, revenue and growth.  They old that companies created and competing on the web routinely beat their real world counterparts. On the surface that appears to be true given the success of digital giants, many of whom offer services that impossible without the web.

Look deeper at their business models you find that these digital giants have significant physical presence that is essential to their business model.  Sure they are digital companies, but they are digital in combination with the physical world rather an in spite of it.

Digital businesses have a significant physical side because the web is not a

self-contained and self-sustaining system.  What happens on the web can stay on the web, but its much more valuable when it connects with the real world.  If it does not connect with the real world then it matters, just not as much as other things that embrace a combination of digital and physical.

Everything digital becomes physical. 

It is a pretty bold statement, but one that is true particularly if you add one word – eventually.   That may be hard to accept as the hype about digital revolves around virtualizing things like personal relatonships (Facebook), product descriptions (Amazon), music (iTunes) and consumer attention (Google).  But in each of these cases, the value of the virtual information exists when it is recombined with the physical world.  You in the case of Facebook, what you buy from amazon, what you listen to and your purchasing dollars are what make Google’s advertising valuable.

Lets go one step further. 

Everything digital eventually becomes physical.  With most things becoming physical in terms of changing human ability.  

The majority of digital eventually revolves around human ability

Human ability refers to the range of activities you have the capability and capacity to perform.  Human ability ranges from being able to feed yourself all the way to the work of the worlds greatest physicians, scientists and business leaders.  Human abilities encompass everything we do.

If everything digital eventually become physical,

and

Most things manifest themselves in changes in human ability

Therefore;

Most things digital eventually manifest themselves

in changes to human ability.

We cannot say that everything digital becomes human ability, but enough of the value does to make human ability a central design element for any digital business.  A fundamental question for any digital initiative therefore becomes:

How does digital technology change human ability?

This is a fundamentally different question that the focus of IT centric investments that concentrated on cost takeout, automation, integration etc.

IT’s focus was financial.  Making the numbers work in terms of the business case boiled down to simple math comparing as-is and to-be costs of doing business.  This makes sense given the massive investments required to build out IT infrastructures and operations.

Digital’s focus is more direct. Smart phones, social media, big data, sensors etc. are technologies that directly touch the individual.  They are personal in the way a personal computer never could be.  They still have a business case but one built on the value resulting from expanding people’s ability – customers and associate/employees alike – that really matters. 

Human ability is at the center of successful digital business models and a core element of their design.  It is easy to lose sight of human ability’s role in digital business given all the attention paid to transforming atoms into bits.  But human ability is there because everything digital becomes physical particularly when it changes our abilities.