Digital Disciplines: Attaining Market Leadership via the Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobile, and the Internet of Things

Chapter 3Digital Disciplines

Treacy and Wiersema's value disciplines framework—operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy—is timeless. As long as there are companies, they will have processes, products or services, and customer relationships. These firms will need to differentiate themselves in the market to be successful enterprises, and to do so they'll need to create unique customer value.

Although the value disciplines approach is timeless, technology generally—and information technology specifically—is advancing so rapidly that there has been an evolution and revolution in each of the three value disciplines discussed in Chapter 2, leading to three corresponding digital disciplines. In addition, because of the exponential growth of both competition and technology, a fourth digital discipline—accelerated innovation—must be added.

The impact of these technologies is directly apparent to almost everyone, thanks to mobile devices and the Internet. We live in an always-on, always-connected mobile and multiscreen world, and the result of all this time spent on mobile and online has created immense wealth for high-tech companies that we all know: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo!, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, but also juggernauts in other countries: Alibaba and Tencent in China, for example.

But it isn't just the pure-play newly arrived Internet firms for whom digital technologies are relevant, but also the legacy firms that are ...