The future of business is a future of transceivers. A transceiver is a device that both transmits and receives. The term itself dates from the 1920s. It may seem odd to speak about the future using 90-year-old terminology. But the word “wireless” dates from that same decade – and it seems that the potential of wireless and transceivers is only just now being realized.
The concept of a transceiver is meant to provoke fresh thinking about digital environments and digital competition. We are approaching a state where computing and connectivity will be so cheap and so ubiquitous, that every person and every significant object will be continuously networked together. Our current terminology is inadequate to describe this state. The term “digital” itself, although I find it indispensable, is overly associated with marketing. “Internet of Things” (IoT) is too big and too vague, and doesn’t suggest specifics. (IoT reminds me of the guru’s assertion that “All is one” – ok, all very well, but what do we do now?)
Thinking of objects as transceivers, conversely, brings this strange new world to life. In the world we are entering, people and things will be outfitted with sensors, processors, and connectivity at all times. Both will effectively become full-time transceivers, each with active and passive modes of transmitting, and active and passive modes of receiving. This state will entail an unprecedented ability to measure, analyze, predict or redirect physical action.
It is this ongoing interaction with the physical world that separates “digital,” this age of the transceiver, from what I have elsewhere called clerical IT. From the perspective of this digital future, the “information age” will look like a primitive period of electronic bookkeeping. Gartner makes a similar point in its book Digital to the Core: digital business is “the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds.”
This blurring has three major categories of implications: transactional, analytical, and trust-related. The transactional implications are that we will be able to optimize and redirect action in the physical world more efficiently and effectively than ever before. The analytical implications are that every request and every response will generate a trail of data, which we will be able to study from the standpoint of the past (historical analysis), the present (real-time intervention), or future (predictive analytics). Lastly, the trust-related implications are that everything that occurs will be infinitely traceable and something we can later audit. We tend to focus solely on the dystopian aspects of traceability that threaten privacy. What we miss is that traceability defines and creates trust relationships.[1]
These are the dimensions in which the transceiver redefines the competitive field. Companies caught up in the last phase of Internet innovation – “Let’s put it online” or even “Let’s put it on a mobile device – are stuck in the assumptions of clerical IT. They are missing the broader implications of digital, as are those who believe digital is just another marketing channel.
[1] An Uber driver, for example, would be foolish to use Uber to pick up and rob passengers, since there would be a record of the driver, the passenger, their interaction, and the route taken. Surely some Uber drivers have already made this foolish mistake – but of course, inherent foolishness has never been a pure deterrent for everyone in every circumstance.
Rob Lawrence 