Hooray for the crisis!  

Facing the current crisis, most companies have to ask themselves the right questions. The traditional responses no longer suffice to find growth. So is it not now time to embrace the future? Our patterns of consumption have changed and in consequence we must reduce our structural costs. So it seems that the return to competitiveness can only happen through a real break, a paradigm shift. What if digitisation finally becomes the hope of salvation for a weakened industrial sector? What if economy of scale rhymes with technological innovation?

In the digital economy, new business models transform all the traditional paradigms of our businesses. We buy and pay for our products with our smartphone, we talk about them on social networks, and the e-reputation of the products is created at the same time. All sectors of society are affected, from politics to the economy, over culture and leisure. Mobility, cloud, social networking and Big Data will fundamentally change the environment of the company: they offer or impose new ways to sell, recruit, communicate and produce. What company now recruits without social networks (Linkedin, Viadeo, Xing)? What company does not now have a large, simple and effective communication on the web? What company can still afford to sell without providing a digital distribution channel or digital information?

Our world is connected and it transforms the way we work. Inside and outside the company, our practices exert an irresistible pressure: the consumption cycles shorten and become more flexible. Companies must innovate if they want to regain competitiveness and survive. The CIO shall not be a "Chief Information Officer" but the "Chief Digital Integrator." The “CDI” shall exploit the immense amount of data exchanged on social networks to guide the marketing strategy, offer mobile services to support the user experience of the customer, and make available anywhere and anytime the information and the service provided by the company.

However, we must recognise that companies are still cautious about embarking on their necessary transformation. Only those who are subject to a particularly strong pressure have migrated to the cloud, rethinking their working methods and business models.

Now it is time to move from traditional IT to IT in the 21st century! Yesterday’s IT was reactive and focused on its own effectiveness. Being technological in nature, it was geared towards serving known needs and did nothing but adapt. Instead, the new IT is open on how it can be used. Innovative, it is ahead of the business needs and suggests solutions. It no longer follows the trend, it sets the trend. Agile and flexible, it is open and connected to the world. It is also a source of savings for those companies that wish to win 1-2 points of profitability by migrating to the cloud, according to the first observed effects.

There are still many "Digital Americas" to discover for explorers who want to believe that another model already exists. And the companies that today are emerging as leaders in their market are those that have made innovation their corporate culture. All their employees are encouraged to be creative, whatever their field of activity. But to get to this stage remains difficult. Unable, for structural reasons, to align rapidly with growing business needs, traditional CIOs today are doomed no longer to satisfy the business managers. These have already begun to deal directly with external suppliers to meet their requirements. They cheerfully bypass the CIO and soon will eliminate the CIO budget while looking elsewhere for more flexibility for themselves and their employees. The sales people of cloud services have understood this trend: it is to the business managers that they are now offering their services. The parallel information system that thus will emerge, the "shadow IT", represents a significant business risk. Indeed, if not the CIO, who else could guarantee the security and integrity of the data?

The second risk is losing competitiveness by staying with outdated models. Change is no longer an option, it is a condition of survival.

The race for technology to meet the business challenges is ending. We have arrived at the end of a model. It is only by restating the question and thinking in terms of business models and practices that IT will be able to find its place in the chain of value creation.

By switching to this new model, companies and especially SMEs can regain profitability and tackle the global market.