“Changing the way we Work, Live, Play and Learn”

A long and amused path to what we know now as Digital Transformation

By the end of the ’90s, Cisco Systems, Inc. by then the unequivocally leader in networking and Internet routing technologies, coined this slogan summing its different vision about the future, not only form a networking standpoint but also from a content spreading and business processes transformation perspective.

All of those who were part of the executive team that took this message to the market (including myself), knew at that moment that life wouldn’t be the same anymore. We lived it every day, working from home or from wherever you find a data-able telephone or an access point to work over the network. I suddenly saw myself working on any hotel or airport’s executive room using the wired telephone line to check our emails, update our early CRM version or completing a Sales Order from the field.

Those who liked and went into the gadgets mania spent some bucks on weird cellphone-based modems or early versions of PDA’s (now absorbed by smartphones) like the Palm V which costed me over $300 including all the gadgets to work in a cool way, usually causing a “wow” expression from the “normal” people. We also were constantly invited to discuss this new trends at some forums and TV shows without mentioning the questions and conversations at every social meeting with friends and relatives.

By those days we witnessed multiple electronic prototypes that today became in standard home appliances, mobile devices, and security systems, just to cite some examples of them. We used and sold the very first versions of Voice over IP devices, WiFi networks, and Optical Network Transmitters/Multiplexers which prompted the optical revolution taking the Internet to what it is nowadays, but also learned about the futuristic 3G & 4G mobile networks and their future evolution to some mystic and mysterious 5G.

A huge universe of possibilities opened by the fact that you will digitize whatever content you needed, turning the analog telecom networking world into an unlimited source of digital services and business possibilities. But we never lose the focus on what was important for all of us: the people, and by extension, people’s businesses. With certain obsession for taking to the cloud whatever we find in front of us, with the firm conviction and knowledge of the capabilities the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) could provide, we got by-industry business specialists involved into the quest and we join them to discuss and understand their business models and processes, and to show them how all these new technologies and the cloud could improve their ways to do business, shorting and digitizing their traditional processes and procedures. We experienced the very first versions of e-commerce, e-banking, e-learning, e-health, e-government, and a whole world of e-possibilities that you could imagine.

Over the years, those who were bolder and adventurous (again, including me) decided to move over different levels of the technology. We experiment with the very first versions of Linux and Open Source software. We created business solutions with what old-fashion business people considered just “college experiments” or “science fair projects”. We challenged them and competed with traditional renown vendors by building open-source routers, IP voice gateways, open-source databases, and application servers, and lately, NoCode developed business solutions. We work with enthusiastic communities and passionated groups on trending technologies to bring value to those who couldn’t afford the traditional branded solutions.

Even more, we didn’t just saw these combined IT innovations, we also seek to implement them combined with NoCode software development within real-world digital business processes that today are well-known business models like telemedicine, telecommuting, e-government, e-voting, virtual schools, the internet of things, the wired homes and multiple this experience and innovations has been used on COVID19-tracking solutions lately). So as a summit of these experiences and surfing the multiple pike waves, we got all of these business models and tried to make them achievable to almost any other organization regardless if it was a small business or a large corporation. It has been +20 years working in a virtual model, helping companies and entrepreneurs to adopt this business model which starts by changing their minds instead of just using your mobile device y a different way or implementing the trending SaaS solution.

It is clear that the Digital Transformation concept has been evolving since these early days and meanwhile has been adopting different names and faces depending of the area involved in the venture and making the effort. Terms like process Re-Engineering, Downsizing, Rightsizing, Lean & 6 Sigma, MRP2, etc started to sound familiar in the business and corporate arena. Later on, other terms such as IDE & CASE Tools, Business Process Management, Agile/Scrum, LowCode/NoCode surged to complement the set of software tools and methodologies needed to work over the same challenge: the need to change and evolve the way we Work, Live, Play and Learn, in a continuous and recursive process to adapt our businesses and activities (processes) to the new trends and the always changing demands and trends from the market regardless the size or sector this belongs to.

Unfortunately, it has been this pandemic what finally made many organizations “discover” what a Digital Transformation could provide, and from our perspective, participating and sometimes leading experiences like:

• the creation of an open-source multi-service platform to provide hundreds of SMBs with IT infrastructure and technology that used to be out of their budget,
• the very early method to updating the operating system for over 1 million remote routers (turning it from semi to fully digital, saving several hundreds of millions for the company,
• the integration of multiple databases into a few geo-referenced ones to create thematic maps for city infrastructure and urbanist planning and to deliver more digital services to the citizens,
• the creation of the very first wireless city surveillance network owned and deployed by the local government in connection to a local police command center.

have given us a very wide foundation and the permanent open-mind state needed to put technology after business strategies and leverage strategies on people’s minds and willingness for change. Digital Transformation is not the revolution of digital things, but the revolutions of leaders’ minds.

Today every organization leader must have crystal-clear this mind-changing process since wether they assimilate it or not, it will impact their stakeholders anyway. So it is time to embrace the change and rebuild the foundations of what businesses will be in the future.