Originally published LinkedIn 2019JUL17
Business Digitisation: Many providers are stuck at thinking of transformation as digitisation of business processes, and seeing their own role as rote, merely to offer product and service. I see leadership as enmeshing with our customers, to reimagine transformation as the Digitized Era transforms how we work, live, and even conceive the future.
Reasserting the centrality of infrastructure: Until now, Infrastructure has been disregarded, a mere mule to carry Content. An unimaginative mind would think of 5G in terms of just low-latencies and greater bandwidth.
Australia’s Telstra 5G has been ranked a winner in CNET’s testing of networks around the world, particularly in the critical balancing between faster speed or more coverage (millimetre/mid-band). We project a 180% CAGR, and 5G likely will overtake 4G by 2023.
Telstra envisions how 5G allows a creative segmentation of the network, be it for security, isolation, redundancy. That segmentation, along with Telstra’s information-exchange header project, aligns with the G20 Osaka initiative to standardize global movement of data flows with better privacy, property, and cybersecurity.
Australia offers a showcase away from the geopolitics amongst Europe, United States and China: Telstra’s pioneering 5G launch spans 10 major areas across a continent approximating the contiguous United States at roughly 3 million square miles.
In the Digitized Era, “digitization” is quite more than transformation of organizational processes or devices. It is permeating our patterns of interactions, affiliations, and expectations with ever shorter geographical and temporal lags across the world. And certainly, different stratifications in rights and access and control emerge; and a particularly stark gap between the have-digitizeds and the have-nots.
It is in this context of the Digitized Era’s transformed objects, organizations and culture, that telecommunications can take innovative leadership.