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10 Tell-Tale Signs You Are Not In A Digital Enterprise

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There’s been a nonstop stream of chatter that it's time for companies to shed the husks of their analog and manual ways and evolve into digital enterprises. It really sounds like the way to go: one, because it's cool; and two, because there are too many scary stories out there about entire industries (publishing and music to name a couple) being thrashed, ground up and spit out in little pieces by digital competitors.

But what exactly is a digital enterprise? The definition remains, well, a little murky. Are there still physical offices with real people doing analogy things? Google and Amazon are very physical that way. For gosh sakes, the term "digital enterprise" doesn't even rate an entry in Wikipedia yet. Most attempts to define it evoke social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (the SMAC lineup), and mixing some kind of magical concoction of all of the above to digitize one's way to the seamless, frictionless, service-spewing enterprise your organization was always meant to be.

Alas, there are no well-marked thresholds or to let you when you've reached digital nirvana. So, to make things a bit easier, let's take a look at ways to tell if you're not in a digital enterprise. Reader, hopefully your organization doesn't have any of these traits -- but if it does, take solace in the fact that it's actually quite normal.

1) Customers have to call you, by phone, to inform your organization that its site or services are down, or not functioning correctly.

2) Your CEO employs a PR agency to craft his/her tweets.

3) Nobody in your organization can tell you how many social media accounts are active in your company's name, or doing your company's business.

4) There is no count -- and nobody has a clue -- as to how many Amazon Web Services or Box accounts are actively being used -- and paid for -- to handle your company's business.

5) Your IT department is a mysterious black box full of smart people that sit in a large room somewhere churning out reports. It's treated as a cost center -- expected to keep applications and databases up and running, and nothing more.

6) Your company has a separate "digital" team that is charged with handling all the fun stuff, such as online engagement and building a new channel. Plus, nobody really knows what they're up to. If you already have a "digital channel" for customers, it's relegated to the  "e-commerce" side of things.

7) Vendors and consultants are circling your organization, pumping executives' heads full of visions of becoming the seamless, frictionless, service-spewing enterprise your company were always meant to be -- if you buy their stuff, of course.

8) You are aware that there is plenty of unstructured data floating around -- documents, video, sensor data, log files -- but no one knows how much of it there is, nor does anyone know if any of it is being captured for the business.

9) Your organization issues proclamations about having a "digital DNA," which makes everyone feel really good, but nobody really knows what that means. Perhaps there's a Singularity twist to all this?

10) Your organization's mobile strategy, as far as you can tell, consists of that iOS app issued a couple of years back. That was also probably about the same time that BYOD policy was issued, which nobody remembers anyway.