What does a digital transformation look like?

What do you feel when you look at the image below? What does it make you think about? How do you think people looked at Henry Ford when he talked about the assembly line? What did they think when he planned for the average household to afford a car? What did people say when Ford started to pay his employees ten times more than anyone else? After his success, every aspiring auto manufacturer had to industrially “transform” their business if they wanted to move forward.

Ford Assembly Line. Digital Image. Wikimedia Commons. 1913. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A-line1913.jpg.

If your company is going through a digital transformation, you're going to work with more people and robots. You’re going to program machines that learn to program themselves. You’re going to watch sensors get placed on the simplest of objects and start talking to other machines via the internet. You’re going to listen to people talk into devices instead of typing on QWERTY keyboards.

Now scroll back up to that picture of Ford’s assembly line hard at work. When you reflect on those people, do you envy them? Their design and manufacturing methods were considered state-of-the-art at the time. How would they stack up to today’s standards, especially considering transportation vehicles have been using millions of lines of software code for years (RIP Chevy Volt)?

I feel proud to look at our world’s industrial heritage. We have a standard of living made possible by these people. I am in awe at what they were able to accomplish with so little. They didn’t have microprocessors, the internet or a bunch of robots to do their repetitive or dangerous tasks. I also feel fortunate to know what we use and take for granted today.

Now, flash forward 100 years from now. When people look at the picture below, what do you think they’ll be saying or feeling? Will they be in awe at what we were able to achieve with so little? Will they feel proud to look back on our world’s digital heritage?

Robot installing roof on Tesla Model S. Digital Image. Wikimedia Commons 5 October 2011 . https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_auto_bots.jpg.

That’s what our “modern” digital transformation means to me. It is a reminder to many companies they must move forward. Why? Because that’s what humans do.