Economit Intelligence Unit reports on the Digital Economy

The EIU has released a couple of, survey based, reports on the Digital Company in 2013. You can download them here.

As I was reading them, I was struck by the difference between my experience of the digitial economy, and the one that CIOs were describing for five years hence. Practically everything they discussed is available, and in use, right now. By way of example, I learnt about these reports, not through a flyer arriving in my post box, but via David Gurteen's Knowledge Newsletter. Having read the story, I looked over at my Skype contact list and noticed that David was still in Australia, and so not available for an instant (and free) video conference. And, the surprising part, of course, was that this way of working is completely normal for me, and hundreds thousands of other people.

So, what is holding these, predominantely larger, companies back? Perhaps, the technology just isn't simple enough to implement and integrate. If so, the real challenge for digitial economy researchers may be about making existing technologies simple enough to facilitate their widespread adoption, at an acceptable cost.