Emerging

Digital Technologies
Workbook
Inspiring opportunities, use cases, and digital
economy business cases.
By Pro fessor Samir El-Masri
 Introduction

As the world rapidly moves towards the digital economy and the organizations transform
themselves into digital organizations, the required skillsets and mindsets of leaders and employees
have changed.

The Digital Transformation journey can’t succeed without building the internal digital capabilities and
without the digital mindsets of the senior executives and digital skillsets of leaders. Team members
should learn how to act with lean and agile approach and methodologies.

Leaders must gain a minimum level of One of the conditions of digital

knowledge to effectively and successfully lead a
digital team, department or organization.
With this new digital economy spreading rapidly
around the world, all organizations are going to
deal with digital transformation sooner or later.
Consequently, all business leaders at all levels
and in all industries must educate themselves
on digital technologies and start acquiring
managerial level of digital knowledge and skills.
transformation success is to build internal
digital capabilities at both operational and
managerial levels, in addition to the CEO
and senior leaders’ digital mindset.
It should never be forgotten that the drivers
of Digital Transformation are the emerging
digital Technologies. So, the questions now
are; “what is digital Transformation?” and
“what are the emerging digital technologies
that all leaders should be fully aware of?”
 03

Digital Transformation
Let’s define digital transformation first. Wikipedia defines Digital Transformation as follows:

“Digital transformation (DT) is the

change associated with the application
of digital technology in all aspects of
human society.

The transformation stage means that digital usages inherently enable new types of innovation and
creativity in a particular domain, rather than simply enhance and support traditional methods.”

As per Global Center for Digital
Business Transformation,
“Digital is the convergence of multiple
technology innovations enabled by
connectivity” and
“Digital transformation is the organizational
change using digital technologies and
business models to improve performance”
So Digital Transformation is the initiative of
transformation of your business enabled by
the convergence of digital technologies
such as Big Data, Analytics, Artificial
Intelligence, Cloud Computing and
Blockchain. The transformation must be
based on new digital business models that
drive new digital business values such as
products and services, price, customer
experience and platform.
We should always distinguish between digital
change and digital transformation. When you
digitize a few operations, you just conduct
digital change and you might be able to
improve performance and efficiency, but you
are not immune from the digital disruption that
might drive you completely out of business.
On the contrary, with digital transformation,
you create new business models and new
value that creates digital disruption - or at least
you become protected from being disrupted.
Digitization means digital change while
Digitalization means Digital Transformation
Given the risk of closing down your business,
Digital Transformation is no longer an option
or a choice, but it is a destiny for all
organizations. Moreover, you should act
quickly and scale up fast as it is no longer
about "big eats small" - but it is about "fast eats
slow".
 4

Six Emerging Digital

Technologies
As it has been mentioned earlier, the digital transformation initiative technically relies fully
on digital technologies to identify and create the new digital-based business model with all
the new digital business values.

A look at Gartner's 2018 Hype Cycle for emerging technologies.

The above graph shows all the new emerging
technologies with their stage and the
estimation time to reach the commercializing
and industrialization phase. If we closely look
at the graph, we can see Artificial Intelligence,
Digital Twin, Quantum Computing, Smart
Robots, IOT Platform, Virtual Assistants,
Machine Learning, Deep Learning,
Autonomous Vehicles, Cognitive Computing,
Commercial UAV (Drones) and Blockchain.
It is tremendously crucial for any business
leader to understand to a certain extend the
concept and the impact of the technologies
that might cause on businesses. I believe it
is even more crucial to understand the
convergence and relationship between
those technologies in order to think and
identify a new innovative digital business
model for your business.
5

1. Data
Science
To briefly explain some of the above technologies, let’s
start by explaining Data Science which consists of
various phases and starts with collecting data, cleaning
data and then building an analytical model based on
algorithms and techniques such as machine learning.

Part of data science is also the data interaction and

visualization in addition to the interpretation and
presentation of the results to the decision makers. In a
nutshell, Data science is a mechanism to extract
insights, knowledge and wisdom from data by
identifying patterns and predicting future events.

The most important phase is the model building which

is fully based on analytics.

BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY
science?

DIGITAL
digital solution look like?

COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE
create for your organization?

CASES

create competitive advantage?

 6

2. Analytics
Analytics is based on a few techniques such as Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Data
Analytics as it is shown below has different types:

1. Descriptive Analytics
(Based on statistical methods)
1.

2. Diagnostics Analytics
(Statistical methods)

3. Predictive Analytics
(Machine Learning)
4.

5. Prescriptive Analytics
(Machine Learning and
business rules)

6. Cognitive Analytics
(Artificial Intelligence)
(based on Deep Learning)

BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY

DIGITAL
solution look like?

COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE
create for your organization?

CASES

competitive advantage?
7

Machine
3. Learning
Machine Learning technique is based on
a number of algorithms such as
supervised learning, linear regression
and classification, and then the
unsupervised learning and clustering.

As it could be seen in the above graph

that the Artificial Intelligence represents
the highest level of maturity in analytics
where the system autonomously makes
a decision such as the case in
autonomous vehicles, flying taxis and
drones.
You could see briefly the relationship between data science, analytics, artificial intelligence and
machine learning with some algorithms. All those terms are very much related and connected.
The huge volume of data can’t be analytically processed by traditional technology and there is a
need for Big Data that can also deal with the speed of processing and the structured and
unstructured types of data.

BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY
learning?

DIGITAL
solution look like?

COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE
create for your organization?

CASES

competitive advantage?
8

Cloud
4. Computing
Cloud computing is another enabler for your business where you may scale up and down on
your infrastructure, storage and processing power as per business need without losing on
capital investment and without worrying about building internal support and security team.

BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY
computing?

DIGITAL
solution look like?

COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE
create for your organization?

CASES

competitive advantage?
9

Industrial
5. Internet of Things
The Industrial Internet of Things (IOT) is definitely one of those trends that will connect over 50
billion machines by 2020 and exchange data and with the rest of the emerging technologies it
will make autonomous cars, flying taxis, drones and other big machines generate trillions of
dollars to the world economy. Internet of Things, Cloud infrastructure and platforms will make
the smart cities be able to offer great services to city residents and businesses.

BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY
Internet of Things ?

DIGITAL
solution look like?

COMPETITIVE
ADVANTAGE
Things solution create for your organization?

CASES

to create competitive advantage?

 10

6. Blockchain
Finally, the new technology player Blockchain is going to make a revolution in how to store
and compute our data. The cryptographic nature of immutable records with the
transparency and decentralized and distributed network will change the way we use
technologies and conduct businesses especially with the introduction of smart contracts.

Blockchain technologies are evolving very

quickly with Hyperledger and Ethereum
platforms and in addition to bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies, the big immediate industry
winners are banking, finance, Insurance,
media, healthcare, real estate, supply chain,
asset records and governments. We started to
see a convergence of Blockchain, AI and IOT
applying on autonomous vehicles, flying Taxis
and drones.

BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY

DIGITAL solution look like?

SOLUTION

COMPETITIVE for your organization?

ADVANTAGE

CASES
competitive advantage?
http://www.digitalization.cloud

Professor Samir El-Masri