To better grasp the emerging landscape it will be important to retract and explore underpinnings to this phenomenon . An industry wide trend analysis reveal a combinatorial effect emerging from the shifting technology , consumer and market boundaries .
The digital economy has transformed the way we communicate with each other ; the way we consume information , products , and services ; the way we entertain ourselves . It ’ s revolutionized seemingly nondigital industries - think of how different financial services , for instance , are today from what they were two decades ago - and investors expect it to soon transform others , which is why Tesla Motors is worth more than General Motors despite making a tiny fraction as many cars as GM makes and earning a tiny fraction of the revenue .
This phenomenon explains why there is suddenly immense pressure on traditional industries that are getting disrupted pitching them against the so-called Big Five of the digital economy - Apple , Alphabet , Microsoft , Amazon , and Facebook – which have , at various points over the last year , been the five most valuable companies in the world .
It might so appear that the much hyped digital economy has lived up to the expectations people had for it 20 years ago . In the early days of the Web , its widely remembered that there were a myriad of colleges providing different trainings in computer packages , in this day and age those skills appear to be inborn going by the vanishing of the college adverts on computer packages and just how amazing toddlers ( sic ) navigate through their care givers smart phones .
‘‘ In the early days of the Web , its widely remembered that there were a myriad of colleges providing different trainings in computer packages , in this day and age those skills appear to be inborn going by the vanishing of the college adverts on computer packages and just how amazing toddlers ( sic ) navigate through their care givers smart phones .”
In other important ways , however , its consequences have been smaller than you might think . Our GDP growth has , by historical standards , been disappointingly slow since the arrival of the Internet . Productivity growth , which many assumed would be invigorated by the impact of digital technologies , has been dismal for much of this century .
One could argue probably that that GDP was not capturing the true value of the many free goods the digital economy offers or take for instance the new jobs born out of the phenomenal Mpesa . But there ’ s little doubt that the productivity revolution we hoped digitization would usher in has yet to materialize or at least not matching the reverse effect rate at which key industries are folding up their business units .
The digital economy also has not transformed the job market as much as one might have expected . To be sure , we now have entirely new categories of workers : fleets of Uber drivers , and the Mpesa Agents and economy that relies on it .
But Kenyans are not getting jobs and some who had jobs are being left jobless as industries digitize and undergo re-inventions . This harm is yet to be felt locally but because of things like online shopping , hundreds of thousands of retail workers will soon be out of a job .
More important , the digital economy has not been the source of a huge number of good , wellpaying jobs . In fact , the rise and consolidation of the digital economy has coincided with an extraordinarily weak labor market as most companies take advantage of digitization and digital reinvention to create better business processes .
On the flipside , the shifting consumer digital awareness is something that most organizations ought to take advantage of by embarking on a digital transformation customer journey . Equity bank is demonstrating that by working closely with their customers and educating them on digital literacy through non-digital channels like women chama ’ s as they gravitate towards the full digitization by 2020 .
Timothy Oriedo is a Certified Big Data Scientist ( MIT ), Certified Business Coach ( ICF ), Lead , Group Digital and Partnerships at Royal Media Services , a CIM Instructor Digital Marketing , and Adjunct Business Coach at Strathmore Business School . You can indulge him on this or related matters via mail at : Timothy . Oriedo @ predictiveanalytics . co . ke .