Contributor: Aarti Borkar

Director, Websphere Integration Product Management

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If I think about my life today compared to just five years ago, a large portion of my interactions that involve me paying for an object or service now happen through a digital transaction. I shop for everything I need from milk to shoes on a digital device. I bank, check the weather, book travel, check into my flights, walk through immigration, and check which friends living in the city I am visiting for work through one or more digital devices. My car reminds me it needs to be serviced and why, my phone reminds me which friends I need to wish happy birthday today, and I am told by a pesky fitness band that I’ve just not exercised enough.  Some of it is annoying, some of it is life-changing, some of it is an addiction, but all of it has fundamentally disrupted the way I live my life.

Translate that to your business; are you a disruptor or are you being disrupted? Growth in today’s world is going to come from only one of those options and it’s very easy to guess which one. Every one of your customers is living their personal and professional lives differently than they were before. Are you in their line of sight? Do they consider you a part of their now-disrupted lifestyles? This is the age of the digital economy and transforming your business to be a part of it is a matter of survival.

This does not mean you need to give up the way you do business today, it just means you need to extend your business to engage with your customers in a way they are used to, and be accessible to them in the digital realm where they tend to spend most of their time. This is about taking your existing business to a new level of growth by exploiting this digital realm to expand and serve new geographies, new demographics, to partner with enterprises you would have never counted in your friend circle before and to find assets you have in your backyard you never realized could be valuable to the community. 

This change is about people, business strategy and technology.  It’s about creating a culture that accepts the need to do business at the speed of innovation, moving one step ahead of the market and your customer. It’s a business decision to make the digital channel a primary channel for the growth of your enterprise, and to have a well-defined plan to grow that from the small impact it has on your business today to potentially being a major source of your revenue. Ensure that you have the technology that helps you leverage what you have today, grow with limited initial investment and expand quickly when you become wildly successful.  We in the technology world call this the API economy Welcome to the new world.

I am an IBMer in the Silicon Valley who wakes up every morning to the sounds of digital transformation and the excitement of the API economy.   

To learn more about the API economy and how you can start disrupting, join us in Santa Clara at API World on September 29th and 30th as we bridge the gap between the business and the IT departments.  It is your chance to stop being disrupted and start being your industry's disruptor.

For more information you can also visit ibm.com/apieconomy.