Most digital infrastructures are meant to communicate or coordinate, or are in support of other digital infrastructures that communicate or coordinate.
The internet is a prime example. It is designed to enable computers to communicate by moving data packets between them.
Social media is another example, used by people to communicate with each other. Its success is a testament to the fact that communication is a fundamental human need.
For an example of a supporting digital infrastructure you can look at an IaaS provider, which enables data processing and storage for other applications and infrastructures.
From a business perspective this communication and coordination can lead to value in the form of, amongst others:
- better resource utilization and less waste,
- better process efficiency,
- better quality of services and products,
- reduction of risks.
These are just the major, broad categories of delivering value, and there is considerable overlap between them. For example an organization’s website helps communicate to its customers. But you can also look at it as a more efficient way to organise the coordination on the delivery of products and services to the customer.
As you dive deeper into business processes, you will find that there is a wide range of processes and ways that lead to business value, each of which has its own peculiar ways of communicating and coordinating. In the early days of networking, I was sometimes asked what the value of a network is. Equally unanswerable is the question what the value of a message is. It just depends on the role that such a message plays in a process. For example, if your house is on fire, you only need a small message to reach the fire department, but if it does not get there, you’ll lose a house.
Strategy consulting firms, like the one I worked at, do a lot of work in process reengineering to create value for their clients. The larger firms have serious collections of proces improvements. Over the past decades, significant reengineering of supply chains has taken place. The core idea of that is typically that better coordination reduces risk and inefficiencies.