Today, it’s an special day for our blog, we have achieved our first year posting every week our content about “How digital technologies are improving our life, businesses and society”. During this year, we have covered and brought our personal opinion about digital transformation, industry 4.0, smart mobility, artificial intelligence and other tech trending topics that are called to transform our live in the coming years with the hope to motivate more readers to join to the digital society roadmap.
In order celebrate our anniversary, Prof. Haber has prepared an amazing comparison between the baseball and Digital Transformation to introduce Xymbot Digital Solutions as your digital partner!…
Baseball, a very popular and passionate game for ones and a boring game for others, has evolved a lot in the last centuries from the traditional ball-and-bat game. Indeed, maybe you are not aware that pre-Columbian Native Americans of the Arawak played a ball game that resembles baseball in Puerto Rico and Cuba, but this is story for another blog.
We could also trace back the roots of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics some centuries ago but unimaginable in relation with production systems, computers and communications that we have nowadays. The tales of giant bronze robot Talos, artificial woman Pandora and their creator god, Hephaestus are samples of how Artificial Life and robotics were naively explored in the ancient Greece.
Digitalization is more contemporary with dozens of different definitions in the Digital revolution era. How is Baseball and Digitalization alike? In nothing, but we could explore some interesting resembles. In baseball, two opposing teams take turns batting and fielding. Digitalization can be seen as a “game of transforming” to a digital business. The application of new digital technologies to yield disruptive changes in a tailored business model has also two or even more opposing teams inside and outside companies due to the impact on labor cost, employment and change not only in means of production but also in the way of thinking.
Winning a game in Baseball requires that all players in the defensive team (fielding) cooperates together in harmonized way to avoid batters from becoming runners, and lastly to prevent runners’ to touch the home plate. The key player in baseball is the pitcher with different pitches such as fastball, slider and curveball. The best pitcher does not only require a powerful fastball. Even with only one hand (I invite you to discover Jim Abbott, American former baseball pitcher), the best pitcher should be able to throw the ball combining unique pitching such as screwball with fastball, slider and others.
In order to face Digital Transformation challenges you also need a multidisciplinary and agile teamwork, i.e., you need a ‘pitcher’ that drives your services and products to achieve a ‘perfect game’. Small companies such as emerging spins-off, born in research institutions and universities are growing in the post-COVID19 era. Not all of them will survive in short terms but those having singular products and services, unique know-how and an arsenal of tools and methods conjunctively fed by Computer Science, AI and Control and Systems Engineering will have the key to succeed in Engineering Intelligence. These small but bully companies able to Engineering Intelligence are the pitchers that you need to win Digitalization game in the post-COVID19 era.
In future posts, we will be continue writing about technology and business trends for enterprises. Furthermore, we recommend consulting the following literature to continue your digital transformation journey:
- Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success, MIT review
- The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives, by Simon & Schuster
- Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need, by Harvard Business Review
- The Year in Tech, 2021: The Insights You Need, by Harvard Business Review
- The Deep Learning Revolution, by MIT Press
- Competing in the Age of AI, by Harvard Review Press
The objective of this blog is to provide a personal vision of how digital transformation trends will be impacting in our daily activities, businesses and lifestyle.
By Rodolfo Haber 
Senior Researcher, his research interest includes Process Automation, Industry 4.0, Smart-Control, Cognitive Control Architectures and cyber-physical systems.
One Response
Thank you, I’ve just been looking for information about this subject for a long time and yours is the greatest I’ve came upon so far. But, what concerning the conclusion? Are you sure concerning the supply?