The increasing presence of cloud computing and mobile smart phones is driving the digitization of everything across both consumer and enterprise domains. It is hard to imagine any area of human activity which is not being reengineered under this influence, either at present or in the very near future.

The biggest problem is typically overly ambitious expectations combined with undercapitalization.

Smart mobile phones connect you with 1 billion users worldwide, basically for free - you don't pay for the phone, you don't pay for the Internet, you don't pay for the wireless connectivity. Social networks let you add a new customer or a new agent, again for free.

Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the Web like deer on a freeway.

If you ask why start-ups outperform established enterprises when it comes to catching the next wave, the answer is that they are not conflicted. Everyone is rowing in the same direction. That is never the case in a company that has a portfolio of businesses at different stages in their maturity. So the key to winning there has to be to "zone out" the conflicts - sort of like sending quarrelling children each to their own room.

Don't think you have to be the disrupter to win. A fast-following disruptee will do very well if you can bring your existing customers and ecosystem along with you.

Systems are corporate funded mechanisms for increasing efficiency; programs are user funded mechanisms for increasing effectiveness. Programs should generally be charged back to users, systems should never be. Allocating corporate overhead to the operating units is simply a mistake.