In the year 2000, 95% of the world’s largest organizations were located in developed economies.  By 2025, almost half will be located in emerging economies.  Furthermore, between 2010 and 2025, four hundred and forty cities located in emerging markets will account for almost half of world GDP growth. If executives and organizations are to achieve success in this new global environment, then the characteristics of the new global normalcy in these types of economies should not only be taken into consideration, they should be a focal point.  Success in emerging markets will be strategic for any organization and multinational in the near future.

Known as the largest democracy in the world, India is an economic giant that is experiencing rapid growth.  It is a nation moving towards the third millennium at great speed, without losing touch with its past and its age-old culture.  In a couple of decades, it will be the world's most populous country, as well as one of its largest economies, with new poles of development such as Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Vadodara, Jaipur, Aurangabad and Nagpur, in addition to those we are already familiar with such as Mumbai or New Delhi.  By the year 2030, it will be the country with the largest middle class population, and will account for the highest percentage of global middle class consumption.  However, it is also a complex market posing great challenges relating to corruption, employability, uncertainty and extreme bureaucracy, as unfortunately occurs in other emerging economies such as Latin America and Africa.  Those very characteristics, along with its scale and dynamism, position India as a benchmark for understanding the new models of management and leadership required of executives and organizations.

Recently, new enterprises have emerged from India such as the telecommunications company “Jio”.  While it took Facebook almost a year to reach fifty million users, this organization did it in just three months, despite only having begun operations in September of last year.  Today, barely half a year since starting up, more than one hundred million people are using its services.  Other similar developments and endeavors have also emerged in the country recently.

The accelerated pace of technology adoption drives rapid innovation in our organizations.  And this will be a key feature of emerging markets in the immediate future.  These innovations will grow exponentially, beyond our ability to anticipate them.  Furthermore, they will grow in spite of uncertainty, nationalism, and changes such as those observed recently all over the world.  This presents an enormous challenge as long as we intend to extrapolate our old styles of leadership and our traditional forms and styles of analysis and decision-making.  Many assumptions, tendencies and habits, proven to be stable during decades of executive management, are now changing in a rapid and radical way.

In the same way that India as a civilization has adapted and survived various invasions and conquests since its prehistoric origins, the ability to change, rapidly innovate and adapt, without losing our essence, will be key to the success of individuals and organizations.  One of the greatest challenges we face, is how to move quickly towards the future, taking with us only those parts of our essence and our past that serve us best.

These changes will take place in new environments, where in order to compete and stand out, the use of technology, data and information will be fundamental.  The government of India, for example, has decided to integrate the information held on its population, into a single central system (Aadhaar) that assigns each citizen a unique identifier based on their biometric and demographic data.  Through incentives, they have encouraged citizens to open bank accounts and become part of the formal economy.  They have also developed innovative platforms such as Paytm (‘Pay through mobile’) to contribute to this objective.  This will allow the government to identify, measure and understand the activities of its citizens in order to better serve them.  Just as organizations do with their customers and markets, integrating data and information is the first step to developing public policies that truly support and develop individuals and organizations in the new global dynamics.

In spite of its enormous size and complexity, India is changing, and it is doing so rapidly.  This shows us that the greatest challenge to triumphing in emerging markets and in the new global dynamics, will be associated with opportune and adequate changes to the leadership, culture and management models in our organizations.  We must question our principles and “reinvent ourselves;” especially in those companies that have enjoyed great success to date.  Leaders and organizations must watch and learn in order to adjust to this new reality, although we don’t yet fully understand its magnitude and second and third order effects.  And this is of fundamental importance in emerging economies such as Mexico and Latin America.  Either we do it quickly and effectively, or someone else will beat us to it. 

We are living a Big Data revolution. Yet the huge volume of data transmitted every day over the Internet and from millions of interconnected sensors might be overwhelming to organizations that are just beginning to get started in the Big Data world.

The volume of data generated in the world is calculated at more than 2.8 zettabytes and is expected to rise to 50 times higher by 2020. Likewise, the number of nodes and sensors is growing at an annual rate of 30%. This data explosion surpasses the ability of organizations to collect and process it and to extract value from it, so they can continue to be relevant in a very competitive arena where no organization can escape from this new reality.

As it is critical to collect this data, businesses must design a Big Data digital strategy to be able to face the growing volume of information and to create competitive advantage. The strategy is always one of selection, because not all data can be used. An organization must make decisions about prioritizing and implementing a short-, medium-, and long-term portfolio of initiatives. They must be aware that the most-valuable data are not those stored in databases but rather data that have not yet been created.  

In the chapter “The Strategic Business Value of Big Data,” coauthored with Dr. Jorge Ramírez and published in the book Big Data Management (Springer, 2017), we analyze how Big Data impacts business competitiveness and innovation, to identify different digital strategies to be implemented to gain competitive advantage. The disruptive power of Big Data requires businesses to get involved at the strategic level, because they can change the competitive environment by the transformation of processes, the alteration of corporate ecosystems, and the facilitation of innovation through products and services they had never imagined. Businesses such as Uber, Waze, Airbnb, and Tesla have helped some industries to transform, but not all sectors adopt Big Data at the same pace or give it the same relevance.

Many technology, media, auto, and telecommunications organizations are taking advantage of Big Data, while other types of businesses such as financial services, health, construction, energy, consumer goods, and the public sector still have a way to go. But they should pay attention. The rapid change in sectors such as mobility and transport shows the size of the phenomenon; today auto, technology and startup companies are both competing and complementing each other, reimagining their processes, their ecosystems, and their value creation in a world they had never considered.

Mapping out opportunities in the algorithm age

Opportunities from Big Data can be framed through two dimensions: reengineering the value chain and reimagining the offering. Think of any product, service, or company and how its value chain is organized. It has several clients and suppliers, and many data are generated not only at the point of sale—through online, physical, or mobile channels—but also at the different stages of the supply chain—automated order and delivery processes, financial processes, or even human-resource management. Meanwhile, reimagining the offering requires creativity and vision, and Big Data offers ample opportunities for new products and services.

Essentially, the goal of a Big Data digital strategy is to turn data into information and knowledge, which over time leads the business to transform. Leading companies are constantly threatened by new players who approach client needs in different ways and force businesses and entire sectors to be reinvented. They require agile methods to test and improve prototypes, products, and strategies along with clients. One example is Amazon which, in only ten years, introduced electronic-book readers, tablets, smartphones, cloud services, delivery services, and online markets.

Before setting up a Big Data strategy, it is necessary to identify in which maturity stage the organization is situated:

• Enhancement: Even though it is the least-radical stage, it can provide immediate value creation and fund the broader Big Data strategy growth. This stage includes predictive maintenance and streamlined digital links to help suppliers and clients make better and more-accurate decisions. This enhancement includes ‘recommendation engines,’ a useful and sometimes necessary tool.
• Exploration: The organization investigates offerings adjacent to the current business or pursues larger adjustments of the value chain. These decisions involve management and require significant investment in infrastructure and technology, and their performance must be closely tracked.
• Transformation: This stage is relevant for organizations that need to face deeper changes. This all-encompassing strategic move has the greatest potential to generate competitive advantage, but also implies the greatest risk. It requires major investments and the development of new partner ecosystems and key alliances.

To achieve this vision, businesses can attract scientists, experts, or organizations who can find patterns in data and translate them into useful business information. But the CIO should be the one to run this transformation and to make decisions above and beyond the technology architecture and the traditional processes.

The Big Data strategy depends on the maturity levels and on identifying and prioritizing strategic choices. An intuitive tool is the digital strategies matrix (see Figure 1). Organizations must take into account both the external environment and the internal capabilities. As a result, the digital strategy is an iterative process that is continually adapting and identifying new opportunities.

Figure 1. The Digital Strategies Matrix, authors’ elaboration based on the IT Value Performance Tools Link to Business-IT Alignment Gartner Research.

Big Data for decision making

It is not enough to trust intuition and experience, because we are seeing the emergence of a culture of data-driven decision making. Companies that use their data more intelligently have a better performance in financial and operational results and are better able to realize their business objectives.

Organizations with a higher maturity level are better positioned to carry out key business strategies using accurate, real-time data. Furthermore, the data tend to be fragmented and out of date at lower maturity levels, which makes it difficult to make adequate, timely decisions.

The realization that fact-based decisions are critical at every level of the organization has led to a need for technological tools and advanced analytics techniques. Groups of data on clients are analyzed—for example, their preferences, purchasing habits, website browsing, purchase histories, physical position, response to incentives, and other demographic information—and the relevant decision makers in each case receive this information. The greatest benefit of Big Data analytics is improving and speeding up the decision-making process and supporting decision making with automated algorithms.

Five Industries Impacted Greatly by Big Data

Several organizations from the following sectors are using Big Data to enhance, improve, or transform their value and performance:

• Retail: With data on online transactions and client behavior, the retail industry is taking advantage of the value chain for merchandising and pricing, improving customer service or using location-based marketing strategies to send offers to their key customers’ smartphones. They are also optimizing distribution and logistics thanks to data from GPS-enabled telematics. 
• Manufacturing: In their production processes, manufacturing companies are incorporating real-time data from sensors. There are several advantages, from reducing waste to maximizing yield throughout larger, more-complex, more-globalized supply chains.
• Telecommunications: By analyzing network traffic in real time, businesses in this sector can optimize service quality, develop new products, identify fraudulent behavior, or prevent the loss of customers, among other things.
• Public Sector: Big Data can help governments reduce administrative costs, collect taxes more efficiently, and increase transparency by making the most-relevant data on programs and public policies available to citizens.
• Health Care: The integration of nanotechnology embedded in people, for example, is an innovation that could be used as a tool for monitoring and diagnosing, integrating and sharing different datasets with biological information and high-resolution tools such as x-rays, CT scans, or MRIs.

In these sectors and others, Big Data will have a profound impact on business as we know it today. To be successful in the digital transformation, businesses must link their offerings to their strengths—what they know how to do well or what makes them stand out—and identify where they can add value for their clients. In data processing, volume and speed will continue to present challenges for businesses to become more agile than their competitors, but in the end, it will be the ability to create a culture that fosters innovation and experimentation that will make the difference.