Digital Transformation + Digitization with Red Hat Director of Strategy Brian Gracely – Episode 52

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Digital Transformation and digitization are two huge topics and Brian Gracely shares his insights here in this great interview! Brian Gracely (@bgracely) is Director of Product Strategy at Red Hat, the world's leading open source software company. He brings 20+ years of experience (Red Hat, Wikibon, EMC, Virtustream, NetApp, Cisco) in Strategy, Product Management, Systems Engineering, Marketing and M&A. He is recognized as an industry thought-leader in Cloud Computing and DevOps, as well as being co-host of the award-winning podcast, The Cloudcast. He has a BS/MBA from Wake Forest University. Brian Gracely On LinkedIn The Cloudcast Podcast The Cloudcast Video Channel WARNING — AI Transcriptions May Cause Grammatically Correct People Serious Stress Brian Gracely 1:09 Thanks for having me on Nathaniel really appreciate it this morning. Nathaniel Schooler 1:29 My pleasure. So I've got a couple of topics that I mentioned before, and I'm still confused and I think many people are actually about the difference between digitalization, which is one of the topics and digital transformation. So I think we'll, we'll sort of kick off by talking about digitalization first, if that's all right, with you? Brian Gracely 1:52 Yeah, sure. So, the terms can kind of sometimes get interchanged or get "buzzwordy" and they get confusing, but I think in the simplest sense, the way that I think about digitization is essentially the process of taking something that let's say, it's in the context of business, something that used to be very physical based, so going to a store or something that was, location based. Hailing a cab or something like that, and figuring out, okay, how do I, number one, make that a digital experience? Something that I can interact with, say, over the Internet, for example. But more importantly, how do we make it something that can be personalized, and we can learn from that process. So let's take it let's take a simple example. So if I was in London, and I wanted to hail a cab, you know, in the past, the cab sort of had full control over what that experience was, as the end user, you know, the person writing the car, I didn't really know when they're going to show up, I didn't really know what the fair was going to be. They didn't know who I was, there was no sort of loyalty to any cab company specifically. Now what's happened is, you know, because I have, essentially the internet in my pocket on your smartphone, and I have a service. So something like Lyft, or Uber or any of the other services out there, that process of hailing a cab is now become digitized, because I have visibility of where they are. So I have a sense of how long it's going to take? Do I stand out in the rain? Do I not stand in the rain? They know, I can look at who the who the driver is, so I can get a sense of how trustworthy they are? Do you know do I want to deal with them? Have other people thought they were good, good driver? But all of that has now become a digitized experience. And so you can begin to wrap a bunch of other things around that experience loyalty to a service, an understanding of who the driver is, the location of where the car is. And then that begins the process of:- "Well, okay, what what more could happen beyond that?" Well, you know, basic things start to happen, you know, it's raining, or the traffic is bad, and you go, I'd like to build a communicate with that person, maybe I moved from where I originally started, because it was raining, I moved down the street to to the next corner, I want to be able to text that person or call that person. And so we've taken something that was very physical and location based before we've turned it into something that becomes digitized, ie, we put the internet between your business and the person and all these other new interesting services, customizations, kind of spring out of that. So to me, that's one example of what what digitization mig...