Digitalisation: between hype and old illusions
The digitalization of companies is on the rise.
In the space of a few years, it has become a somewhat dictatorial wave based on a sequence of strong and sometimes simplistic ideas:
1) The company generates a mass of data in its customer relations, in the use of its products, in its design, manufacturing and marketing processes through its supply chain, its reporting mechanisms or even through interactions between its employees.
2) However, when properly processed through statistical correlations in multiple combinations, this mass of data generates value through the services it can create or through the savings it can generate. Therefore, let's create homogeneous "lakes" of data, correlate them and something will always come out of it. This is often the first challenge for the newly appointed Chief DigitalOfficer in a company.
3) Eventually, the combination of data intelligence, predictive learning algorithms and robotics will lead to any physical object to do without - finally - direct human intervention. The dialogue between "intelligent" and "autonomous" machines will make it possible to free oneself from human randomness and to substitute "reliable" and "predictive" objects for it. It is the idea that a company or an organization must be deterministic, orderly, and that human intervention creates a harmful disorder...
The watermark of this wave is the old dream of a world where hazard has been reduced and which, at its ultimate horizon, frees itself from the major failure of life: death. Moreover, the founder of Palantir Technologies, Peter Thiel, makes no secret of the fact that it is the challenge of his corporate existence that is surging.
