CDTB Colloquium, “Digitalization is the key to a successful business in the future”

CDTB Colloquium, hosted by the Center for Digital Transformation & Business (CDTB) of KUBS (Dean=Bae, Johngseok), was held on Friday, April 30. Sehoon Min, the Senior Managing Director of Deloitte Consulting, was invited as the speaker and gave a speech on the topic “How will the company’s challenge shape my future career?” The lecture was hosted both online and offline under the governments’ COVID-19 guidelines.

Senior Managing Director Min started the lecture by introducing the role of the Analytics & Cognitive Department that he is part of. The Analytics & Cognitive Department provides various companies with a decision-making tool that enables advanced digitalization.

Next, he spoke about “the perspective on the new era” as a business consultant. He stated that “Now is the time for a transition from the Linear World to the Exponential World.” He continued, “As newly founded companies are quickly reducing the time necessary to produce meaningful value, companies that are stranded in the past are easily outperformed by its successors.”

Senior Managing Director Min pointed out Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb as examples of companies that took powerful control of the market in a short period of time. The commonality among these companies is that they chose the Platform Business Model. He further explained that Digital Transformation (DT) is necessary in order for companies that focus on traditional physical assets to transition into such an innovative business model. He stated that this is “a process of digital-based efforts by companies with physical assets to make their business worthwhile in the future.”

Min mentioned that “The most important thing in a company’s DT is ‘transforming both the business and the organization at the same time.’” He continued, “Even if the company introduces a new, innovative Information Technology (IT), no actual change will take place if the organizational management does not transform accordingly.”

The process of establishing a business strategy in a business consulting firm has also changed, following this trend. According to Min, “The traditional method was to establish a To-be Goal and set up a procedural roadmap.” “However, we now set a long-term goal in the bigger picture, identify smaller short-term goals, and then run Trial & Error to reflect the experience of success and failure into the final system,” he said.

When giving advice on starting a career in the digital transformation era, he stressed the importance of “coming up with one’s own methodology.” He suggested that students should check whether they ▲ have an understanding of new technologies and changes in paradigm they bring about ▲ are ready for the exponential growth, which involves thinking and experiencing, rather than traditional linear growth, which requires building knowledge ▲ have an understanding of “diversity” and “inclusion,” which are values required in the digital platform era.

Meanwhile, KUBS has established CDTB in 2019 to act as a platform that connects the education, research, and industry, while leading digital transformation in the field of education and research. CDTB has been hosting many special lectures since then.

Article | Hyejung Park (College of Liberal Arts, Department of Korean Language and Literature ’19)

Photo | Serim Shin (College of Political Science & Economics, Department of Economics ’18)