Industrial revolutions share two common properties: 1) New Increasing Return Technological Paradigm and 2) New Funding Methods. In the first industrial revolution, they were the steam engine and the fiat money creation. The combination allowed the British to create a Global Empire capitalizing on the increasing return nature. The same pattern holds for the 4th industrial revolution as well. This time, it was the cyberspace and the money creation system called "Silicon Valley". This time, however, the land grab is not on the existing continent. It is on a newly formed 8th continent, also known as "Cyberspace." For the time being, GAFAM seems to be prevalent there but the battle is not over yet. To survive the battle, we have to change the way we conduct our business to fit to the new technological reality. Retrofitting the new technology to the old way delivers quick result but does not allow to fully capitalize on the new reality and result in the colonization. To avoid it, there is no other way but transform the business and system to identity-centric architecture because otherwise, your system will not be increasing return.
Key takeaways:
1. To capitalize on the 4th Industrial Revolution, we have to transform ourselves to be fit with the new space: cyberspace.
2. Retro-fitting the new technologies to the existing ways of conducting business will only gain the short-term result and disadvantage you in the long-term.
3. What's needed now is to convert the business architecture and put the user-centric identity system that delineates authentication, claims provision, authorization and relation forming. Otherwise, the system will start to show the decreasing return characteristics and slows your business. That will be fatal in the midst of an industrial revolution.
4. Start moving towards such an architecture and demand vendors the support of it to survive.
