Fifteen years ago, chief information officers were rising up the ranks of executive hierarchy. Since the late 1980s, technology had been automating existing common processes and the change this had on businesses – offering larger scale and faster processing – required some understanding at the board level. In his 2001 paper ‘Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants’, academic Marc Prensky talked of the "singularity" that was the “arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century”. Stephane Lubenec, chief technology officer at BNP Paribas Securities Services recently told clients at an internal event: “The 20th century was just a warm up session for the 21st century.”
In some senses, the digitisation of information and the portability of digital devices has recreated the physical world in a digital format, opening a breadth of possibilities previously unimagined.
