Doing Business in Real Time
About this Blog:
The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
Business Strategy based on Cloud Computing and Agility
The biggest impact of cloud computing is business agility, not cost-cutting
Companies that create a foundational business strategy based on agility put responsiveness before efficiency. They emphasizes continuous exploration of new business opportunities followed up by rapid growth into new markets when exploration shows a business opportunity to be profitable.
The future belongs to those companies that figure out how to do continuous exploration of opportunities without spending a lot of money and wasting a lot of time. Since most new ideas don’t work out, companies need to try a lot of ideas to find the winners. Yet most companies still try to pick the winners by doing lots of analysis up front and then investing lots of money to bring a few selected ideas to market. But in the high change and unpredictable economy we live in now that approach just doesn’t work anymore. It’s better to do a little analysis to identify a lot of good ideas, and find ways to bring them to market quickly and cheaply and see what happens.
[ This post excerpted from my newest book - Business in the Cloud ]
Example of a Strategy of Agility in Action
Here is a case in point; suppose a company, GrowMore Corporation, spots an opportunity to leverage its existing expertise and supplier relationships to launch a new product line. In order to do this the company wants to set up a new business unit with branch offices in key cities around the world. It wants to have sales offices in these cities and it wants to support the sales staff in these offices with a customer relationship management (CRM) system that enables sales people to prospect for customers, create presentations and follow up with prospects in a timely and organized manner. GrowMore Corp. also wants to collect information from all the offices and store it in a single database at headquarters to provide for overall reporting and tracking of sales and business development activities.
The new product line will need some customization for individual customers so that it best fits their unique needs, but GrowMore Corp. does not want to staff all these offices with engineers to do this customization. Instead of sending engineers out with sales people to make calls on prospect companies, the company wants to set up video conferences. This way their sales person on site with the customer or prospect can arrange for video conference interaction between an engineer and a customer and the engineer can interview the customer and collect the information needed to configure the product.
In the old days management of the new startup business unit would have submitted a support request to the company IT group. The IT group would then have sent out a business analyst to evaluate the request and study the needs of the new business unit. Then the request would have been prioritized against requests from other business units and, since existing business units typically get priority in the allocation of available IT resources, the startup unit would likely have to wait until the next budget cycle before it could get funding for the IT services it needs.
When the funding and IT resources became available there would be a process of designing and developing the needed software or evaluating possible packaged software solutions. Then there would be the purchasing and installation of the needed hardware and the communications networks and finally the rollout of the new system and accompanying user training. And during that time months or even years would have passed. In many cases the window of
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