As the technology wave relentless refocuses attention around Internet based technologies all of the current leading Technology Vendors have moved to reposition their products and capabilities. The resulting re alignments will also have to apply to IT departments to ensure that they are similarly aligned to both these new product sets, but most of all to the new Enterprise Business internal redesign of operations.
The maturity of Client-Server based technology in terms of its technology elements, leading products, and the manner in which Enterprise Business makes use of its capabilities, has lead to an optimization through specialization within the IT department. This has lead to undoubted excellence in delivery operations of the internal use of IT as a mechanism to reduce the costs of the so-called Back Office internal administration of an Enterprise. However it also introduces the risk of being unable to see and understand these changes that don’t fit the existing specializations.
As an example associating SAP with your ERP delivery unit alone, or any other major Technology player solely with their existing internal IT delivery unit, is a big mistake. The Technology venders know they have to move into a wholly different set of products or services with correspondingly different delivery methods, and have already done so. The danger is that IT departments have not followed these disruptive changes in product sets and capabilities.
A previous blog drew attention to this danger using as, an example, Cisco announcing a new set of capabilities for the Internet of Things, IoT. An announcement that included adding a whole range of new integration technology products to build Internet based systems. Cisco knows it has difficulty in getting non-networking IT staff to read its releases and recognize the new roles and capabilities its products now support. Its the same story for SAP with its rapidly growing HANA capabilities moving its capabilities beyond those of the IT departments ERP staff. Or, Salesforce, IBM, in fact the whole top tier of Technology vendors find themselves ‘trapped’ in there traditional market slot.
Investments have introduced genuinely new, innovative products that match real business requirements, unfortunately they all too often cant be matched to their current ‘partnership’ positioning in the IT department organization.
For the major technology vendors, as much as the new startups, the inability to get their messages read and understood is a major issue. As specialized team members make what were previously rational decisions to disregard what doesn’t directly concern them in their current roles and partnership alignments it has now become a recognizable issue for the IT department too.
It’s a subtle and difficult challenge to take on, because right now few IT departments have any systematic manner of identifying the ‘big picture’ of emerging technologies to identify and characterize how to make use of radical new capabilities with business. New requirements are either dealt with in the manner of the one off requirement, or maybe by asking the ‘nerd squad’ doing small scale Internet and Services build work for sales or marketing. Neither reaches the real issue, which is to strategically decide what is required as an ongoing Enterprise in association with Business change, and accordingly, re evaluate potential partners around their positioning and products.
Can IT re evaluate and re-position itself on its own? The answer is almost certainly no, as the re-positioning has to be around the new Enterprise Business model built on the basis of Technology capabilities.
Exactly what this means was skillfully made clear by Blake Cahill, the Global Head of Brand Marketing for Philips, speaking at the Constellation Research Digital Disruption tour in Amsterdam recently. Blake has been interviewed by various publications and there are three interviews that cover his views and provide more depth to the whole topic of the extent to which Digital Disruption is reorganizing Enterprises; One, Two, and Three.
Blake’s presentation to the event described how Philips had created three common business zones each of which covered all their products and activities to insure that there is a common enterprise wide engagement;
- Market to Sale – understanding and interacting with the overall Digital Marketing in all aspects of both inward intelligence as well as outward messaging.
- Sale to Order – presenting the choices and assisting the potential customer in achieving a mutually satisfying deal.
- Order to Fulfillment – recognizably based around much of the existing Back Office IT systems, but with the addition of Digital links for purposes such as order tracking by a customer.
The three zones each have all the activities of Philips in that particular engagement area to ensure a full ‘big picture’ relationship to each other, though not necessarily in the manner of traditional IT processes where alignment of process and data is the key. Taking as an example Market to Sale the requirement is to be able to track all market data both incoming and outgoing to determine new ‘insights’ of business value that in turn are used to act and create successful ‘outcomes’.
Digital Business is not just about doing Business Online using Digital Technology; above all it’s the development of ‘Smart’ Business capabilities to interpret apparently unrelated data into previously unrecognized ‘Insights’ of Business value. In the super competitive Digital world awash with data to survive, and prosper, requires not just more data analytics, but a different business model.
This point was made in a previous blog, and brings the point back to the re invention and re positioning of the knowledge and capabilities of the current IT department. The IT department has to bring a very different set of technology tools, probably from a new set of partners, to manage the data flows from a world of Internet of Things devices, as well as many other existing sources; Machine learning is just one example of a new and radically disruptive new tool, but already the there are sufficient new products and capabilities launched that need to assessed in systematic manner.
However the words Strategic and Systematic examination of new technology and tools require matching to the requirements of the new re-positioned operating and business models of the enterprise.
This is the first in a new blog series where the focus will be on understanding what, and how, a business may choose to operate as it under goes its own ‘Digital Disruption’, and the consequences for re-positioning the capabilities and competencies’ of the IT department as the provider of Enterprise Technology knowledge.