Technology has changed dramatically over the last ten years and we have seen the immense impact that technology – and failure to keep up with its evolution – can have on a business. Companies that fail to adopt and embrace technology will inevitably wither away.
A famous case study is that of Blockbuster versus Netflix. A story in which the reasons why the loser lost are obvious, and the reasons why the winner won are a lesson to us all. Blockbuster quite catastrophically failed to embrace technology, and it was this that led to its downfall. Blockbuster allowed legacy to get in the way of innovation.
So the lesson quite clearly is to ‘be more like Netflix and less like Blockbuster’. But what can enterprise CIOs learn from the likes of Netflix and other tech companies in the age of Web 2.0? These organisations are fast, agile, and organise data better. They also manipulate, mine and analyse it better. Critically, tech companies such as Netflix do not have legacy constraints and are not tied down by clunky old-fashioned systems. This means that they can be first to every opportunity. This is a key learning point that organisations need to sit up and take note of.
The way in which organisations view technology is changing and IT investment is moving from a line on a balance sheet to a business enabler. Staff are expected to work faster, smarter and with greater flexibility. It means that, like Netflix, organisations have the desire to do business faster than their competitors and want to achieve the ultimate goal: be first to market.
IT is about speed
Irrespective of vertical or market, IT is about speed. Everything is always about becoming faster – DevOps cultures are all about faster releases of higher quality applications, Big Data is about faster decisions, High Density compute and Flash storage is about faster infrastructure and mobility and collaboration technologies are furthering productivity through faster users and consumers.
It is clear that speed is a natural evolution of technology – every organisation modernises and therefore inherits some form of speed through vendor or software gains, but this doesn’t make you stand out, nor does it create innovation – it is what you do over and above that accelerates business performance.
The first principle is to lose any undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure; it is simply a distraction. It generates a headwind and only results in resistance. The ‘business as usual ‘IT department is dying because automation tools are becoming faster than humans and managed and cloud service providers are achieving a slicker process for running infrastructure at scale. Infrastructure has gone past being commoditised and should be treated as industrialised. This view enables higher order systems and puts the focus where it should be, for everyone in the team.
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Culture
Culture has to focus on the business mission. If people aren’t willing to lose undifferentiated heavy lifting and are worried about their empire, they need to buy into the business vision and adopt change, or move on. There is no room today for technical empires; this needs to be confronted head on by senior IT leaders.
You may like technical bakeoffs and enjoy looking under the bonnet of certain technologies, but the reality is that the value differentials between technologies are shrinking as the pieces under the bonnet become more industrial. This means ‘best of breed’ for individual components is starting to fade as ‘best of brand’ wins out and the value-add over and above the technology provides more benefits.
Enterprises have lots of legacy that Web2.0 and startups don’t have. This is generally the major force of resistance with old processes, legacy applications and people who are naturally resistance to change.
So this is where the focus needs to be – not in the technical beauty parades and months of long process to determine buying decisions in a market in which the value differential is shrinking every day. This is undifferentiated and provides little value but wastes so much time and focus. The culture needs to understand this and get bought in fast.
