Beyond Two-Speed IT – Part 1
Summary
Markets move at different speeds and in different directions, constantly
reshaping the technology-related capabilities required by the business. This
blog is the first in a series covering the third principle of the Digital
Manifesto.
When in New York, searching for a restaurant on your mobile yields those
nearest to your current location. If your search history indicates you like
Chinese food, the results will highlight those.
To create this kind of personalized experience, Google Now, Cortana and
Siri combine several data sources, such as location and past usage patterns, to
deliver a personalized experience. The capability to show the restaurants
in New York instead of Moscow reduces the ‘search stress’ faced by customers
and the saved time is a source of customer benefits.
The business has a similar expectation. When requesting a new IT
solution, the context, such as stable versus emerging market, or having little
or intense competition, is at least as relevant as the functional need. An
application with a world-class user experience and feature set is a failure
when launched after the competition has seized the market.
At solution-level, the business context has to be reflected by both the
design (e.g. non-functional requirements) and realization and support processes
(e.g. Waterfall versus Agile development). While these operational are
important, they are by themselves point solutions.
To maximize the return on investments in technology, the IT business
model as a whole has to be tuned to the context the business operates.
Differentiation (e.g. focus on cost or speed-to-market) is, first and
foremost, a strategic topic. An IT and business operating models optimized for
Customer Intimacy in an analogue market are very different from one optimized
for Product Leadership in a fast moving digital market (I) Similarly, the
strategic context embodied in the choice of the business to position itself as
an extrovert Prospector or more introvert Defender reaches far beyond the
development approach (II).
Notes and references
(I) According to Treacy and Wiersema, a company has to focus on one
of the following three generic value disciplines: Customer Intimacy,
Operational Excellence or Product Leadership. The value disciplines are covered
more in-depth in the book and here.
(II) Prospector and Defender strategies refer to the model by Miles and
Snow. The Miles and Snow typology is covered more in-depth in the
book and here.
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