In an Uber ride home, I started to think more about the earlier line of questions & discussions about Cloud technology as I tried to relate it to my past years of exposer and experience with Cloud Technology.
The Changing landscape!
As I started to think, my thoughts meandered and begun to analyse the current state of the business landscape within Australia. Fortunate enough to have exposure to a wide variety of industries, I started to realise that a substantial portion of companies are not resting on their laurels. On the contrary, they are trying to understand how to optimise their business operations to stay alive. Some of them are already successful in finding the keys to transform and upgrade their kingdom, but most are struggling to understand what that change means in light of the 4th-gen technology revolution in progress.
The driving forces for a change with winners & strugglers?
As digital disruption has been the most popular buzzword recently, but it lacks to describe the fundamental changes we are witnessing over the last few years. So, to further advance my understanding and thought process to the next level, I started to ask a more profound question – what is driving all these businesses to make this shift and why are some companies winning or struggling?
What I found was very interesting but not a complete surprise. As a new technology revolution has been brewing, it has also been busy creating and crafting business into district performance classes:
1.) The Elite & High Performers, and
2.) Medium and the Low Performers.
And depending on which class or bucket you belong, it will define if you will grow and sustain your market share or decline and perish in the time of the 4th industrial revolution!
The Medium and the Low Performers type are the ones who think there is no need to transform if revenue is satisfactory. They are the prosperous business with a substantial monopoly who got comfortable and complacent with doing what they have always done and become more internally focussed (product-focused) than externally focussed (CUSTOMER FOCUSSED). Remember Toys R Us, Blockbuster, Nokia, Kodak, HP and many others bellowing to this list were once a favourite, but no longer.
Whereas the organisations bellowing to the Elite or High Performers group, believe that every company now needs to be a technology company as part of this new revolution. They are the businesses that acknowledge the 4th industrial revolution’s presence and started to realise the fundamental importance of the data (the secret sauce) and what this new magic sauce can do.
Talking to some of the business leaders within this group of high performers, I found that their core business model and belief system are very different from the other group. As I asked, what pushed them to adapt and transform, the answer was simple, the new technology business revolution creates transparent access to all forms of data, the ability to perform meaningful analytics on this Data. It enriches the ease of collaboration across the different teams to use these analytics which is critical for running a successful business in today’s age. And to exploit the power of intelligent data, you have to have ensured your tech-ecosystem foundation is successfully transitioned and transformed to the Cloud, as they further clarified.
This group of companies has shattered their outdated business models and uses cloud technology and big data to win customers in exciting new ways. Rather than a disruption of the status quo, what we’re seeing is a New Industrial Revolution. For example, a business-like Amazon built on this new thinking (digital/online / customer-centric) quickly and easily evolved from an online bookstore to a global marketplace for buying virtually any products. There are others, the likes of Uber, VRBO, PayPal and Airbnb.
It is all excellent news for all new-age digital organisations. But still, the question stayed open for me, how a traditional business can remain relevant in this Data led tsunami of changes?
The IT platforms and services hosting Data services have drastically evolved in the last decade with the adoption and enhancement of underlying platform technologies like Cloud and Containers. And Cloud Technology is like a primer-technology for unearthing the possible dynamite potential that Data, or should I say Smart-Data brings to any given business.
As my investigation ‘moving to the cloud’ continued over the coming days, revealing that some of the top business leaders and owners of the legacy technology ecosystems are very aware of the advantages of using Cloud Technology and are trying to approach this uncharted territory. In discussions with these leaders, we found that although the new Cloud led technologies to bring better Data-Intelligence features & smarts, it is no easy task to stay abreast while adopting them and get real benefits. And this problem is further magnified if they are an enterprise whose business systems and IT works:
the traditional way,
running huge monolithic legacy apps,
supported by multiple
processes, on conventional hosting platforms,
spread over multiple data centres across different geographical locations, which are now almost outdated.
And, to add to that the non-technology half:
people,
process &
culture is also outdated and monolithic too!
Let’s summarise:
Smart-Data is what you after, and
Cloud is the foundation for data to be intelligently exploited for a business to stay relevant.
It is all good if you are a new-age digital organisation, but it is no smooth transition if you are a business with a legacy monolithic IT ecosystem!
Reflecting on my past success in leading multiple complicated legacy IT-Ecosystem transitions to the multi-cloud platform, I started to have some questions of my own. Something is still missing. I said to myself that maybe my colleagues were not questioning the Cloud; perhaps they were trying to figure out how to transition to the Cloud successfully!
So, I said to myself- maybe I have to keep going in my pursuit to dig a little further to see what else can I find, learn and share!
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