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Next Generation Enterprises Imperative
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Next Generation Enterprises Imperative
Seven questions to ask about unleashing your organization's potential
The Internet continues to be a hotbed for innovation. It has always been about instantaneous communication and unprecedented information access. The second major generation of Internet-based technologies, collectively called "Web 2.0," do a lot more. They enable us to sort through that massive amount of information in its variety of formats - data, text, video. They let us publish with extraordinary ease - through blogs, wikis, and Web sites - what we have to say and contribute. They encourage us to participate individually, to establish communities, to collaborate on an unprecedented scale, to be active.
The result is yet another growth spurt in customer power. The Internet has long provided consumers with more options to consider, more information with which to make informed choices. Today's technology-assisted customer is extending the exercise of choice in three dramatic and interrelated ways:
- Collaboration. Individuals, often unknown to one another, contribute to and draw from common pools of information and experience, and in the process inform and influence one another's choices of products, services, and entertainment. Out of this collaboration, new social networks, communities, markets, and business models are surfacing - and changing the face of commerce.
- Co-creation. The customer doubles as creator. Alvin Toffler wrote in The Third Wave of the unnatural breach between producer and consumer that had fueled the industrial revolution - a breach that would ultimately be healed by technology. He was right. We all do product development for Google. Each time we use Google or buy through Amazon, we contribute information as well as consume a service - information that can then be used to serve us and others better.
- Customization. We've learned to expect to be treated individually (and to be greeted personally when we revisit a favorite Web site). As customers, we expect products, services, and interactions with businesses to be customized for us - because we know they can be.
If your corporation buys, sells, serves, or communicates via the Internet, you're no doubt rethinking how you connect with customers. Your customers are more active, more enlightened and, yes, more demanding. As you continue to digitize your company, you can feel (and should be measuring) your customers' rising and changing expectations regarding how you do business and how your business presents itself.
These changes and pressures are most pronounced in business-to-consumer markets, but they're everywhere, for example:
- Employees, especially younger ones, bring their experiences and expectations as consumers to the job. They expect not just friendly technology, but lots of information and lots of communication. They expect to collaborate, to co-create, to be treated individually every day. In the process, they may present an unprecedented and inexorable challenge to corporate culture and style.
- Business-to-business customers and suppliers, trying to cope with these forces themselves, want more flexible, collaborative, and productive relationships. If they're in tune with what's happening, they want more communication, more shared information, more collaboration. They want to co-create what they do with your business. And you should be asking the same of them.
There's no turning back the clock on a technological, social, and marketplace revolution that's taken hold as this one has. There's no rearguard action that a major business can profitably take. You have to embrace the changes - but what exactly is there to embrace? All this can feel like a hurricane of activity and change - a massive, relentless storm containing countless storms within it, with no calm eye anywhere, and it's not blowing over soon. But it's ultimately good weather, not bad, for those who reshape themselves to prosper under these new but prevailing conditions.
What kind of enterprise can thrive under today's conditions - and continue to thrive under tomorrow's? It takes a Next Generation Enterprise (NGE), and we can be specific about its characteristics. An NGE uses Web 2.0 technologies to work in new ways with next generation customers, markets, and workforces. But that's only part of the story. It also has innovative management processes, updated priorities, and fresh perspectives. At its heart are five elements:
- Customer Experience. An NGE's viewpoint is always outside-in. It doesn't just deliver products and services; it collaborates with customers to create an experience that maximizes value. It also monitors customer experiences, assesses them analytically, and enhances them continuously.
- Business Architecture. An NGE's components are modular, interconnectable, and easily reconfigured - just like the technologies it employs. There is a clear distinction between what persists over time, and what flexes. This architecture enables the enterprise to change the mix of its portfolio of activities to focus more on innovation, value creation, and changing customer needs.
- Agile Processes. An NGE's work happens on demand. If the business architecture is the map, then each process and capability is designed to work with the others. Standardized interfaces and shared components enable a new level of agility. Processes are designed for flexibility more than repeatability, designed to gather and deploy resources as needed.
- Agile Talent. An NGE deploys talent on demand. To get the right talent, it engages and develops people in a wide variety of ways, from full-time employment to anonymous collaboration over the Web.
- Collaborative Culture. Communication, information sharing, openness, cooperation, and trust permeate all of an NGE's relationships - among employees, customers, and partners of all kinds.
To stay in tune with the marketplace, and to achieve efficient agility for the long-term, a business has to attain the characteristics of an NGE. Those that do so more quickly and emphatically than the competition will thrive and be rewarded. The pieces are available - it's simply time to assemble and activate them. | |
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