“Can we do something
with Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence,
to be better than our competitors or disrupt the market ? We are growing faster
than the average, but I constantly fear where the disruption will come from to
our industry”. Thus spoke a technophile CEO of a mid-sized multinational
company. They had grown inorganically acquiring brands, products, and small
companies in growth markets to grow and increase their product portfolio to stay
relevant to their customers.
It is an exciting time to be in the technology world with technology
at the center of almost every disruptive thought and asset light digital business
model. It is an exciting time to be a consumer with everyone bending over
backwards wanting to provide offers and promotions on anything and everything. It
is indeed an exciting time to be an entrepreneur with unimaginable ideas
beginning to take root and come into the realm of possibilities with fast
evolving technology allowing for rapid prototyping and success.
It is a mobile first world where everyone wants their App on
your phone, send you notifications, read your address book, track your location,
and gather petabytes of data to analyze to eternity. Data is everywhere, it
always was, though not in a form that could be capture effectively, assimilated
and explored. Technology has evolved allowing semblance of sense out of stray
wisps of information in the large volume of data to form pictures and
scenarios; newer insights, action items progressively improving outcomes.
Big data is getting bigger, analytical tools are evolving
rapidly, compute is getting faster, storage and retrieval quicker, and business
hungrier for data driven insights. Democratization of technology and
availability of tools creates a perception of easy pickings which continues to
add to shelf ware for the IT organization. CIOs are being pushed to create new
centers of excellence or hire skills that will help make the business grow
faster and more profitable; consultants are filling in the gaps across the
value chain with limited value delivered.
Internal innovation
and new ideas are nurtured in few enterprises, this was not one of those; the
company had always rewarded subservient behavior with stray incidents of
brightness escaping attention. With a cautious approach to every spend in the
past, managers were unable to rise to the occasion fearing being snubbed. The
technology organization had decent set of tools, they were well aligned to
operational IT requirements, but limited expertise and ability to shift gears
into a new level of thinking and execution.
The CEO threw the
challenge to the management team to come up with a plan on how the company can
break away from the normal. Two quarters later there had not made any
significant progress or breakthroughs. The CEO thus hired a global top
consulting company to help create the roadmap for digital disruption. After three
months of Workshops, brainstorming sessions, offsite and many weeks spent in
conference rooms, the exercise was declared complete and the management team
invited to unveiling of the new strategy.
Sounds familiar ? This is the story of almost every
enterprise where information is consumed in reports from traditional ERP
systems or data dumps massaged in spreadsheets. Scores of reports with columns
represented in different places or one additional data element make up the
repository of analysis. Smattering of dashboards at Board Meetings, Investor
Conferences, and external presentations represents the visual data creation and
consumption. People love their prints but also want tablet computers !
A big hole in the pocket, they had a document with multiple
streams and action items; teams were created and tasked to generate new
customers, markets, and disrupt competition. The consultants stayed on to
oversee execution and find faults; they churned dashboards, progress reports,
control towers, to keep telling the management why they had still not achieved
the desired results. A year later and a bigger hole in the dwindling treasury, breakthrough
success continued to elude them as competition grew fiercer.
A new age company CEO
reaffirmed the hypothesis that data is the future lode mine proclaiming they
generated and consumed a petabyte of information daily. His business added new
revenue streams every quarter, evolving with consumer demand while shaping the
market. His company had redefined the industry becoming the benchmark, taking
calculated risks and staying close to the ground through the journey. He did
not scoff at the old, he just decided to create a new path giving his team
freedom to explore.
Can old age companies emulate such examples ? There are a
few examples, but still a few; survival is not threatened for most, relevance
probably is !
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