Disruptive Innovation – Placing Business Models Before Technology
Digital disruption is a reality today. The bigger players that dominated the scene using their monolithic approach to building products are now looking for ways to be more nimble, reach their customers faster and to exponentially enhance the Customer Experience (CX). The focus on ‘CX’ has tilted the center of gravity back to ‘Content’ and to the platforms that cradle the right content in to the lap of the customer. This requires an innovative mindset that accords primacy to the “Why” and the “What” of business and thinks about “Product Development” differently.
Today, most companies rely heavily on utilization of assets built by others (e.g. Google Maps application for gathering geo-spatial data) and leverage the ‘Minimum Viable Product (MVP)’ driven approach for building products and platforms. The stress is on failing quickly and learning rapidly while minimizing the impact of risks associated with such failures. Such a mindset thrives amidst a matching engineering ecosystem and technical prowess that allows for ambiguity and evolution of the product’s capabilities along a viable roadmap. However, this is easier said than done, for such a strategy demands an end-to-end understanding of not only the underlying business models but also the attributes of an enabling technology platform that brings the whole idea to fruition.
The ability to understand adjacencies in product offerings and exploiting those adjacencies using lead users or early adopters is another typical trajectory of digital disruption and modus operandi of innovative market disruptors. Dealing with early adopters is not for the faint hearted. It calls for an inherent ability to listen and soak in the feedback quickly and be able to do multiple iterations in the face of rejection before getting any closer to a plausible and a winning product. Companies that succeed in the digital economy exhibit certain signature traits that position them better than their competitors. The semantics of a disruptive dialogue in such firms often centers on key areas like:
- Customer experience and customer journey map
- Need for Content coupled with a Mobile first approach (iOS, Android, Windows)
- Building a future proof, client focused digital content strategy and a supportive technical platform
- Asset utilization and monetization of data, including illumination of dark data lying locked in traditional data warehouses, data marts and untapped data sources
- Agile delivery capability (a.k.a. Transformation of the Engineering Maturity footprint)
- Building ‘Data Science’ teams capable of standing up the requisite plumbing for upstream data source ingestion, curation, analysis using machine learning algorithms and visualizations that businesses can comprehend
- Business led, Enterprise Architecture-centric Application Portfolio rationalization and optimization to constantly keep the technical debt in check
- System Integration using a well-managed API ecosystem to improve channel access and creation of new business models and partner ecosystem
- Building of a strong test automation enabled development environment with strong coupling between upstream and downstream automation
The way end customers experience products is the single most important factor that differentiates the successful players from the ones that go extinct. The tenets enumerated above are some of the common themes that are seen as patterns in companies that get the story right. In the ultimate analysis, focusing on the customers is all about sticking to the business lens and allowing the technology context to emerge rather than forcing on the latter to further the business aim.
