Platform-led market expansion
For CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, and Strategy Executives
New models as competitive weapons
What if…. your digital platforms, and technology services could adapt and move with the speed that you want your business to grow and adapt to market opportunities.
Having a first mover or new market entrant advantage with the right technology and operations is going to supercharge your business. Just think what that would do to transform your business and your teams. That is a digital business. It creates a mindset shift - when you use technology, data, AI and the cloud and renewed operational team models as competitive weapons, you are able to quickly exploit new market opportunities.
Executives are always balancing up and down levers across their businesses. Up with revenue, profit, market share. Improve organisational retention, knowledge and IP. Build sustainable businesses. Down with time to market, costs. Reduce risks, production operations downtime and outages. Minimise environmental impacts. Meet sustainability goals.
Executives and their teams need to think of a value-agility-cost-risk-sustainability equation that answers these questions:
How do we make our business better? - we have changing business needs, we need to be able to adapt and be ready to take advantage of new market opportunities as we see them
How do we grow our business? - how do we scale and do so securely, derisking changes, strengthening organisational resilience
How do we exploit technology? - we need to avoid just choosing shiny technology because our IT team thinks it's the best for our business, we need to make choices about what tools we use, what we change, make it cost effective and fast
So how might you get from where you are to embark on the next step of your journey...consider what type of capabilities you regard as competitive advantage, that are rich sources of value to your business for now, and the future.
This could be new products or services, new markets, new ways of working and therefore opportunities for new business and revenue models. This also helps to think about an organisational and technological overlay of capabilities to be able to take advantage of those new business capabilities and help pivot your business at speed. This can prompt the realisation that you need to have a common set of services for operations and technical configuration, security, risk and compliance processes. It implies you may need to rethink how you enable your IT team to get more done in less time, being able to make changes in minutes, not months. It might also make you realise that the beating heart of your business is actually your people, and armed with a consistent and connected operating model, your team has modern skills and platforms at their fingertips, they can deliver sustainable value quickly, AND you retain new know how as corporate IP.
Are we there yet?…Use continuums
A useful way to think about it is in a 'capability continuum'. This is not necessarily a sequential timeline but it does help to think about your current baseline capabilities and at the same time think about future extension capabilities for your business expansion.
Stage 1 - Organisations that tend to be here are really focussed on business and technology cost containment and total cost of ownership. Teams are typically focussed on ways to draw benefits by optimising their processes, data and systems. This can be a spagetti of integrated on and off cloud, private and public cloud deployments. Deployment and support overheads can be complex, inflexible and heavily controlled meaning the speed to make technical changes for business initiatives can be months.
Stage 2 - Organisations at this stage have typically more integrated, streamlined operations, data and systems with the ability for more flexibility and generally more productive 'change' and 'run' operations - all geared to faster speed to value. Some organisation use value-based backlogs of business and technical initiatives to improve overall agility and lower total costs of ownership. The use of more contemporary technologies and modernisation of the processes and technology estate means more automation, much lower downtime and support overheads, often improving change and deployment cycles that previously took months and weeks, to now hours and minutes.
Typically, these organisations believe they have a repeatable and robust playbook for market entry and in-market service teams. Most organisations stop here, but those that do tend not to benefit from higher order capabilities and ways to access new markets and business value in the most effective and efficient way.
Stage 3 - Organisations elevating themselves to this stage realise that business growth needs new business models, products and services whilst being able to pivot the organisation as and when required. We find more and more leading organisations are here. This needs maturing operations, modernised technical foundations. Scale, standardisation and derisked operational disciplines are needed to use automation and AI effectively and securely as portable platforms and digital services. In many cases, the use of corporate data can also be monetised as a new service to customers, up or down stream partners or new adjacent markets. Offering 'as a service' platformed services provides strategic optionality and portability allowing customers the flexibility to integrate the service with their own environments.
Stage 4 - This stage expands an organisational value chain. Organisations that operate and deliver products or services here are typically abstracteed to a marketplace offering. Customers typically use these services from a platform on a consumption basis. Organisations operating here have designed new business and commercial models entirely different to their core businesses but have developed and operate platforms with composable design, portability and scale to allow them access to much larger markets and geographies.
A model for platform-led business growth
This also means these organisations must think carefully about a platform-led approach to business growth. I outline below the key platform components that organisations need to consider and design for.
Technology Platform - a set of pre-integrated, ready to install cloud-native technology accelerators using modern architecture and engineering practices and legacy integration capabilities. Core platform capabilities typically include access, security, function software solutions, integration, operability, scalability, monitoring and engineering.
Functional and Market Accelerators - Functional modules and services with core functional journeys ready to be configured to the customer's business context, product, brand and proposition. Loosely coupled and exchangeable third-party vendors to support customer's requirements, applicable market spoken language and regulatory postures.
The Core - The organisation's know how and IP codified as a 'market entry, delivery and operate' approach and methodology that sits around the platform. This includes both business and IT operating and organisational models.
Organisations that operate at Stage 3 and 4 inherently think of themselves as firstly a technology company then a <insert chosen market or service> company. This helps future proof their organisation, they are ready for what's next.
Are you ready for the next step on your modern journey?
Thoroughly Modern Journeys is a business design practice that helps senior executives to get the best value from technology to improve their businesses. We are passionate about building business value helping executives and their teams design their organisations to be more customer and employee centric, and sustainable.
Ciaran O'Connell is the founder and Managing Partner of Thoroughly Modern Journeys. He has worked with many Australian and international public and private sector companies to evaluate and exploit emerging and disruptive technologies. Ciaran has helped these clients develop new business models, technology strategies, operating and organisational models and implement complex technology-enabled solutions to improve their businesses.
