Powershift from an I.T. Perspective

One of the factors that made Walmart dominant in the market and enabled them to change the "core logistic" of the industry was their ability to customize their local stores to the local market, maintain inventory and build customer relationships. Power shifted to the customer. 

A service-based business is different. If you are in a product-based business and you go out of business, the product still exists. Someone else could create it, sell it, re-sell it, it change it, maintain it, etc. However, if you are in a service-based business and you go out of business, the service no longer exists. The service is YOU, your business. The Information Age customer, every individual customer, wants you to customize YOUR BUSINESS to their specification... on demand!

Go back to the rate of change issue for a moment. If you drive the rate of change out of sight... what will that do to your "time-to-market"... from the time you get an order until you provide a response, fulfill the order?... Your time-to-market is going to shrink... if you drive the rate of change to infinity, your time to market will shrink to... ZERO.

Just think about IT (Information Technology) for a moment... go back a year or two ago... what was the IT time-to-market in those days?... from the time IT got an order for a new system or some new implementation of some kind, how long did they have to deliver something useful for the Enterprise? People usually say, "oh, about a year." If IT could do something useful in about a year or so, they were "home free."

What is the IT time-to-market today? Is it a year? People usually say, "oh, about 3 or 4 months." Go out a year in the future... what do you think the time-to-market is going to be a year from now? I am pretty sure it is not going to revert to a year! If it is 3 or 4 months today, a year from now it is likely to be 3 or 4 weeks, 3 or 4 days, 3 or 4 hours, 3 or 4 minutes, 3 or 4 seconds... where will it stop? It is going to approach zero. As the rate of change approximates infinity... the time to market will approximate ZERO!

The customer wants what they want and they want it NOW. The customer wants a custom product, mass-produced in quantities of one for immediate delivery. If you can't produce that... "click", they get another supplier. It is a global market and it is too easy to change suppliers.

Just looking at this from an IT perspective again, what are you going to do when the IT "customer" (General Management) wants a new, custom Enterprise, integrated, Enterprise-wide, today, in time: zero? Hmmmm.

Do you think this is not happening?

What is going to happen to the Enterprise if IT can't deliver to those specifications?... The Enterprise is likely to go OUT of business... because that is what the Enterprise needs in order to accommodate their customer, the Enterprise customer.

The question is, how are you going to deliver custom Enterprises on demand? Who is working on this? Is it even possible to produce Enterprise-wide integrated Enterprises at the click of a mouse?

There is an argument to be made that it is not possible. The argument boils down to Enterprise-wide, integrated implementations would take too long and cost too much. It is impossible. Your only hope is to produce a few more lines of code.

However, there is another argument that it IS possible... but it is different... it is not more of the same... it is not building and running systems... it is a NEW PARADIGM. This is the point of developing the Information Age context. Major changes have to take place if the Enterprise and its Information Technology are to stay in the game... big... or, small; Private... or, Public!

I will use the Toyota case in a later post to prove that it IS possible to produce custom products, mass- produced in quantities of one for immediate delivery... the "new paradigm".