Business is constantly changing
If your business doesn’t keep afloat, will your IT drag you down?
Photo from flickr.
Today, disruption in business is far more common than in previous times and the consequences for companies not being able to change are huge.
But IT doesn’t matter, or?
If your business model depends on IT and if your legacy systems are to rigid and to costly, then IT does matter.
Google is a service company, with individual users of their services and their customers are those who a paying for ads. Now, they are starting to sell physical products under the Nexus brand. This is a new value proposition, with huge impact on customer relations, channels and customer segments.
Adobe has been selling shrink-wrapped software with perpetual licenses. Last year, they changed their business model to offer licenses per month or year for some of their products.
Microsoft has been selling software programs for a very long time. (Do you remember Word 1.0 for MS-Dos?) Today, you could rent Office 365 as a service and the application is hosted in the cloud.
Apple started their own stores more than ten years ago and today you could buy their products from stores of individual resellers, Apples own stores or on their web-site.
A Telco would like to give offers that are combining their own services, with other manufactures products and other companies services to individual customers. This is very different from the plain old telephony systems. An example is Telia who were selling an iPhone with a two-year mobile contract with and Spotify music service included in the monthly fee.
Banks started to offer self-service thru Internet as a complement to their local offices. After more than ten years do they still struggle with their different channels.
A financial institution added selling savings accounts to their product portfolio in addition to credit-card handling.
An old insurance company have traditionally sold insurances directly to individuals and small companies. They would now like to expand their market with white-label offerings where other players sell their policies under their respective name. The consequence is that they don’t have a direct customer interaction anymore.
New market regulation in the Nordic countries will probably force Electrical network companies to change their business model. Instead of sending an invoice to millions of customers, they will only send a few hundred invoices to other companies per month.
Do you think that these companies could do changes to their business without affecting their IT-support?
This article was first published internally within Capgemini in Swedish Architecture Community newsletter, May 2013.