Communicating Through Platforms
People are your most important assets and a very close second is the interoperability of your platforms which will determine your future organizational success. We have seen many shifts of the past few years in the patterns of communication to accelerate commerce including:
- B2B (business to business) – PayPal and Alibaba Group
- B2C (business to consumer) – Amazon, FreshDirect, and Zynga
- B2G (business to government) – large e-procurement initiatives
- C2B (consumer to business) –Zonzoo, Fotolia and Google Adsense
- C2C (consumer to consumer) – ebay and Facebook
- C2G (citizen to government) – Agencia Tributaria (tax agency online)
- G2B (government to business) – E-government, AEPM, and Certificado Digital
- G2C (government to consumer) – USA.gov and eDNI
- G2G (government to government) – government gateway and Schengen Information System
Likely the habitual conference chant of today would be a delicate balance between P2P (peer-to-peer) and H2H (human-to-human). Our landscape and how we communicate is changing. New advancements in technology has afforded us the ability to revisit B2B, and has added the expanded P2C (platform to consumer) to the communication ecosystem of business. Mobile first, cloud first will shift into platforms first. How you connect directly correlates to the growth or detraction of your company’s network effect. Networks build value. From financial services with banking to healthcare with consumerism: more people communicating equals more value. After the discussion wraps about functionality and need, reframe discussions into interoperability, customer journey’s and how this fits into the customer centric platform to deliver streamlined services and products. Platform to consumer business design is all about communication and those discussions my friend, delineate good from great.
Focusing on How Customers Communicate (not their mobile phone)
The benefits of knowledge sharing (communication) have remained consistent throughout history, while only the method to share has evolved. Information access and knowledge sharing in 15,000 BC was popular. Lascaux cave drawings used imagery to capture and sharing hunting knowledge. By 3400 BC hieroglyphics appeared as an innovative way to document the spoken language and by AD 77 the first encyclopedia by the Romans was compiled. Classic printing presses of the 1440’s enabled printed material to be available on a broad scale and by the 1600’s, newspapers were the most common method for widespread sharing of knowledge (Simoneau, 2013). Radio in real-time pushed boundaries of information communication in 1912 and the television, of course, transformed social media by 1946. The challenge of the 1960’s was what to do with all the information that was generated. This question spurred the creation of databases for structured data and the famous floppy disk for portable storage was invented by 1971. This progression of information and knowledge sharing is illustrated well in the infographic ‘Information Access and Sharing throughout History.’
Sharing information and knowledge has benefited every generation back to the last ice age. Scanning through the inventions of times past, one common theme is apparent. Early adoption of an emerging technology does provide an immediate competitive advantage for the early adopters.
Over time communication media evolves as do the technology enablers which accelerate change. How do we point to a communication trend that will be substantive, that won’t become the bell-bottoms of today, tomorrow? How do we ready our organizations for those changes? Answer: We must hone in on communication. For example, we know mobile phone technology will evolve but the strong need for people to communicate will remain true. Brainstorming how customers want and choose to communicate helps define transformations that build the foundation for corporate leaders.
Moving from Projects to Transformations
How does IT delivery business value? This is the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is how do we as an organization delivery transformational operational value? We don’t want to be efficient, we must transform the organization. Committed CIOs already know this. Repositioning discussions away from project 1 vs project 2 is a start. There are only three reasons for a transformation: 1. Increase revenue or market share, 2. Improve customer satisfaction or 3. Cut costs. There is no forth option. Once the reason is identified we need a one-page strategy to frame the transformation. The October 2015 article titled, “The Hard Side of Change Management” in the October 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review, by Sirkin, Keenan and Jackson is great place to begin. The DICE framework developed by Alan Jackson originally published in 2005, when leveraged appropriately is helpful to score projects based on objective measures. DICE stands for duration (D), team performance integrity (I), commitment (C), and effort (E). Referencing the October article, “a DICE score between 7 and 14 is in the “Win” Zone (very likely to succeed), while a DICE score between 14 and 17 falls in the “Worry” Zone (hard to predict success), and a DICE score higher than 17 falls in the “Woe” Zone (indicating high unpredictability or likely to not succeed).” Communicating the ‘why’ you are transforming and the ‘how’ you’ll measure the transformation growth are two critical pieces essential for executive leadership adoption of change.
References
Business Fusion Limited. (2014). Online Learning (online image). Retrieved November 2, 2015, from http://www.theindependentsconsultant.com/online-learning/
Peter Nichol, empowers organizations to think different for different results. You can follow Peter on Twitter or on his blog. Peter can be reached at pnichol [dot] spamarrest.com.