Mark P. McDonald
GVP EXP
8 years at Gartner
24 years IT industry
Mark McDonald, Ph.D., is a group vice president and head of research in Gartner Executive Programs. He is the co-author of The Social Organization with Anthony Bradley. Read Full Bio
by Mark P. McDonald | April 20, 2012 | 2 Comments
Digital technologies are opening new avenues for companies to disrupt competitors and markets. The prior post outlined three dimensions of disruption: access, enterprise economics and performance. This post focused on performance as a dimension of digital disruption.
Performance can be defined along a range of dimensions from price/performance, or technical measures, to operational and financial metrics among others. Performance is relative as specific measures are often tailored to a specific product, service or industry. For example, in automobiles performance is measured by MPG, safety, 0 – 6 mph time, etc. In technology its processor speed, storage capacity, communication speed, weight, power requirements, etc. Organizations define performance in ways that support their brand or self image.
Performance disruptions include concepts such as price/performance or value. This type of performance disruption is an important part of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation as new entrants establish themselves at a low end and disruptively evolve toward the top of the market.
Outperforming the competition, regardless of price is another basis for disruption. In this case, performance can be thought of as …
Performance is the degree to which the organization exceeds customer needs.
Performance disrupting firms have one goal to be the best and the belief that the rest will take care of itself. These firms seek customer premium with the intent of being the most profitable rather than the most market share. As one CEO said “what good is it to be the biggest, if you are not making the most money.”
Performance comes from the innate properties of its components and the emergent properties created from component interactions. Innovators disrupt markets by delivering better performance by changing the components and their combination. The new class of mirror-less SLR cameras or automated parking assist features coming out in new automobiles are examples.
Digitalization creates new levels of performance by extending the ability and capacity of products and services to deliver more against customer needs. The notion of being digital and the value of replacing physical assets is well understood. However, new properties and combinations are enabling digital disruption to go beyond traditional notions of electronic or digital commerce.
Digital technology is expanding the potential performance profile for products and services. Besides mobile, social, analytics, big data and the other technologies related to the Internet of things. New combinations of information, interaction, and context are expanding the range of digital value. At the same time advances in material sciences are giving products, facilities and equipment new physical and information-based properties. Digital signage, 3D printing, touch sensitivity are just a few advances in material sciences that create performance based disruption opportunities.
Behavioral science is another area where technology is making new levels of performance addressable. This is transforming the notion of a customer experience, customer control and context. Value comes not just from knowing how to get things done – the right way to use the tool – but increasingly from your ability to adapt and apply what you have to meet your needs at the right place, the right point in time and to the right level of performance.
Creating a performance-based disruption can define customer and market expectations. The reward for disruption is nothing less than an asymmetric share of profits and market clout. Apple’s use of performance as a means of disrupting markets is often used, but cannot be under-estimated. Consider that Digitaltrends reported that 30% of people purchasing an iPhone 4S surrendered their iPhone 4’s paying the early termination fee. That is an example of a performance premium
Performance represents one of the three dimensions of digital disruption. New digital technologies expand the performance potential of products and services with new physical, informational and digital properties and combinations. This establishes a new basis for disrupting markets and incumbents – sheer performance. Firms like BMW, Porsche, Nordstrom, Nike, and Apple among others are pursuing performance based strategies.
Digital technologies are creating new forms of disruption discussed in this and the prior posts below. What are you seeing? Will digital strategies mimic their Internet and analog predecessors? If not, then what is emerging?
Look for this space for additional posts on digitalizing business.
Related Blog Posts
Digitalization creates new dimensions for disruption
Access, one of the dimensions of digital disruption
Enterprise Economics, one of the dimensions of digital disruption
Category: Digitalization Economy Strategic planning Tags: Business Strategy, Dgigitalization, digitization, Strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | April 17, 2012 | 1 Comment
Digital technologies open new avenues for companies to disrupt competitors and markets. The prior post outlined three dimensions of disruption: access, enterprise economics and performance. This post focused on enterprise economics as a dimension of digital disruption.
Digital technologies disrupt economics at multiple levels by upsetting the balance between volume and value by creating a geometrically higher volume of transactions, with each transaction having a geometrically smaller value.
This is the basis for digital disaggregation of analog resources and assets that drove the first wave of eCommerce.
The music industry is often used, but helpful example. Take a single record album — the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” — as an example. In brick-and-mortar stores, the physical album’s original 10 songs existed as a single bundle worth, say, $12.99.
This is a low-volume item with a high value compared to its digital counterpart of 17 songs, each selling for $1.29. These “micro-transactions” are possible because bits are cheaper to create, store and manage than atoms. This may be the basis for the efficiencies of e- commerce operations, but it is not necessarily the basis for new digitalized business models.
The emerging digital environment, the one coming from digitalizing business rather than digitalizing transactions is creating more opportunities for firms to disrupt each others economics beyond simple disaggregation and reassembly.
A firm disrupts its and competitor enterprise economics by changing how customers and companies assign, attribute and earn value.
The term, enterprise economics is intentionally broad as digital disruption covers a range of strategies from transforming pricing to redefining customer/market units and profit pools. This ranges from current approaches related to selling access (a.k.a. advertising) to attracting premium customer via so-called ‘freemium.’ Both are viable digitally enabled economic models, but they are applicable in a limited number of circumstance.
- Advertising revenues only work when you are able to attract economies of attention to drive scale economies in micro-revenues. Few firms have the millions of people, attention, eyeballs, etc., to make this model a cornerstone of their strategy. Even specialty firms, those with ‘high value’ eyeballs use digital advertising as secondary source of revenue.
- Freemium models are likewise limited in their application to firms that are able to support a large group of free users against relatively low conversion rates for premium services. While digital operations are cost-efficient enough for the business to carry nonpaying customers, the viability of the freemium model depends on a sustainable conversion ratio and a business having technology that is “too cheap to charge for.” LinkedIn, for example, has the wherewithal to market, sell and serve a base in which only 15% of customers pay for 100% of the cost of operations (the estimated conversion rate for customers of LinkedIn’s premier services). Not everyone is so fortunate.
I believe that future digitally based economic disruptions will come from more than selling access or giving stuff away. Here are few thoughts:
Digital price disruptions are a given as technology changes the cost of products, services and the unit of value in ways that disrupt competing models. The first wave of price disruption was price transparency and comparisons enabled by the Internet. Here providing price transparency actually created intermediaries and brokers for example in the travel and leisure industry like Travelocity, Oribitz, Hotels.com and the like. These are intermediaries who were supposed to disappear as disintermediation dried up their profit pool.
Digital technologies change more than just price. They change the fundamental economic model and perception of value, cost and commerce. Consider what is going on now in software and transportation. Micro-leasing companies like Zip-Cars are changing the unit of consumption for automobile travel. The introduction of software as a service (SaaS) changes the unit of value compared to traditional license-based products. With SaaS you buy access over time to a range of services rather than an individual license to a fixed set of functionality. The economic unit is different disrupting license revenue models and operations. Watch the interplay between Google and Microsoft in this space one tries to change the economics of the other.
Applying digital technologies to disrupt economics encompasses fundamental differences of price, unit sold, revenue model and the like. This post highlights just a few of these disruptions and there are more to come.
Category: Digitalization Economy Strategic planning Tags: Business Strategy, Digitalization, digitization, Strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | April 12, 2012 | 4 Comments
Digital technologies are opening new avenues for companies to disrupt competitors and markets. The prior post outlined three dimensions of disruption: access, enterprise economics and performance. This post focused on performance as a dimension of digital disruption. Theses posts reflect my personal thinking about how digital technology will evolve the nature of competition and value realization.
Digitalization of business has the potential to change the access dynamics within an industry. Access in this regard can be defined as:
The paths, channels and relationships among organizations and customers to realize value describe access. Access disruptions change how customers, suppliers, intermediaries and others interact and the way in which they create value.
Access is the oldest and most studied dimension of digitalization. Called ‘disintermediation’ in the first wave of ecommerce. Eighteen years ago the Internet created disintermediation – a form of access disruption – based on directly connecting customers with suppliers.
Access disruptions were the dominant strategy behind eCommerce successes like eBay, Craig’s List and Amazon. They were also the dominant strategy behind high profile flops like Pets.com, Webvan, among others.
Disintermediation was intended to mean the death of distributors, intermediaries and brokers, something that has not happened on a wholesale basis. While some distributors have gone out of business, others have adapted, evolved and disrupted the access dimensions of their industries through a combination of information and services. The persistence of these firms indicates that there is more to access based disruptions than just disintermediation.
Access disruptions victimize firms who believe their value rests in controlling access to products and services. Firms whose strategic value rests in ‘barriers to entry’ are particularly susceptible to access disruption, regardless of their industry. The idea that you control access, or territory in the value network and can exploit that position for profit identifies areas of potential access disruption.
Wal-Mart has used access to fundamentally disrupt an industry. While move students concentrate on Wal-Mart’s size and supply chain capabilities, looking at how the company applies them to redefine the terms of competition is equally important. One of those changes has been in terms of access to retail merchandise, starting in rural, then suburban locations.
Consider the book marketplace, where Borders and Barnes and Noble continued to survive, despite the Internet based model of Amazon. It was not until Amazon went beyond supply chain disintermediation and digitalized books via the Kindle and Kindle reader that the market became fundamentally disrupted. Amazon did not change the nature of books, but it fundamentally disrupted access to them.
Amazon, which continues to use of technology to disrupt access in the retail space, is now seeking to do the same in terms of its cloud computing model, products and services – which are fundamentally changing the access to computing power and storage. Their cloud services, Amazon Turk and other new product lines can be viewed and valued from the dimension of access.
In my personal opinion, not Gartner’s, if Amazon continues to seek digital disruption based on access, then others in the technology marketplace will need to look out as their business models are based on maintaining positional strength in a value chain rather than bringing together a value network.
Facebook is seeking to disrupt access to the native web itself, as highlighted in a recent Wired Magazine article. With 800 million plus people interacting via the platform, it has changed the way people access the web, disrupting the open access assumptions of competitors like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and everyone else.
The connection between access and digital technologies is obvious. Digital technologies create new access channels in terms of distribution and collaboration. Digital technologies also create new types of value, content, information etc. to access. Individually or in combination digital technologies are changing the nature of access.
Consider mobile and tablet computing and what that has done for access. If you have a smart phone count the number of apps and ask yourself – are they from the same company? Are they integrated? Do they even need to be integrated? If you step back you can see that access via extended communications and computing power has made you, the individual, the integration and access point. Everyone with a smart phone is a living example of access disruption of the software market.
Access disruptions are an area that has been well studied so I will not labor on this point for much longer. Look for future access disruptions in the future as digital technologies create more complex interrelationships, increase individual customer choice and computing capabilities create or corrupt relationships across the value change. Critical questions to ask yourself and your organization regarding access include:
- What are the value networks we play in?
- Where is our position in those networks?
- How do we extract value from that position?
- Where do information, value realization and expectations form for the customer?
- How can information, communications, products and services change our position in the value network or eliminate the need for our current value network?
There will be additional posts over time, and the purpose of this one was to offer a ‘description for discussion’ about access disruption. It is neither complete nor was it intended to be. But its time to think about how access is changing, not just in terms of the ability to disintermediate a value chain, but in the fundamentals of the relationships we create and rely on to realize value.
Category: Digitalization Economy Strategic planning Tags: Business Strategy, Digitalization, digitization, Strategy, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | April 9, 2012 | 10 Comments
Disruption is the interruption of normal work or practice according to Wikipedia. In business disruption is the result of deliberate strategies and practices as companies seek to exploit differences and create competitive asymmetry where competitor strengths become comparative weaknesses.
Clayton Christensen detailed the principles, strategies and drivers of disruption in a series of insightful books that define the standard for business research. Christensen’s initial publication in 1997 concentrates on how differences in price and performance can cause incumbents to take the right actions for the right reasons but produce the wrong result – disruption.
Technology is a significant source of disruption. New technologies such as mobility, analytics, big data, social and cloud are creating dimensions of disruption that go beyond traditional tradeoffs between price and performance. The Internet defined new terms of price and performance in terms of eCommerce models that concentrated on ‘being digital’ by transforming atoms into bits.
Digitalization reflects the business side of digital technologies. Digitalization focuses on the application of digital resources to create value and revenue. This is a different focus from eCommerce’s concentration on the technical transformation of analog assets into information-based resources. One based on changing business terms rather than transactional technologies. I believe there are three dimensions that provide a way framework for emerging digitalized business strategies and disruptions. These are shown in the figure below.
Viewing digitalization from this perspective creates new dimensions of disruption – digital disruption that drive company and product strategy.
- Access disruptions change how customers, suppliers, intermediaries and others interact and the way in which they create value. Amazon can be seen as pursuing successive strategies of access disruption, starting with internet based disintermediation but quickly advancing to deeper disruptions through digital distribution (Kindle) including an access based approach to cloud services.
- Disrupting enterprise economics involves understanding how digitalization changes how value is assigned, attributed and earned in ways that go beyond normal thoughts about revenue, cost and margins. This appears to be one of the games being played between freemium/service based offers and traditional product purchase offers (i.e.: Google and Microsoft)
- Performance disruptions created by the way in which digitalized technologies deliver a greater level of value with more effectiveness. While Apple is the obvious example here, viewed from a performance perspective brings another view on their strategies and moves from the recent upgrades to the iPad 3 to investments in PCs and its apps/content ecosystem.
These dimensions provide a way to analyze and assess your strategy, the strategy of competitors and how to think about future moves.
Close readers of business books will recognize that access, economics and performance bear some similarities to Treacy and Wiersema’s Discipline of Market Leaders value disciplines of customer intimacy, operational efficiency and product leadership. There is some relationship, but I believe that digitalization has changed the nature of competition from the single discipline focus to one based on combinations of access, economics and performance that puts together new disruption strategies.
Digitalization and digital technology has transformed the terms of competitive disruption creating new dimensions of access, economics and performance that will define strategic moves, the distribution of value, and future terms of competition.
Latter blog posts will focus on each dimension and as always appreciate your thoughts and observations.
Related posts:
Access, one of the sources of digital disruption
Category: 2012 Digitalization Distortion Strategic planning Tags: Business Strategy, Digitalization, disruption, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | April 6, 2012 | 2 Comments
Understand one of the most important and least understood decisions every company has to make — Price
Pricing is one of the most important decisions that companies face. It is also one that is often reduced to a simple set of list prices, predefined bundles and reactionary policies. It does not need to be that way as the authors of Contextual Pricing share in their book. Rob Doctors, John G. Hanson, Cecilia Nguyen and Michael Barzelay have collaborated to create a highly informative, accessible and book that provides actionable advice and examples. They have created a book that is much more than the normal business book and more accessible than an academic look at the complex issue of pricing.
Highly recommended as a comprehensive, business focused and readily accessible discussion of this critical decision. The authors point out the importance of pricing when they discuss the observation that less than half of customer defections are price driven, yet when customers threaten to leave. They also point out that the idea of price elasticity is fundamentally flawed and how to reform this through a combination of segmentation and elasticity.
The authors point out that pricing decisions need to be driven by customer context rather than simple list prices because the simply did not work. Pricing is therefore more than just an issue of margin and production costs, but rather a complex set of contextually heavy decision. The authors then go on in 17 chapters to explain exactly what this means. The chapters are listed at the end of this review.
This book is highly recommended to every manager and executive who is interested in driving greater success from more successful pricing decisions and programs. CMOs and CIOs should pay particular attention as Contextual Pricing covers the interaction and interdependencies between Pricing, Segmentation and Information.
Strengths
The book is comprehensive in its treatment of the issues of pricing as it covers the impact of marketing, segmentation, bundling and other pricing strategies. Each topic is covered from the central ideas to illustrative case studies.
The book covers emerging and new issues, reflecting advances in ideas around digital pricing, revised bundling strategies, and managing prices in tough economic times. All of these topics lead this book to go beyond just simple notions of price elasticity.
The case study examples cover a diverse range of industries from manufacturers to service companies from long established players to relatively new technology companies. The range of case studies reflects the full range of situations most companies will face.
Challenges
The book is not for the faint of heart. It deeply discusses topics in a significant way that makes the book one that needs to be read, reflected upon, and thought through to see how they apply to your situation. There are few books that have as much underlining and comments in the margins as this one.
The book covers significant ground related to pricing which limits the depth at which it can go into any one topic. Read this book to get a strong understanding of pricing and its role in management. Use that understanding to investigate specific pricing issues.
Here is the list of chapters that give you an idea of the books contents without giving those contents away.
Part 1: The Journey from Product to Context
Chapter 1 – Context and the Death of List Price
Chapter 2 – Why Value Matters Less than Competition
Chapter 3 – Which Context Matter to You?
Chapter 4 – Living in the Digital World
Chapter 5 – Antidotes to Prices Pressure
Part 2: Pricing for Poets and Profit Mazimizers
Chapter 6 – Price Structure
Chapter 7 – Scientific Bundling and Tiering
Chapter 8 – Dangerous Ways to Reduce or Increase Price
Part 3: Pricing Programs and the Marketing Mix
Chapter 9 – Segmentation, Context at Time
Chapter 10 – The Hinge of Fate: Pricing Strategy
Chapter 11 – Higher Return: Introductory Pricing Strategies
Chapter 12 – Brand, Messaging, and Competition
Part 4: Tools for Management
Chapter 13 – First Steps and Missteps
Chapter 14 – Cheap and Cheerful Pricing Tools
Chapter 15 – Key Contextual Data is Not in Your Company’s Database
Chapter 16 – An Enabling Systems Architecture
Chapter 17 – Creative Pricing
Category: Management Strategic planning Strategy Tags: Book Review, Business Management, Business Strategy, Pricing, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | April 4, 2012 | 3 Comments
Lightweight technologies are transforming equations in both the tech industry and every IT organization. A lightweight technology is one based on creating value through Internet based services. The Cloud, Mobile Solutions, Apps, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS are all examples of these technologies. These lightweight technologies represent more than a substitute or alternative to traditional IT. They represent a disruptive technology that when it enters the market upsets the traditional balance between price, performance and value described in Clayton Christensen‘s work around the Innovator’s Dilemma.
A characteristic of a dilemma is that it presents an obvious choice that looks to be the right decision but can easily result in pursuing the wrong direction for all the right reasons.
Christensen’s work illustrates how this happens in terms of an organization’s market response to disruptive innovation where the decision to leave a low margin business to the innovator makes sense until every market becomes a low margin market leaving the organization with a high cost margin structure in a commodity margin market. Christensen explained how ASUS has done this to Dell and other examples.
The incumbent’s dilemma follows the same logic, but applied to their internal operations that invert the way you look at the situation. Incumbent seeks retreat form high margin costs by replacing them with disruptive products and services — in the case of IT these lightweight technologies. On the surface it seems like a no brain decision with adoption of lightweight technologies limited only by concerns about security, integrity or functionality — all of which may not be fully capable compared to in house operations.
Sound familiar?
Right now lighter weight technologies are currently disrupting traditional IT from the bottom and they are moving up. Staring with low value/low margin IT services like storage and hosting, these technologies are disrupting the foundation of many IT organizations. Mobile apps and SaaS are dong the same to the application space providing lighter weight solutions that do not have the power of traditional solutions, but are good enough to represent a viable choice that displaces incumbent solutions.
Individually the right decision, collectively the wrong direction
CFO’s will fall into the same trap as the CMO when they pursue reducing their costs through blindly adopting lightweight technologies based solely on cost and performance criteria. The individually right decision, for example to move to cloud storage or cloud hosting, can set the company on the wrong direction. Not because these services are wrong, or necessarily damaging, but because of how we compensate for market based solutions.
We have seen this before.
Remember when we were all warned that ERP packages in general and SAP in particular were going to compromise our sources of competitive advantage. A number of very smart people predicted that would happen as core business processes collapsed around a single industry standard.
So what did we do?
We went ahead and implemented the ERP. After all it was a sound business decision as package ERP looked cheaper to acquire and operate than the homegrown applications, which needed to be replaced anyway in the face of Y2K.
A decision that made sense until…
We then customized and configured ERP configuration in the name of retaining competitive advantage. Even though we were warned about the cost of modifications and customizations, we did it anyway.
The result is that rather than creating a cost effective market-based asset supporting processes that reflect general industry best practices …
… we have an asset that sits somewhere in between.
A generic based asset that needs to be upgraded on a vendor determined schedule. But an asset customized to the degree that it consumers more resources and requires complex upgrade.
So we made a decision to go corporate ERP to be lower cost and tap into a vendor’s investment in new solutions. But we wound up with a more expensive asset that ties up resources that would otherwise go to innovation and growth project.
The dilema facing incumbents is changing
Lightweight technologies post a similar dilemma as the case for quick adoption and a low cost of entry creates the sense that it is a good decision. And it can be provided that we keep the incumbent’s dilemma in mind. CIOs should not just ceded the lower part of their ‘market space’ without thinking about what that does to long-term plans and long tail activities.
To date, the incumbent’s dilemma has been largely hardware centric. Consumerization based disruptions have revolved around brining your own device (BYOD) to work. Handling that form of disruption has been relatively simple and just as Christensen predicted. CIOs are abandoning a low margin, high resource, and high friction activity – procurement and provisioning – replacing it with standards, remote wiping facilities, etc. Believe it or not, that dilemma is relatively easy to resolve and reflects an answer for very valid reasons.
However, is leaving a low margin, high resource, high friction market always the best decision?
Consider the type of disruption going on now. What was hardware disruption is shifting quickly to software creating a new term BMOA or Bring My Own Apps. Should CIOs pursue the same course of action as BYOD?
Some would say yes, ‘after all the apps that people are buying are at the fringe of the stack. They are information consumption applications that require either little or no connection to corporate systems. We cannot possibly support all the permutations, so let the market do that work for us. We will focus our scarce resources on the applications and areas that matter, where there are high operational requirements and the business needs the type of innovation that only we can provide. That is our strategy’
Sound familiar?
What do you think?
Category: Management Strategic planning Strategy Technology Tags: Strategy and Planning, Technology, Technology Leadership
by Mark P. McDonald | April 3, 2012 | 1 Comment
An accessible and informative guide to tapping into organizational judgement
Judgement Calls is the new book by Tom Davenport and Brook Manville takes on the fundamental issues of how organizations are applying judgement, collaboration, and participatory decision making into their organizations. Davenport and Manville present their argument in the form of stories surrounding major decisions at the organizational, cultural and individual level. Their approach is ideal for capturing the qualitative difference in making group judgments.
The book is recommended for executives and managers seeking to understand, internalize and perhaps adopt this more collaborative style of decision making.
Davenport and Manville use these stories to illustrate the central elements they have observed for effective group decision making. These involve aspects of information, knowledge management, decision making processes and approaches.
The book contains a wide range of stories from modern high tech companies like EMC and Cognizant to historic organizational decisions made in Athens, and public sector/service cases from the Charlotte – Mecklenburg school district to the Wallace foundation. The range, depth, and detail contained in these stories gives the reader a complete, informative and nuanced view of the challenges associated in exercising organizational judgement.
Strengths
- A thoughtful and comprehensive treatment of the issues associated with creating, executing and sustaining organizational judgement. The topic is perhaps one of the most complex, contextual, culturally sensitive and socio-technical activities within an organization. Davenport and Manville recognize this and rather than trying to ‘boil the ocean’ and reduce reality into simple prescriptions they provide a diverse set of stories and situations that enable the reader to get a sense for the power and differences associated with organizational judgement.
- The stories are illustrative, easy to read and focus on the major points that mater in organizational judgement. The diversity of industries, situations, results and outcomes capture the range of applications of organizational judgement. I found the stories about Ancient Athens, EMC, WGB Homes, McKinsey and Media General to be particularly helpful.
- The concepts go beyond simple ideas normally associated with decision making and leadership. The book covers issues like experience, knowledge, information and organizational structure as factors rather than a silver bullet answer. This will leave proponents of the ‘great leader’ model of decision making looking for more. If you are looking for simple answers, recipes, twelve step processes, etc you will need to look elsewhere.
Challenges
- By providing illustrative stories, the reader needs to work a little harder to internalize the ideas and messages found in the book’s stories. This book requires active reading and consideration of the ideas and experiences of others and how they apply to you.
- Fans of management and leadership books will draw the conclusions that this book is relatively lightweight. The topic of organizational judgment challenges broadly accepted ideas of responsibility and resource control. They will be looking for more heavyweight analysis to change their mind – which is contained in the stories but not presented like other business books.
- Fans of Davenport’s prior books on analytics and business processes will find this book light on these subject areas. The book discusses many of the organizational parameters of a successful Social Organization and the EMC story provides good details, but this is book is not about social media, analytics, or other technologies.
- The book’s tone and prose sits between the popular non-fiction / journalism style of Gladwell and Friedman and the business / academic style of other business books. H authors have deliberately tried to write in a more journalistic style and they have largely succeeded in creating a book that is more accessible, descriptive and engaging.
Overall, the book is refreshing, engaging and helpful discussion of her how leaders are gaining an edge through tapping into the judgement of the entire organization.
Category: Book Review Management Tags: Book Review, Business Management, Management
by Mark P. McDonald | April 1, 2012 | 1 Comment
April 1, 2012. Stamford, CT. An unnamed source within technology research and advisory firm, Gartner, indicated that the company is considering changing the name of its flagship event “Gartner Symposium” in response to new IP strategies being discussed in Athens, Georgia. Said the unnamed source, “we do not know what the new name would be, we thought about Gartner AnalystFest, but are open to other ideas.”
The announcement is in response to the Greek Government signaling a new approach to respond to its continuing debt crisis. The government is thinking of raising revenues by charging for use of words derived from the Greek language.
The Under Secretary for Intellectual Property in Athens commented, “economists and finance people made jokes about Greece having to sell its national assets to get out of the crisis. That would never happen, but we did realize that we had resources with unique licensing capabilities – our language. The Acropolis is not for sale, but if you want to use the word Feta ™ then it will cost you.”
Greece says that this approach reflects their continued interest in participating and being part of Europe. Greece is looking to extend EU regulations regarding the use of place names and brands such as Balsamic, Champagne and Provenance “If those regulations are to protect intellectual property and trade names, then certainly the cradle of democracy has the right to brand their terms. We have a right to earn a return on our IP no matter how old it is, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates have created ideas that transcend the statue of limitations for IP and copyright.”
A government spokesman, who wished to remain anonymous, commented that the government would be aggressively pursuing back royalty payments from MGM for the use of the Socrates character in the “Bill and Ted” movies.
“You cannot call the world’s greatest philosopher ‘so-crates’ and expect to get away with it forever.”
When asked about charging for the more recent movie, “My big fat Greek Wedding” the official could only talk about how good Nia Vardalos was in the lead role. The official did comment that a decision on the 2004 move Troy would be a cabinet level decision citing relations with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The movie the 300 was deemed way too cool and ground breaking to charge a fee. Officials hope that the world would forget last year’s movie The Immortals. “Mickey Rourke wearing a venus fly trap is not greek.”
The financial impact of this move is unclear as pricing schedules for words derived from Greek have not been set. One thing is clear, enforcement will be via the technology as Greek programmers and technology companies have readied a group of ‘bots that will comb websites, social media and publications to calculate the fees owed for the use of the Greek language.” The J.A.S.O.N. program will lead these modern Cyber-Argonauts.
Officials at SAP pointed out that Oracle in California should be particularly worried. “Not only is their name derived directly from a Greek word, but it appears that Greece may adopt Oracle’s licensing and contracting practices.”
The Undersecretary commented, “we will grant people of Greek descent an unlimited use license to all Greek words and the Greek language, everyone else pays.” Gartner, Nike, Michigan State University, USC and the International Olympic committee were among the organizations cited at the press conference. “Words like symposium represent unique IP and something we should be compensated for.”
In a related move, IP lawyers from around the world were seeking to assess their exposure to other languages. “We were initially worried about people looking to license words derived from Latin, but we assessed our risk to be relatively low.”
When asked why, leading IP lawyers could only recite a rhyme familiar to students of the language. “Latin is a language as dead as can be, first it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me.”
Based on the number of high-end luxury cars parked outside leading IP Law Firms, it appears that no one is taking this seriously. Happy first of April.
See Related Post: Gartner announces a new magic quadrant
Category: Personal Observation Tags: Fun, personal musing
by Mark P. McDonald | March 30, 2012 | 1 Comment
Yesterday final CIO Leadership Session finished in Phoenix wrapping up sessions in Dubai and London. Each session concentrated on regional challenges from expanding growth in the gulf, to addressing macro economic realities in Europe and leading in times of transition in the Americas.
Regardless of location, CIOs around the world face a new set of business and technology challenges.
The business challenges pull IT in multiple directions, taxing their ability to find ways of working that drive effectiveness and efficiency in the following areas
- Supporting revenue growth, as enterprises need to find and secure their top line revenues and budgets. CIOs at forum reported following multiple strategies for growth ranging from opening new mobile channels and geographies to consolidating systems and interfaces to make it easier to do business.
- Attracting and retaining customers form the key to the business strategies as customers not only provide a stable source of revenue, but also provide a key in ongoing consolidation decisions. Thinking about the customer experience provides a rubric for making multiple complex and unclear decisions about operations, products, services, etc.
- Reducing and controlling costs is a necessity regardless of the economy. It was interesting to see how this business objective was shared from the Gulf region, through Europe and North America. The past five years have been times for cost reduction, today we see CIOs looking at approaches for cost elimination with a suggested focus on finding the distortions in their business.
Technology plays an increasingly important role in the enterprise. By technology, CIOs were talking about things like mobile, analytics, big data and cloud that have the potential for greater external impact than the ‘management’ systems we traditionally associated with IT. Technology is greater than IT, and than is driving initiatives in several of the following areas:
- Customer Experience through the combination of new channel technologies like mobile, big data, analytics and business process reform all to deliver more than an easy to use web site and great ‘after the failure’ markup service.
- Mobility redefined from its origins in mobile or mCommerce with a focus on the availability of systems into a new platform for revenue, retention and efficiency. Mobile investments are on the rise as most seek to become industry leaders, creating an opportunity for innovation and generating executive envy.
- Big Data involving the emergence of new levels of information, insight and potential gained through the analysis and exploitation of information.
- Cloud, giving the scale, reach and economies of scale to drive service delivery and economics of new information intensive solutions.
Combined, these business priorities and technology initiative define a ‘new hotness’ for technology. The term from the movie Men in Black 2, refers to “J” played by Will Smith who refers to the new and cool way of doing his job. “J” compares his ‘new hotness’ to his partner “K” who is experienced and played by Tommy Lee Jones. Where “J” is new hotness, “K” is ‘old and busted.” K – old and busted stands his ground in the scene, leading J to redefine their relationship as “old busted hotness” creating an opportunity for some humor.
The question is, does ‘old busted hotness’ describe the future of IT. A future where what was once cool becomes cold, old and functional. It is possible. CIOs who treat these business priorities and technologies as the same old thing are the epitome of ‘old and busted’.
The reason I ask is that there are “J”’s swirling around these technologies. J’s in marketing, J’s in sales, J’s in the cloud, J’s in service providers. All of these J’s offering the new hotness to the business. How we as CIOs respond to those offers and the choice they contain will determine where we land and how we compromise. “Old busted hotness” does not sound like a desirable destination.
These are but a few of the items discussed at the CIO Leadership Forums. For the more than 800 CIOs attending, my personal thanks and best wishes for success in 2012.
Category: 2012 CIO Cloud Customer Experience Distortion Re-imagine IT Strategy Tags: 2012 planning, Business Leadership, CIO Leadership, CIO-Forum-NA, Strategy and Planning
by Mark P. McDonald | March 26, 2012 | Submit a Comment
After an inspirational story of leadership and building high performing organizations by Pete Goss, the CIO leadership forum kicked off with opening sessions that concentrated on the theme of Amplifying the Enterprise. During the sessions, the audience of more than 300 CIOs provided their initial thoughts on the role of IT, their priorities and key technologies. Using an interactive online polling tool, the CIOs provided the following results.
What is the role of technology in the organization?
Here CIOs indicated technology as playing a significant role in growth and customer facing operations. Together these priorities see figure below, covered 66% of the respondents. Clearly the role and expectations for technology have evolved driven by new technology capabilities (e.g.: mobile, analytics, cloud, etc.) and by new business requirements to capture growth and customer experience opportunities.
Which aspect of amplification will you focus on in the coming year?
Amplifying the enterprise involves applying technology to how an organization sends its signal into the marketplace, handles feedback and makes adjustments and eliminates the distortation that drive cost and complexity. The areas of focus that CIOs provided in Phoenix are below.
Which technology is your top priority for 2012?
Technology > IT, as organizations look to adopt technologies that are qualitatively different from what we normally think of as IT. Mobility, analytics, social, cloud, big data and the like are new technologies that drive not only greater value but provide greater visibility and executive envy. The last question asked of CIOs revolved around their top technology priority for 2012. Here are the answers.
Amplify the Enterprise, is the theme of this year’s Gartner CIO agenda and the leadership forum. How do these survey results stack up against your experience, your expectations and demands? Please share your thoughts.
Related Posts
Welcome to the 2012 CIO Leadership Forum: Europe in London — This Post features the two planning framework slides from the keynote presentation.
London CIO Leadership Forum Final Poll Results – this post contains the results from the same questions asked of CIOs attending the Leadership Forum in London
Technology > IT — a discussion of the differences between technology and IT
Find your human middleware – a discussion of one source of distortion
The sources of distortion — a discussion of distortion and its importance in the 2012 CIO agenda
Category: 2012 Amplifying the Enterprise CIO Leadership Strategic planning Tags: 2012 planning, amplify, Business Leadership, CIO-Forum-NA, Strategy and Planning, Technology Leadership
