Business Technology Trends Create More Projects
The McKinsey Quarterly article on technology trends to watch had some gems. These trends will cause pressure to do a lot of projects that need control- first in the choice of projects that match strategies and then in making sure those projects get all the help they need to get done. In such an environment projects completed means strategies completed.
They divided the trends into three broad areas:
1. Managing relationships.
2. Managing capital and assets.
3. Leveraging information in new ways.
I’d like to concentrate on the trends in item 1. since it seems to be a trend area that provided more immediate change and value.
The first trend is Distributing Cocreation. Given that the article’s introduction stressed that “companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business”, I was disappointed to see that innovation fueled by cocreation only dealt with physical and virtual products and not services. My feeling is that valuable services related to products, packaged from a service perspective is a big innovation area.
These service based approaches can change internal business processes, requiring new technology, in a big way. One example is a metals distributor that realized that inventory management services, which they were providing on an ad-hoc basis, could be packaged by customer segments that were willing to purchase them. The cocreation aspect of this was that warehousing partnerships were worked out along with technology to support the services.
What services and/or business process innovations have been created along with your customers? What technology was required to support it?
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