Companies are engaged in an arms race. For years they have been rushing to beat competitors to market with applications designed to automate a previously manual area of the business, making them more efficient and thereby creating a competitive advantage.
Today, enterprise applications are so successful that it is impossible to do business without them. The efficiencies they deliver have irrevocably changed the business environment, with an industry developing around them a range of vendors providing products to meet most needs. It is even possible to argue that many applications have become a commodity (as Nicholas Carr did in his HBR article “IT Doesn’t Matter”), and in the last couple of years we have seen consolidation in the market as larger vendors snap up smaller niche players to round out their product portfolio.
This has levelled the playing field, and it’s no longer possible to use an application in the same way to create competitive advantage. Now that applications are ubiquitous, they’re simply part of the fabric of business.
Today, how we manage the operation of a business process is becoming more important that the business process itself. Marco Iansiti brought this into sharp relief through his work at Harvard Business Review when he measured the efficiency of deployment of IT, and not cost, and correlated upper quartile efficiency with upper quartile sales revenue growth. Efficiently dealing with business exceptions, optimizing key decisions and ensuring end-to-end consistency and efficiency will have a greater impact than replacing an existing application.
We are finished the big effort: applications are available from multiple vendors to support the majority of a business’s supporting functionality. The law of diminishing returns has taken effect, and owning or creating new IT asset today will not simply confer a competitive advantage. Competitive advantage now lives in the gaps between our applications. Exception handling is becoming increasingly important as good exception handling can have a dramatic impact on both the bottom- and top-line. If we can deal with stock-outs more efficiently then we can keep less stock on hand and operate a leaner supply chain. Improving how we determine financial adequacy allows us to hold lower capital reserves, freeing up cash that we can put to other more productive uses. Extending our value-chain beyond the confines of our organisation to include partners, suppliers and channels, allows us to optimize end-to-end processes. Providing joined-up support for our mortgage product model allows us to put the model directly in the hands of our clients, letting them configure their own, personal, home loan.