As we enter the era of the data-driven, data dominated business, one of the major issues companies will face is the speed with which things occur. Driven by hypercompetition, market transparency and customer expectations, companies will need to learn how to act before their customers need them. They need to anticipate customer needs and proactively sell solutions in a just-in-time fashion.
Data analytics allows such predictive action, but it won’t come inexpensively or easily. A company will need the ability to capture and assess millions of pieces of data per second, most of it generated in real time. This data will need to be compared with huge volumes of existing data and with constantly updated models of customer behavior, also in real time.
The volume and velocity of business will preclude real-time decision making by humans. We will no longer be in the loop, so to speak. Rather, we will be able to review the results of all of the automation that we’ve deployed and check on the health of automated systems and processes.
Four business responses to societal drivers will drive the velocity with which all businesses must operate in the near future. While each of the four is driving the need for greater speed in business operations, taken together they represent an absolute imperative that you accelerate your business. Let’s look at these four forces in turn to see how they are driving the need for speed.
Contextification: from demand anticipation to customer prediction
Contextification, according to its maturity model, is going to accelerate business by forcing companies at
the very least to actually anticipate the needs and wants of customers. Once companies can anticipate such demand and adequately respond to
it, the next step is to actually predict customer needs and wants and to proactively engage customers at the instant they become aware of their needs.
Socialfication: from hyperresponsive to immediate gratification
Socialfication is enabling deep engagement with customers that will eventually lead to customer intimacy. Part of what makes this relationship with your customers so powerful is that if socialfication is properly implemented, you should quickly move from being extremely responsive (i.e., we’re so sorry that you had a bad customer experience with us) to being predictive. If you achieve this, you start to deliver immediate gratification to your customers. The moment that they acknowledge that they have a need, you will be there to meet it. This level of customer intimacy implies that you have in place business processes that can support such business velocities. You may not yet, but it is highly likely on or more of your competitors are working on this problem right now.
Applification: from business value to buzz creation
By their nature, apps have relatively short life spans. For apps to be successful, they must provide immediate value to their intended audience, generate an initial buzz that drives their adoption, and deliver immediate value to the user. All of these factors require that you deploy apps quickly and update their form
and functionality frequently, taking advantage of immediate customer feedback from their use.
It’s not enough that you put an app out there; it’s imperative that you constantly improve it to remain fresh and to keep customers’ attention for which you compete against millions of other apps.
Thingification: from simplification to result production
At the rate of adoption seen through the 2010s, connected things will soon outnumber connected people, and each of these things will be constantly monitoring and acting upon their own status to the benefit of their owners. When conditions for these things require that they act, they will do so immediately, thereby creating an instantaneous business opportunity that will go to the lowest and most responsive bidder.
These things won’t make their decisions based upon brand loyalty; they won’t be sentimental. Rather, they will respond to whatever deal best meets the needs of their owner that very second. Therefore, your ability to immediately identify new business opportunities and respond to those opportunities as rapidly as possible will determine your success in capturing these fleeting markets of one.
Multiply the effects of these four industry dynamics against each other and it should be fairly obvious that the processes that support your business today will be inadequate in the near future. What this means is that the old business norm of small, incremental process improvement has become a recipe for irrelevance.
Instead, you need to plan for and participate in productive destruction. You need to fundamentally rethink how your business operates, all of the time. Going forward, periodic process reengineering or even process revolution will be replaced with process extinction, in which old ways of doing things will be continually destroyed and then reborn based upon the application of real-time predictive data.
Christopher Surdak is a technology evangelist for Hewlett Packard, focusing on Information Governance. This article was excerpted from his book, “Data Crush: How the Information Tidal Wave Is Driving New Business Opportunities” (AMACOM Books, 2014).
