- Exploiting Cloud Platforms
- Business Agility
- Value Based Management
Most commentators focus on either cost or scalability issues when discussing cloud platform exploitation, citing this as an uninspired approach to mechanisation of what is already there, which has been described as making caterpillars faster (as opposed to transforming them into butterflies). However, cloud platforms and SaaS applications are great for businesses wanting to standardise and simplify their businesses, either as a basis for performance improvement and automation or as a means of making integration of acquisitions (under M&A) easier. The latter often being a tool used to bring new products and know how into a business for further innovation.
Business agility is an evolutionary extension of not just Agile Development and Design thinking, but a full blooded extension of Lean approaches across Integrated Product Teams and DevOps styles of delivery to continuously experiment with opportunities and deliver new value at pace. If a business is not a start up and has not simplified its processes and applications, this can be difficult to achieve. In the end, though it is all about focusing on customer value.
Value based management has two strands of thinking; firstly it connects the dots between market insight, customer experience and business agility to focus on value; secondly it recognises that a digital business will spend proportionally more on digital and information technology than a traditional one, so it needs to understand how and why it spends the money (and other valuable resources) and then to make sure that it balances spend appropriately between maintenance, protection, enhancement and revenue or value streams, as well as innovation.
