The digital utility: your business opportunity

Disruption of the classical model creates a massive change in what and how we produce, we consume, we live. But where do we stand if we compare the business activities (what's the change, the progress we've made?)

  1. The volume starts at the inception of the business model. A startup is now Internet-based, in a optimal resource utilisation, focused on a circular vision of its economic model. Renting cheap office (if any), using collaborative and virtual spaces - and renting all what is needed to operate. This means very poor or low capital intensive businesses, with a strong profit margin if the costs are tightly controlled.
  2. Customers are close to the management - and so is the marketing strategy. Big data analysis, customer relationship management systems, all the info where insight can be gained and created (a kind of old 'back and trace' notion, but cloud-based. Modern).
  3. Improvement of productivity and efficiency. Every day, decisions, movements in the business should lead to added-value to the turnover. The economy offers today endless opportunities for establishing contacts, new rules for collaboration, partnerships that can support an idea and the development of your business endeavour. No resource to lose.
  4. This optimisation should lead, in my views at least, to:
    1. Optimised maintenance
    2. Better spare-part management
    3. Improved decision-making processes
    4. Fewer losses (in time, capital expenditure, productivity)
    5. Optimisation of every step taken in daily business life
    6. Better prices and customer segmentation
    7. Digital operations
    8. Optimised operations & management through excellent resource planning 
  5. Automation of back-office processes is the big area where IT can help and make an impact on business life. And this does not include some of the new analytics possibilities around customer choices and the new way they want to consume your products.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Applying systems design principles to business

A system is a collection of elements that interact to produce an effect that cannot be produced by any subset of the elements. This interesting definition of what is a system guides Haeckel to define the synergy (the glue between the elements): Defining synergy as a result that is "more than the sum of the parts" is closer to the mark. This definition, for example, is what the corporate office of the General Electric Company (GE) achieves by lowering the cost of doing business for its subsidiaries. Because they are part of GE's portfolio, the subsidiaries benefit from the economies of scope that come from sharing the GE logo: GE's AAA investment rating, GE's worldwide telecommunications network, and GE's 'boundaryless' knowledge, to name some of the assets that are shared accross units. The result is that the units are more profitable as part of GE than they would be as separate entities, which means that GE's revenue and profit are more than the s...
Read more

2024, nearly there...

Image
Waw...time flies...Already five years working back as a business consultant, advising clients every day (and coping with the traffic jams folks, what a nightmare) - trying to help where and when I can, providing support with concrete and realistic feedback. In a nutshell, this year, I've been busy consulting for two major public entities, both located in Belgium. One where I currently conduct a technical debt reduction strategy (see my previous post on that matter) and another one dealing with the whole delivery department (PMO management, testing and development teams)...and it has been a lot of hard work!! The current complexity in IT architecture, cloud knowledge, generic and broad technical concepts, down to earth KPIs, are nowadays mandatory to run a workshop, to present some convincing arguments (why should the client change, right?)...and all that in a secure (security by design, of course) environment (should use plural here)... And again, this year has been full of great m...
Read more