DailyPost 1819
THE BUSINESS OF TECHNOLOGY
What is the business of technology? We will unravel it; through the journey we have traversed and the journey which is right ahead of us. We are undeniably in the Digital Immersion Age and the technology which we are talking about is IT, with all its consequent technologies finally culminating in the Artificial Intelligence Age, from our present understanding. The business of technology is making other businesses more productive, efficient, data enabled and giving them a return on investment which they could not have imagined. In that business truth is the value of your business. All this should happen with the least of friction and should always be able to take away drudgery out of the system.
The second reality of business is whether you are able to create a business ecosystem of your own or are you still stuck up in the wholesaler, reseller, last mile mode, with any number of intermediaries. In the Microsoft Inspire while delivering the keynote this year Satya Nadella said that for every dollar Microsoft earns, nine dollars goes to its associates. Microsoft currently has over 400,000 associates globally. Jeff Bezos had earlier stated that seven eighth of the revenue generated by Amazon goes to its global army of the Associates / affiliates. Suffice to say the nature of business has changed. Even the biggest of the MNCs are able to either deal with the customer or through just one intermediary.
The third and even more critical component of business is that a software ties the whole business together. It is only through those processes business is conducted. There is no manual intervention but for feeding of process data and the system would then act as per the business logic already fed into it. It has to be a 24/7/365 system and it should work as a failsafe and an error proof mechanism. The ecosystem is self-created and should remain totally under your control. The IT behemoths can be self-explanatory examples but there are hundreds and thousands of lesser mortals in all categories as well; large, medium and small cap.
The primacy, pervasiveness and processing of the company created business data, dynamic and real time, for exponential growth has been the defining magic sauce of these companies. They are at the end of the day, data companies and amount of the world’s data they hold gives them unassailable power not only in business but also in mainstream national and global power equation. Whether it is Google or Facebook or any IT enabled company, might not be an IT company; understanding and utilizing the primacy of data will help it prosper in a similar manner. IT companies still have a competitive edge in harnessing exponential data. Data enablement helps in every process of planning, execution, sales, operations and maintenance and what not. It makes earnings exponential. The most fascinating part of the data companies is the liberty and freedom they enjoy because data guides every decision of theirs.
IF YOU CAN MAKE YOUR CLIENT’S BUSINESS PRODUCTIVE AND PROFITABLE, THAT IS THE TIME YOUR BUSINESS PROSPERS.
Sanjay Sahay