Future-proof your business in 2019

If you’re a Nairobi listed business you’re either a monolith or a dinosaur. There are two definitions of monolith in the Oxford dictionary. 1. a large single upright block of stone, especially one shaped into or serving as a pillar or monument. 2. a large, impersonal political, corporate, or social structure regarded as indivisible and slow to change.

Pick one!

Either way you’re “slow to change” or a “block of stone” that can’t move quickly enough to adapt to market disruption. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about digital disruption. It seems so far off and innocuous, harmless to financially sound, well managed, regulated businesses that have digital strategies and seem highly sustainable. Sounds as solid and safe as a bank!

Enter 2019 where I predict that at least one established corporate will hit a wall and even one of the new digital banks will not meet market expectations. Not because their digital intentions are not good but rather because they have tried to change what they have got, with what they have got. More of the same stuff expected to deliver a different outcome just because its digital. Unfortunately digital is not a silver bullet, there is no magic.

Digital is not about lipstick on the pig.
Fundamentally, the disruption takes two forms. Either a simple new service that does one thing really well, saving time and adding convenience (take Credit Karma as an example – starting with simple credit scoring and only moving into tax preparation when customers considered their scoring frictionless) or a platform business that has become what Salim Ismail calls Exponential Organisations.

Consider a definition: An Exponential Organization (ExO) is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large—at least 10x larger—compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies. Rather than using armies of people or large physical plants, Exponential Organizations are built upon information technologies that take what was once physical in nature and dematerialize it into the digital, on-demand world.

I hate to say, let’s unpack this… They use “new organisational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies”. What geek do you speak? Sounds like magic but the secret is new, fresh thinking, trying different approaches and with modern technologies that leverage micro-services. You won’t get speed with the same stuff you’ve used for the past twenty years. You also won’t get different results with the same approach and mindset. The ExO’s that have emerged in the last ten years have built their businesses from the ground up to be highly automated digital machines. Not that they have built everything themselves. Often they start with services that are available, typically SaaS, that already do one thing really well. If there is a service available on the internet or across the street for that matter, that does something better than you can, quicker and cheaper, why build it yourself?

Time is the best-kept secret of the rich. As Allan Dib says “Entrepreneurs know that days are expensive. When you spend a day you have one less day to spend. So, make sure you spend each one wisely”. This really applies to all your resources. The days of people sitting in jobs to fill seats and meet quotas will come to an abrupt end. Consider the call centres of the past. They started with hundreds of seats, until the seats ran out and along came IVR to automate and script some of the call responses so that less call centre staff could do more. Press 1 to speak to a human… The service is appalling as even the humans are on scripts. Not the medical type, that may be better. Rather the type where they are not allowed to go off script lest they really serve you.

Scaling by having more people has not stood the test of time, rather it’s often slowed us down.

Adding more people often adds time. But now there is new hype, enter chatbots. Amazingly, they are also scripted and there is no press 1 to talk to a human option but these are more sustainable. They leverage Artificial Intelligence and learn from patterns where the unsolved problems are and because the learning and scripting is digital, the resolution is more scalable at much lower cost.

Call centres are being dematerialised by chatbots and AI. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and many of the other services listed in the Azure catalogue of services are way more accessible and flexible to use than in the past. Machine Learning is accessible to small business and entrepreneurs alike through platforms such as Azure. Unlike call centres that were really only cost effective for large corporations. SaaS and micro-services in general can be monetised and offered on-demand on a pay per use basis. One example that we’ve had quite a bit of fun with is Azure Cognitive Services facial recognition. It’s a “micro-service” that you can weave into your customer journey as appropriate. This without having to actually write the code that performs the magic.

Consider the speed (read “time saving”) and accessibility – you can’t be a monolith!
But how can you harness disruption? How can you construct an enterprise that is as quick, adept and innovative as the people who will be part of it? How will you compete in this accelerated new world? How will you organize to scale?

You won’t have much choice, because in many (and soon most) industries, acceleration is already underway. Salim Ismail in Exponential Organisations talks about the 6Ds: Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize and Democratize. I’ve touched on some of these concepts and will cover others in my next blog.

If you haven’t seen it yet, disruption is coming for your industry in 2019 in a big way. It will come from unexpected quarters through upstart entrepreneurs and from adjacent industries. You need to future-proof your business by dealing with the monolith.

Think of the “micro-services” you can use to deconstruct the monolith. If you don’t somebody else will.