Platforms, Competition and Transformation
Key Insights
- It’s Go-Time: Years of digital transformation are finally starting to pay off for enterprises — and for their competitors. Just at the moment that digital strategies are yielding increased loyalty and new revenue with some customers, competing digital platforms might draw business away.
- Opportunities to create digital platforms arise from the combination of inefficiencies in information or capacity and unique domain knowledge or scale. Platforms are not dependent on specific technologies, and niche players and new entrants, especially ones that can leverage data assets, can disrupt value chains through new platform-based business models.
- Nearly every company is wary of Google and Amazon. With effectively unlimited capital and compute power, the giants could woo customers and suppliers from the side, if only they had industry-specific domain knowledge — which they are hiring.
- Software isn’t a potential new line of business: It IS the business. Not every enterprise should shift to a SaaS business model, but data and software capabilities underlying traditional goods and services is the only way to address customers’ needs for business outcomes.
- Culture, as ever, may be most companies’ greatest vulnerability. Business and IT need to collaborate as never before to lead with new integrated business models, or face participating on others’ platforms.