The Business Benefits of the New IT

Businesses can benefit if IT services can be easily reused and applied to any business problem, opportunity, or innovative idea. For example, imagine that a large retail corporation is looking for new ways to create innovative partnerships that will allow the company to leapfrog competition. Retail is a highly competitive market with low margins. It’s difficult to differentiate one company from another. Simply being the low-cost provider will not support growth. The company decides that as a differentiator, it must introduce innovation on various levels:

1. The company decided that it would enhance its e-commerce site by providing customers with the ability to customize each outfit based on their different needs.

It, therefore, leveraged imaging systems so that customers could order outfits based on their exact measurements. To accomplish this, the company had to do the following:

a. Partner with an imaging technology company

b. Modify its supply chain to create a system that could synchronize how much merchandise is ordered through a new on-demand consumer model

2. To be successful, the company needed to implement new business rules that governed how and when it purchased merchandise based on the level of orders and customer preferences.

This business model hadn’t been tested before, and thus was risky.

3. The company decided that it needed to experiment with many different go-to market strategies that would require a highly tuned collaboration with its business partners.

4. The company also had to make sure that it was analyzing the results of these experiments to determine which business models were most effective.

Looking in the rearview mirror would not be enough; the company needed to be able to look at data across its entire supply chain in order to anticipate the best future business mix of product offerings.

5. The company needed to create an IT model that would allow maximum flexibility and that would allow customers to basically create their own outfits in real time, online.

6. The company needed a way for its business partners to participate in the business model.

If one of the experimental models was successful, the company wanted to be able to expand it quickly without time-consuming implementation cycles.

This way of architecting IT as a set of services that are implemented in a flexible cloud-based model is the way companies will compete in the future. Companies that remain tied to ineffective computing models will be unable to compete with competitors that adopt this more dynamic computing model.