The development of platforms and not more applications is a paradigm shift for the ISD and a major transformation that begins over several years. Still need to go in the right direction!
When we speak of a platform, we often mean the algorithms that rewrite the rules of work or markets, like Uber or Airbnb . In "Platform Capitalism " Nick Srnicek, who teaches at King's College in London, shows how Google , Facebook , Apple ,Microsoft , and even Siemens and GE are companies that are adopting and perfecting a business model leading to a new digital capitalism. mainly through data collection and intermediary status.
These companies have an unusual monopoly potential which, although it fits into the logic of so-called "classical" capitalism, presents for the author a real danger of the evolution of capitalism. They will certainly be regulated, one way or another, but they have set the new standards of digital and de facto information systems of companies that connect to it.
Like Mr. Jourdain who prose without knowing it, all companies already have two or three platforms without always calling them like that. The transactional onearound the ERP, the one decision-making around the "Business Intelligence" when it exists, and the last digitale around the exhibition of the company on Internet, that it is its Internet sites, extranet or marketplaces. It is on this last that is in recent years part of the innovations of the company.
In " DSI: moving from applications to platforms " GreenSI showed that the first impact was organizational less thinking of " silage application managers " and more to the emergence of "transverse product owners" centered on these platforms and the business benefits and commercial that they bring. Unsurprisingly, these platforms project the CIO into this new capitalism and asks him to take an interest in business and to become the bedrock of (digital) business, thus adapting his skills.
This is a real paradigm shift for the ISD and a major transformation that begins over several years. Still need to go in the right direction!
In the first place it should be remembered that business applications are the fastest growing segment of the IT market in 2018 (11%), which is why companies have spent the most. Much more growth than spending in data centers and even infrastructure software. The subject is therefore for the ISD to maximize this application investment, and not to entrench itself in the, certainly necessary, optimization and securing of infrastructures. The software is devouring the worldMarc Andreenssen told us in 2011 when talking about the role of the internet, there is no reason he stops at the door of the IS.
The software is a major asset of the company whose value continues to grow.
In this context of restructuring of the company's application assets, platforms are a means of decompartmentalization, of cross-cutting to fetch new services at marginal cost , to benefit from scale effects and the " law of networks " ( Metcalfe) who says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its participants.
So rather than managing 4 applications that each have 100 users, there is more value in managing these functions on the same platform with 400 users. Even if today these users are in 4 separate services that do not talk to each other, with different mastery of books, tomorrow it may be otherwise and this value can be released. A way to maximize the potential of your investments.
Platforms can therefore be an IS urbanization model that is easier to reconfigure to adopt new business models. They are not organized in relation to their construction (and therefore the internal organization of the ISD and its suppliers or masterworks of works) but in relation to their users to maximize the potential of the network law.
They can also violate an old-world rule that separates B2C (consumer customers) and B2B (corporate customers). This is exactly what Googleand Facebook are doingby offering B2C services, some paying free others, and selling B2B paid advertising services that leverage that consumer insight. Together they account for 58% of the global online advertising market, and derive these revenues from their B2B business which finances their B2C platform.
Thus platforms allow the accumulation of data on users, which foreshadows the intelligent services of tomorrow which, with this data, will exploit the advances of algorithms in terms of AI.
Of course, companies will have to behave in a less cavalier way than the GAFAs in their infancy and they will have to anonymize the data or declare the treatments on the personal data and obtain the consents of their owners. But that does not prevent multiple opportunities for data recovery.
In two months we will celebrate the one year of the RGPD . GreenSI hopes that this will allow todefinitively leave this period of massive destruction of value (see all that for that ?! ) where, guided by a complex regulation, little understood and whose legal directions have seized, the companies inflicted sentences which are equal only the doubts related to their non control of their data. The economy in front of us is built on the understanding and the valuation of data , and those who do not understand it will soon be there to explain their mistake ;-)
For others who have understood that the valorization of the data is essential to survive, there are four types of recognized platforms, when we classify them by type of business business (business model) they deliver
The collaboration platform is the least disruptive model. It consists of bringing together all internal and external users on the same service platform. It is the convergence of internal collaboration platforms that have developed well over the last decade and web-based service platforms for customers.
Any in-house application can potentially deliver value and revenue externally. Imagine that you are the only ones to have the problem that you have solved with this application. If we think of the early Amazon bookstore that opened its Amazon.com platform to others who wanted to sell lines online, which led him to imagine a scalable infrastructure (AWS) from which he derives much of its margins today, we see the potential for value creation that can be hidden behind such a platform.
Every company now has to imagine what it does so well that it can offer it externally.
The orchestration platform delivers value by optimizing interactions in a complex system. The simplest is for example IFTT which allows to connect its services online and to define rules to orchestrate them. We can also mention Slack, a very popular collaboration platform that has won over Microsoft and Google, and which switches to orchestration with intelligent agents. Outside of the digital world, smart grids or electricity producers and consumers interact, and even smart cities for the optimized management of the public space, are also cases of use of the orchestration platforms.
The creative platform allows co-construction with its clients. Publish a development kit on your PaaS, and get all the intelligence of your customers to imagine complementary services to those you offer. It also works with physical products that can be modified by customers when they contain embedded software.
The inventor of this concept is perhaps Salesforce who invented the store of applications developed by its customers (App Exchange), well before Apple with the App Store.Steve Jobs has also benefited from the brandAppStore and the domain name sold free by Marc Benioff !
We are here in a rather disruptive use that can bring additional income as with Salesforce, until becoming the major economic model of the platform with Apple.
Finally, the linking platform is currently the most disruptive.
Instead of holding assets whose use is being resold, we seek to connect actors who own assets with those who would like to use them. This relationship which controls the entire contractual process and billing of these services , allows a model on the basis of one or two commissions.You have recognized Uber and Airbnb , but on a smaller scale, multiple platforms exist in what is sometimes called a somewhat narrow collaborative economy. There is no reason to limit the collaborative economy to this linking model and to extend it to the platform economy.
The vision of GreenSI is therefore that your IS, mixing B2B and B2C, internal and external, has a capacity to organize itself into four platforms that can support the development of new business models. They are often ambitious, bear a mark associated with a strong user experience, and are based on a technical base that has become a new profession. These platforms can share, or not, the support services of the ERP platform which will deliver less and less value compared to these new platforms.
You've noticed that every platform is not technology-driven, but a business model that can leverage all technologies. This is a break for the CIOs who under the influence of their suppliers are organized by technologies (IoT, ERP, BI, ...). For its construction in 2017 GreenSI used the image of the station Alpha of the film the Empire of the thousand planets , the space station where all the species of the Universe meet. The idea is that this construction will be more "organic" and agile, a large infrastructure project as we have already seen a lot ... fail!
The task is immense and will certainly be addressed in several future master plans .However, you can start simply by asking for each current application of your IS, which platform it will have the most value. You will be surprised by the platform vision on your IS and its potential contribution to the value of the company. This will make it even easier to reduce low-value investments and redirect them to platforms with the strongest potential.