Friday, March 29, 2024

Platforms: the Intelligent Cloud

Paulo Morgado, Cofounder of BridgeWhat

The digital world has brought the business world challenges that many managers are still attempting to assimilate. One such challenge stems from grasping the value of Business-to-Business (B2B) platforms.

Platforms are ecosystems that facilitate and accelerate access to a sharing and collaborative economy. B2B reflects the deals done between various companies.

The Internet is the platform of platforms and itself supported by another platform that enables easy navigation accessible to all: the World Wide Web (www).

The platform of platforms enables access to that which has become known as the Cloud. Through collaborative, Internet based means, the Cloud makes available both software and software and infrastructure development platforms (“machines”), which we commonly access via our laptops, desktops, servers, smartphones or tablets (and through which the “things” also gain access on the Internet of Things– IoT).

We therefore encounter a collaborative world enabled by various platforms that have become unavoidable as regards everything under the auspices of the information and communication technologies.

However, the inevitability of these collaborative models has yet to be incorporated into management. There are many reasons for this but always coming along in association with the lack of study and the underlying conviction that they are not really necessary. Among the other reasons, two others are fairly general: the excessive focus of managers in large corporations on matter internal to their companies; and the cult of secrecy in companies in which ownership and management entirely overlap and with the business lives of their owners confused with their private lives.

Both in the former and the latter cases, managers would seem to be afflicted by the same problem: “Thinking inside the box”!

However, let us return to collaboration. Waze stands out as one of the best navigation platforms as, in addition to the automated processes that return automatic readings of reality (via that Internet of Things that enables various smartphones, traffic lights and other emitters / receptors to mutually communicate), this platform has proven able to establish a community that collaborates to obtain levels of information not otherwise accessible to those remaining “disconnected”. Whoever has Waze knows how to avoid traffic jams because the community provided the information in a collaborative fashion about such incidents, adding further information to that already provided by the interconnected devices. Humans that mutually collaborate among themselves and among machines (which also communicate among themselves) to optimise decisions (such as how to avoid traffic jams).

In the case of platforms that interconnect various different companies buying and selling goods and services in a market, this type of collaboration extends still further. The data collected and communicated (information), may then be combined with analysis and recommendations (intelligence) and experience and methods/implementation tools (transformation).

A basic example of the benefits of collaboration within service provision platforms are the starred rankings provided by users of these same services (for example: Uber), with the same correspondingly applying to the sale of products (for example: Amazon).

We might easily provide further examples but, in summary, we would simply recall what managers may be losing when thinking overly “inside-the-box” and not making recourse to B2B platforms: knowledge and digitalisation.

Knowledge reflects especially on the insights into: i) which are the best and worst companies (curatorship), ii) what the best companies are doing (innovation), iii) what are the prevailing business opportunities (marketplace), and iv) the best specialists in a specific sector or field of knowledge (consultancy).

Digitalisation conveys the capacity to centralise through software a set of activities that display the facets typical of the digital world: instantaneity, perfection and free of any charge:

• Instantaneity: the capacity to communicate online with all participants…

• Perfection: keeping up with the best standards and knowledge in the market…

• Free of charge: “all-you-can-eat” through a subscription package or for a particular price.

Managers that think “inside-the-box” are unable to visualise any problem in the pre-Uber world: a taxi that burns time and fuel while seeking a client… and the “client” who burns time waiting for a taxi to go past.

In a similar fashion, managers retaining a more classical stance in their way of being and thinking are also not taking into consideration…

• The lack of instantaneity: mails, messages, travelling, always in a great rush, to gather information from a series of persons while also communicating information to a series of persons. Certainly, whenever there is a need to purchase something, there is recourse to the old-school procurement platforms. However, prior to contracting, there is a set of key information to the livelihoods of companies that can (and should) also be exchanged via platforms.

• The lack of perfection: once again, except for the procurement platform templates, the guides to best practice rarely get followed, for example, sharing data about a company’s reputation with potential clients (normally conveyed through outdated presentations during meetings) or about the specific benefits of certain suppliers (left to free commercial arbitration).

• The lack of free of charge: classical managers end up incurring far higher information costs given they still depend on many interactions in order to gain and share a particular volume of information.

“Thinking inside the box”? It can be done… But it is far slower, more expensive and does not provide the guarantees of keeping up with the best practices ongoing in a market.

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