Differentiating yourself in a world of ICT abundance, 'creative disruption'

According to SAP Africa's Alvin Paules, the fact that information and communications technology (ICT) is maturing is very unsettling news for business.

"Precisely because ICT is beginning to realise its full business-enabling power, it's going to trigger an era of creative disruption. A time when either you must disrupt your competitors or they will disrupt you - based on the new services and products that ICT makes possible.

"We now have technology abundance - defined as bandwidth being more accessible and cheaper, the availability of processing power accelerating, and processing power being miniaturised and therefore becoming cheaper.

"If you add in much easier convergence of technologies, you start to bridge the gap between time and place. You gain the ability to be aware of everything that happens as it happens, and act accordingly. There's no need to wait for information about an event in your business in order to make a decision about how, if it's negative, to prevent it happening again or, if it's positive, to replicate it. Technology abundance allows you to predict and pre-empt. You can be proactive, get ahead of the game."

Paules warns, however, that business people are not used to operating from in front, with a clear view of potential and opportunity. "We're having to become different people - people who are never satisfied, who are constantly looking for smarter ways to do things and capable of understanding very quickly just how technology enables more seductive products and services.

The key to staying in control in a ceaselessly evolving marketplace is a standards-based, service-oriented architecture. It ensures you can immediately adapt and adopt technology to achieve new capability and capacity.

"Affordable radio frequency identification (RFID), for instance, has just come on stream. By enabling you to trace and track items anywhere across the value chain it gives you true ability to see what's going on as it happens.

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"Then there are personal empowerment devices - like the BlackBerry. They're wireless palmtop computers that can also be a phone and an e-mail and Internet access facility. They put everything you need to do your job in the palm of your hand. They finally make anyplace, anytime computing a reality.

"Without the right architecture, you'll battle to exploit these technologies - or any not yet invented. And if you don't exploit them, you'll choke in your competitors' dust."

Paules also predicts that the traditional enterprise will become an eco-system, rather than a conglomeration of different divisions, business partner and suppliers. Business processes will become tightly fused across the entire value chain, making collaboration a crucial management skill. "In addition, we're looking at a changing vendor landscape, with smaller organisations being absorbed into corporates because of their greater nimbleness in innovation. Customers will have to be much more astute in their selection of vendors in order to get the most appropriate value for their specific needs.

"All in all, we're looking at a very different business landscape. One in which the mark of success will be not just the ability but the will to do things differently - faster than anyone else.

"It's a good idea, therefore, to set up technology exploitation teams, in which not just IT people but members of other divisions work together to build scenarios for the future - and then understanding what technologies are critical to those scenarios, deciding what to exploit and building what I call a fail-fast competence. That's the ability to get out quickly and with minimum cost and risk if it becomes clear that a decision is not going to provide a huge payback."