Johannesburg, 18 Jun 2014
The era of high-speed transformation is clearly upon us. Organisations are seeking ways to become more productive than they have ever done before, says Rainer Gaier, MD at Ovations Group. Competitiveness, time-to-market, and anticipating what the customer wants seem to be corporate expectations... and they want it now!
Such behaviour is evident in the millennial generation - my children are testimony to that. My generation - the baby boomers - would consider instant gratification to be impatient, spoiled or even brattish traits, but the reality is, we are evolving at a phenomenal pace, where instant satisfaction is the order of the day and is served up in a variety of ways every day.
It smacks of greed, but it's actually survival measures. Business no longer has the patience to wait two years to see returns. If you want to drive the appropriate behaviour, link people's bonuses to outcomes - you'll see immediate action. One can argue that quality and long-term strategies give way to short-term gains, but who are we as vendors/partners to fight that? The one holding the wallet dictates the nature of the deliverables.
Business process management (BPM) and the cloud plays a prominent role in quenching the thirst of rapidly transforming businesses. Software as a service (SaaS) has unlocked immediate benefits for many organisations. BPM is a differentiator - it is a flavour of SaaS, but has one major differentiator: it can be highly modified and tailored precisely to match the requirements of each client (we're talking weeks, not months, to implement solutions). The secrets of success lie in an agile deployment methodology aligned together with well-trained teams and great tooling. We are witnessing crazy turnaround times, delivering complete hosted solutions in record time. The end-users are shielded from the complexity of these solutions, even though there are often several moving parts.
In closing, those dinosaur delivery companies had better adjust their sights or face extinction.
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