Johannesburg, 12 Mar 2018
As the world shifts from the old year into the new, one question hovers above every boardroom table. One question keeps the CEO awake at night. When will I be disrupted? In 1997 the top five market brands were Microsoft, Exxon, NTT, Coca Cola, Proctor & Gamble, and General Electric, today only one name remains on that list - Microsoft. The rest have been replaced by Apple, Facebook and Alphabet. The industry and customer moved on, those that didn't pay attention, fell to the side, swept away in the roaring torrent of entrepreneurs, ideas and innovation, says Kethan Pharboo, Chief Marketing and Operations Officer at Microsoft South Africa.
The pace of technological development is stuck in high gear. The rate of inventive ideas and competitive concepts racing alongside. For companies to succeed in this maelstrom, they must differentiate their offering and find ways of sustaining their competitive advantage. Consumers are the ones in charge now, they tell the business what they want and the companies that succeed are the ones that listen. As Dion Chang, one of South Africa's leading trend analysts and founder of Flux Trends, points out - there is no such thing as certainty. Not anymore.
Think back to the way that the motor industry was utterly transformed by the creation of Henry Ford's production line assembly system. Not only did this solution change the automobile industry, but the way that manufacturing processes were approached globally. It was a fundamental shift in how things were done.
Today, every industry is on the brink of disruption. Take a look at the legal profession. This is not an industry that most people think is on the brink of disruption, and yet automation has already done just that. JPMorgan developed a programme called COIN (Contract Intelligence) in response to its own fears of being disrupted, and already it has outstripped the capabilities of human beings. COIN takes only a few seconds to review commercial loan agreements, a process that took lawyers around 360 000 hours annually. DoNotPay, a chatbot that was designed to help people fight parking fines, has successfully helped them overturn 160 000 of them, and is now being used to help refugees find asylum in the UK, USA and Canada.
The list of industries being shaken up by digital disruption include music (still), travel and tourism, insurance, automotive, and financial services. Some, like the travel industry, are working with data insights and analytics to create new economies and ways of doing things that delight the customer, others are still not paying attention. If one industry crumbles, there are ancillary industries that will collapse around it - if the automobile industry dies, for example, so do parking garages, car insurance, repairs and finance.
So how does the business ensure that the jolt that wakes it up isn't someone turning off the lights? The answer is both simple and complex - data. It is the book that every business should open as within its coded pages lie the trends, the demands, the needs and the choices of the mercurial consumer. Within data lies the insight that can help an industry fine tune its competitive advantage and potentially become the disruptor, not the disrupted.
Organisations that tap into data and use it to inform decision-making and follow customer demand are more likely to succeed. In fact, according to Chang, outperforming enterprises are more likely to collaborate extensively with their customers. For the business to thrive, it needs to look to how it can add value to every part of the chain because those that stand out are either the best or the cheapest. The ones that sit in the middle have to differentiate by wrapping their products around services. Instead of just selling soil, a company offers to do soil analysis, gets involved in precision farming, and ensures that the customer gets better value from the fertiliser. The customer isn't buying fertiliser anymore, its buying data and fertiliser has become a service.
It is data that brings this model to life. Data that ensures the right services are on offer to the right customers. Data that needs to be analysed to ensure business process and decision are crafted with relevance, not hindsight. And there are tools and solutions on the market today that are designed to effortlessly interpret the data in ways that allow for the business to pivot, adapt and survive. Microsoft Dynamics 365 is one such tool. It has been designed by the company that understands the value of disruption and differentiation. Bringing together customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) into one cohesive ecosystem, the platform ensures that data is accessible enough for anyone to read.
Disruption is here, uncertainty is certain, but the personalised opus of the business doesn't have to be reaching a conclusion. With the right tools, their book has yet to be written.
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