What are digital-native enterprises ?
You must have heard a lot of buzz surrounding digital-native brands and what’s making them so disruptive and transformative. Digital-natives are companies that launch with the belief that superior technology can be a differentiator. They believe in a few core operational traits that can serve as a template for larger companies to try to emulate.
Often, these companies are disruptors in their fields, employing technology to reinvent processes, products, and experiences. Sometimes, they are wildly successful at redefining an industry, from online banking with instant loan approvals and payments from anywhere, to streaming media services that bring entertainment to device screens worldwide.
How digital-native businesses use technology
Sure almost every company uses an ERP or a few apps either customer focused or enterprise focused. But that does not build a digital-native business.
- What’s more valuable for you ? Is Bottom Line Savings or Top Line Growth Valued? Bottom line savings is essentially cost cutting. Top line growth is growing the revenue of the business. Most enterprises claim to support both but in many cases the beancounters are empowered to reduce costs at the expense of growth.
- How Often Do You Release to Production ? Frequent releases are incredibly important to innovation because features often take many iterations before they’re perfected. If a feature takes four iterations to perfect and you’re releasing quarterly, it’ll be a year before that feature is generating value. If you release daily, it could take as few as four days before that feature is generating value.
- Can Developers Consume Cloud Resources Independently ? Digitally native organizations allow developers to consume cloud resources as they need them. If a developer wants to use DynamoDB from AWS, he or she can provision some capacity without further approvals. Traditional enterprises would never allow this, but to succeed developers need freedom to make bottom-up technology purchasing decisions. Innovation requires freedom.
- Is IT Governance Able to Differentiate Between Different Types of Software ?Enterprises that can successfully apply different models of governance to different types of software are well on their way to being digitally native.
- Is There a Parallel Manager/Individual Contributor Track ? The only way to “succeed” (higher pay, higher status, etc) in most traditional organizations is through advancing up the manager track. This pulls top technical talent out of their roles into roles they didn’t necessarily want and aren’t especially suited for. Good individual contributors should be allowed to stay in their roles and contribute to the organization through their individual contributions, with pay and status being equal to managers.
- Do You Pay Market Rates for Top Talent ? Many top developers earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Yet many traditional enterprises will balk at that level of pay. A VP of Finance may make 20 lakhs a year but a senior cloud architect may demand 30 lakhs. Justifying that discrepancy to a CEO is hard, but needs to be done.
- Is Software Purchased Bottom Up or Top Down ? Most enterprises buy software like they’re buying new real estate or a multi-million dollar piece of manufacturing equipment – from the top down.
This model of procurement is completely antithetical to how digitally native enterprises operate. When your orientation is innovation and time to market, it makes far more sense to allow individuals to make the initial procurement decisions. Especially now when software is just so easy to consume with SaaS.
Pressure to become a “DIGITAL NATIVE ENTERPRISE” is intensifying, IDC predicts.
IDC predicts that organizations slow to adopt a digital-native operating model will compete for a rapidly shrinking piece of the global economy. 62% of Asia Pacific enterprises are digitally stuck, and to lead in this DX economy, organizations must become a digital native enterprise (DNE).
The phenomenon — essentially, when a technology solution turns out to be too big or too small for your needs — is known as “technical debt,” and it creates a hard problem to solve in the future.
Experts suggest decoupling your technical debt by doing four things that are crucial to the success of your digital transformation.
- First, decouple data from legacy systems mainly through APIs.
- Second, decouple apps from legacy infrastructure by moving data to the cloud.
- Third, unbundle business processes by allowing disparate systems to talk to each other through APIs.
- And finally, decouple IT talent and budget from the IT department since technology is the backbone of a modern enterprise.
Jump start with Cloud and Low-code Apps
You don’t have to be first to win. Businesses that weren’t born in a digital incubator can still benefit from the learnings of tech natives, gaining the benefits of their experience while avoiding the pitfalls of early adopters. However, digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. Even the most iconic tech companies and digital natives need to keep innovating. Technology adoption is a good first step, but no company can stall out there.
While custom-engineered machine learning development can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming, using no-code Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) removes impediments by reducing the cost, time, and skills needed to create personalized apps.
With no-code development, internal teams and individuals can lead the charge in organizing and analyzing data to draw out key insights — while access to the data remains securely inside the company, not with external developers.
By allowing employees and teams to create their own apps, no-code ensures that the tools employees build are well suited to the task and easy to implement and use. At the same time, no-code frees up IT resources so they can focus on more complex work while still having centralized control of the no-code tech environment and establishing guardrails that ensure security and governance organization-wide.
Ask yourself these questions.
- How can principles used by digital native businesses apply to your industry? Which pain points in your industry are ripe for transformation ?
- If you could achieve any dream for how your business operates or how it changes the lives of your customers, what would you make happen? Dream big, and then consider how data and machine learning can bring you a step closer to this reality.
- Which teams in your company are ready to transform themselves? What processes might they redesign? Who can lead the project? Who will champion it? Who will benefit from it?
- What can your IT resources accomplish with more time? How can enhanced security pay off for your IT team?
No matter how near or far down the path of evolving your company you are, IMSS Cloud and Low-Code Practise can guide you toward the future while learning from the past.
