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By Philip Guido, IBM
What keeps a $5 billion business from reaching $10 billion? Often, it’s keeping the same approach to technology that propelled it from a start-up business to its first $5 billion in sales.
As a growing business becomes more decentralized and complex, applying a start-up mentality to its use of technology can actually hinder its growth.
It’s hard for a company to be objective about its own corporate culture. How can it tell the difference between preserving the survival skills of a start-up versus simply being slow to evolve?
Based on the experiences of numerous fast-moving businesses, here are three signs that a business experiencing aggressive growth should change how it views and uses technology:
1) Decision-making by crisis. Companies that value just-in-time decision making as a way of remaining flexible may find themselves forced into rapid decisions because of an unexpected crisis.
Cyberattacks are a classic example of this. Despite the frequency of data breaches, 75 percent of respondents in a recent Ponemon Institute study admit they do not have a formal cyber security incident response plan applied consistently across their organizations. Contrast this with a company like Automated Financial Systems, which adopted a business continuity and resilience services plan to manage cyber risk in an industry that encounters security incidents more frequently than average.
Another example is FleetCor, a fleet, fuel and specialized payment solution provider. Knowing how disastrous system downtime can be for customers who rely on instant payment solutions, FleetCor is proactively switching to cloud services to support a workload that is rapidly surpassing 1.9 billion transactions a year.
2) Power without accountability. The practice of employees signing up for a technology solution without running it by the IT department first is called "shadow IT." Putting this kind of power in the hands of users can lead to unexpected innovations. But as the name implies, shadow IT has a darker side. Empowerment without accountability can leave companies open to security risks, regulatory issues and budget overruns.
For instance, a company-wide audit at a mid-sized business revealed that the $2 million the managers thought they were spending on cloud services was actually $18 million. The culprit: individual business units were allowed to provision thousands of servers with no central way to monitor them.
3) Staying in silos. As companies grow and departments form, breakdowns occur when groups form silos and can’t see business problems from multiple points of view. It’s a departmental echo chamber that is bad for business.
Here’s an example: A growing bank’s online banking service was shifted with little discussion to a network used by overnight back-ups. The back-up took precedence, online banking went down, customers were outraged, and the bank had to put plans for expansion on hold. If the bank had gathered the right people together in a single discussion, this conflict could have been avoided.
Looking at customer solutions as a single ecosystem is highly effective when done right. AMB Sports & Entertainment is taking this approach for the new Atlanta Falcons stadium by integrating analytics, mobile, social, security and cloud to create a highly personalized game day experience.
The Atlanta Falcons organization will use cognitive computing in its new stadium to combine and understand unstructured information from multiple sources, such as stocking the right amount of water based upon the weather forecast and ticket sales. Cognitive systems will help fans navigate the venue by suggesting where to park or where the food lines are the shortest.
Not all of the approaches that characterize an agile and fast-growing company should be discontinued as a company grows. The ability to abandon the approaches that are no longer useful is the differentiator that will position the organization for continued growth.
Tweet this: 3 signs it's time to evolve start-up thinking to support growth by @IBMServices' Philip Guido @Forbes
Philip Guido is the General Manager of IBM Global Technology Services, North America.
Learn about the new era of business at www.ibm/cognitive, and experience the IBM Cloud at InterConnect 20017.
