Strategy

Overview
Businesses don’t garner insights or make decisions. Businesses don’t close deals, invent new products, or find new efficiencies.
People do.
Companies excel when they empower their people to drive the business forward.
Strategies, organization, motivation, and leadership all set the stage for business success. But to see results, you also have to give your people the right tools, information, and opportunities because success ultimately comes down to your people.
Software is instrumental. Software is increasingly how we harness information, the lifeblood of business today. Software enables people to turn data into insight, transform ideas into action, and turn change into opportunity.
The face of business
Every day people at businesses around the world connect with customers, answering questions, making sales, and closing deals.
The call comes in. It’s one of hundreds that this customer service agent will answer today: calls to confirm an order for a new computer, calls to order accessories, calls about confusion over something listed on the Web site. All are opportunities to assist a customer, make a sale, and add to the overall success of the business.
The ability to provide the highest level of service depends on a number of factors, two of which are access to the right information what the customer has bought before, tracking numbers and updates from the shipping company, information on current pricing and bundles and the ability to act quickly on that information to help the customer at that moment. For many companies today, access to relevant information in millions of data records and multiple data stores is difficult or impossible, never mind being able to easily do something with that information.
Business success, business results
Those running businesses, however, have to deliver success: grow revenue and profits, satisfy customers and stakeholders, and successfully navigate the perpetual winds of change. For each business and for every employee the particulars may differ, but the outcomes that drive business success tend to remain the same: creating loyal and profitable customer relationships, inventing and enhancing products or services, managing a business in the most efficient way possible, and building high value connections with partners and suppliers.
The emphasis may vary, but every business must focus on these outcomes. Whether closing a sale, designing the next great product, or discovering a way to squeeze inefficiency out of the supply chain, success depends on the people in a company.
Rarely in business does total victory or complete catastrophe stem from a single decision. Rather, success or failure is based on the cumulative impact of a myriad of decisions and actions by a broad range of people.
Are the systems, tools, and culture of the business enabling people to make better decisions? Does the business get its people the right information so they can delight customers, create new products, or work with business partners, whether they are at a desk or on a cell phone thousands of miles away? Does the business culture help break down barriers so people can work more easily with each other? With partners? With customers? Are the right priorities, organization, motivation, and leadership in place to drive success? Does the technology that supports your business adapt to change so that your people don’t have to?
People matter
Even though many of today’s tasks are automated, people remain the heart of any business. People develop relationships and close deals. People make insights and improve products. People work together to make the thousands of small decisions that collectively add up to success. Finding, developing, and retaining the right people is a crucial and increasingly difficult task for today’s businesses.
The revolving door
The costs, however, may not be the greatest impact. When people leave, they take with them their knowledge knowledge that can be unique and irreplaceable. Knowledge that is crucial for a business to succeed.
Although these issues may seem formidable, they also represent an opportunity: Businesses that can find a way to become a “destination workplace,” one that provides a stimulating, rewarding work environment and in turn attracts the right people, will have a distinct competitive advantage now and in the future as the knowledge based work force of the developed world ages and the new connected work force of the developing world comes on-line.
The global work force
From reading x-rays to filing tax returns to taking catalog orders over the phone, every day thousands of highly educated men and women enter the new global work force.
This poses new opportunities and challenges for businesses and workers as markets enlarge, new competitors emerge, and the competition for talent and jobs begins to transcend geography.
From the lathe to the laptop
The tools of the modern business laptop, cell phone, and PAD stand in sharp contrast to the predominant tools 100 years ago: plow, wrench, and pen.
Over the past 50 years, in the United States, the percentage of manufacturing and farm jobs has dropped by nearly 70 percent (to 13 percent of the total work force), while the professional, business, and information work force has nearly doubled (to 15 percent).
When Peter Drucker originally articulated the idea of a “knowledge worker” in 1959, he described people who applied knowledge to their tasks in a direct and unique way. One important differentiators of the knowledge worker is that he or she owns the means of production. Unlike blue-collar workers who do not own the factory equipment that they use to produce products, knowledge workers own the knowledge and skills that they apply to data to create information.
Knowledge workers for some, a term now synonymous with “professionals” as a segment of the work force accounts for 25 percent or more of such industries as financial services, high tech, health-care, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, “in some cases, undertook[ing] most typical key line activities.”As the PC revolution took hold, it became apparent that work itself was changing. The percentage of people working with data was increasing, and was no longer limited to the creation, collection, and forwarding of that data to knowledge workers.
The demographic crunch
Demographic trends show an aging, shrinking work force in most of the developed world over the next 50 years. As the work force matures, businesses will have to maximize the productivity of their remaining workers while retaining them in the face of increasing competitive pressure. As competition heats up for talent, businesses will have to increasingly cater to the desires of all their people, increasing focus and resources on HR functions while ensuring that the culture of the business is one that attracts and retains the best people. In addition, it’s important for businesses to capture as much knowledge as possible before the experts, the fonts of wisdom, and the masters of process retire.
At the other end of the demographic curve, the “Net generation” that is coming into the work force today has lived its entire life in the digital era. These people have never known a time without computers, cell phones, and the Internet. E-mail, the Web, interactive video games, instant messaging, and mobile devices are as natural to kids today as the wired telephone, television, and ballpoint pen were to the previous generation. They are fluent in the most current technologies used to trade information and collaborate, and they communicate around the clock. They expect their work to be as connected as their play.
Businesses that understand and embrace this new “digital lifestyle” will certainly enhance their ability to attract and keep this new generation of employees, while benefiting from the increased connectivity and communication.
Knowledge matters
Most businesses are drowning in data. Some suggest that this data “nearly doubles every 12 to 18 months” and the larger of the data stores “those at or near the 100-terabyte mark probably triple every three years.” As more systems have been added to businesses, more data has been captured. Moreover, with increased government regulations to retain information, this trend has only escalated.
According to researchers at MIT, companies that have developed systems that support the decentralization of decision rights have higher stock-market valuations than their industry peers. As the pace of change continues to grow, companies that empower their people to act in the most informed manner will continue to put themselves at an advantage.
Software matters
As the time frame for making decisions decreases and the amount of information at hand continues to increase, companies must deploy the tools to enable their people to succeed: tools to help turn the noise of constant information into the music of knowledge.
Software has the unique ability to amplify people’s efforts, capitalizing on their skills and knowledge while providing the flexibility that helps companies adapt to change. Software is a key component of any people-ready business. While organizational structure, a clear understanding of priorities, and engaged and effective leadership are prerequisites for a people-ready business, providing people with the right information at the right time and the tools to act on that information is key to turning business culture into business results.
Software provides the infrastructure, the foundation for the most important systems of any business. Software also makes the difference in how useful those systems are. Software captures the relationships, intellectual property, and processes that underlay a business, linking the ways that customers interact with employees and connecting the line-of-business at they depend on with various other systems and information.

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