Business Value Innovation in B2B space - Part 2
I talked about the cost effectiveness as the first value for the B2B value innovation. Next one that I will discuss in this blog is “Ability to seamlessly scale to support the business growth”.
There are two important segment to this value statement. First is “supporting the business growth”. In my view ultimately all IT/Business investments somewhere have expectations to bring business growth for the enterprise. Let us say with appropriate business strategies enterprise is able to expand the business footprint and is able to grow the business. As business grows, it will sooner or later start exerting tremendous pressure for various enterprise capabilities and stretch their capacity to limits. It is a known behavior and typically happens because the enterprise capability like operational infrastructure etc. are designed with certain assumptions.
Second segment is “ability to seamlessly scale”. Now from value expectations, enterprises really cannot invest extraordinary funds into designing hyper-capacity in the enterprise eco-system due to ROI and cash-flow reasons. So next best thing that enterprises need to have a great scalability built into the enterprise systems. This will mean that as stress on the enterprise systems (including people, processes, infrastructure, IT systems etc.) increases, incremental capability can be added to take care of the stretched demand arising from the business growth. As business growth continues and it keeps putting stretched demand on the enterprise systems, incremental capacity addition continues.
Practically a particular enterprise eco-system will have a range of capacity in which it can serve (with all incremental capacity additions) appropriately. Beyond that range, it will start breaking down no matter how much additional capacity you add. This is because now fundamentally the enterprise eco-system has to be re-designed with different scale and principles in mind. For practical purpose, that kind of mega-reformation of the enterprise eco-system is a major transformation and is outside of purview of my discussion here. I will go with assumption that existing enterprise eco-systems have a good range that they can serve with incremental capacity additions over reasonable period of time and that's what the B2B eco-system has to be designed for when investing into it.
So in simple terms, from B2B perspective, as business grows, more and more business partners will be added to the business eco-system. B2B infrastructure and overall business system for B2B needs to have capability to keep scaling without needing any fundamental reformation. To make it happen, enterprises will need to analyze their end-to-end enterprise system for B2B and investigate every segment/component of it from this value perspective. It could be technology platform, could be business process quality, working capital capacity, service delivery capacity (including vendor sourcing) or capacity for engaging with partner market place. One or more of these value platforms can be engineered to create the value of scaling for business growth. I will discuss in more detail about the specific strategies to achieve this value innovation.
Next blog in the series: “Business Experience Quality for all Stakeholders”....
