ACA = Cloud+BPM+BI
Charles Darwin's "Survival of the Fittest" phrase is old but still powerful and is very much true in today's competitive market place. Every company tries to grab the market share and gain competitive advantage. With the advent of information technologies and frameworks, the gap between competitors has been reducing considerably and every company seeks innovative ways and means to broaden this gap. The Cloud BPM and SOA are some of the hot trends which every company embraces for improving its service capabilities and reach thereby reducing the costs and time to market.
According to Porter, Organization should adopt to one of the three strategies namely Cost Leadership, Differentiation and Market Segmentation to gain competitive advantage. Let's analyze how each of these strategies is achieved. Cloud enables an organization to achieve Cost leadership through its economic efficiency by avoiding capital expenditures on software and services. Business Intelligence achieves differentiation through real-time data mining and predictive analytics by offering intelligent value added services.
In my views,
Adaptive Competitive Advantage (ACA) = Collaboration of (Cloud, BPM, BI)
Adaptive competitive advantage is achieved by being proactive, agile and responsive to market conditions. Collaboration of Cloud, BPM and BI would be enablers for achieving adaptive advantage. Business Intelligence through data-analytics triggers changes in Business Processes and cloud provides a dynamic infrastructure. All these three coupled together offers Customer Innovative solution offerings ahead of competition and Customized deals based on real time analysis of user patterns.
Take the case of Telecom sector, with Mobile Number Portability (MNP) in place the switching costs for customers is zero. To be competitive, every service provider has to bring about innovative and value added offerings at the earliest. Collaboration of Cloud, BPM and BI offers Competitive advantage in this scenario. The service provider can retain some of its key BPM in-house and rest in a third-party hosted cloud platform thereby reducing cost. BI retrieves customer past usage and purchasing history real time and suggests appropriate value added services by triggering the necessary process flows.
In a nutshell, the collaboration of Cloud, BPM and BI offer Cost-efficient and real-time decision making capabilities, Creation of Enterprise Mashups by combining loosely-coupled IT assets, Increases ROI of BI investments and creation of automated intelligent applications, Proactive monitoring of key KPIs' and thereby rectifying problems as they occur.
