Senior executives and boards are demanding top-line revenue growth. They insist on leveraging innovative and emerging technologies to monetize data and information in new ways to attract and serve their customers more effectively. Software is now becoming not just the brand, but also the product. However, legacy organizational approaches are hindering the ability to tap into and execute in the rapidly evolving digital economy.
Software forever more is changing a company’s brand. Most companies today are facing a rapidly expanding gap between strategic demand for innovative software application development and their ability to execute on that software development internally. The greatest proportion of technical resources in many organizations today is aligned to supporting ongoing operations and maintaining the base of existing applications. Senior executives and boards are searching for new revenue streams found in the digital landscape, while protecting existing revenues. Their requests include the use of emerging technologies to provide scalable, anywhere, anytime, any-device revenue generation with rich user experience.
This demand, coupled with the pace at which web and mobile technologies are evolving, creates the need for innovation with never before seen time-to-market and thus, time-to-revenue pressures. Taking advantage of social, local and mobile application integration, as well as analytics, further complicates the challenge. How are organizations to overcome the digital world innovation and execution challenges they face?
Traditionally, organizations evaluate how to accomplish new software product development against a Build, Buy, or Partner option analysis. With ever increasing need for software, a global market to serve, competitive pressures, and the need for new or enhanced revenues all colliding at the crossroads of “we need it yesterday,” the Build, Buy, or Partner decision can no longer be mutually exclusive.
How do you find success in an increasingly Digital World?
Organizations should no longer tackle the innovation and execution challenge internally or on their own. Business and the Digital World are simply moving too fast. A complex reality is that innovation and execution happens much too slow if attempted organically and solely internally. A simpler reality being faced, is one in which companies aren’t able to locate and hire all the deep technical resources they need to adequately staff internal projects, and just when they think they have – disruption like attrition and technology shifts hinder their ability to execute and thus achieve strategic objectives. In order to meet the time-to-revenue goals while exploiting emerging technologies, organizations are being forced to adopt a Build and Partner product development strategy.
To Build and Partner implies that organizations are simultaneously leveraging the best of both worlds to meet their goals. Build and Partner doesn’t imply that the organization gives up the idea, the intellectual property or the innovation. Rather, it allows them to capitalize on the idea, develop the intellectual property, and speed innovation. Building through Partnership challenges the status quo, brings out of the box insights, experiences and thinking that make even the best organizations better.
Successfully building software products through partnership requires that companies select a partner that brings a few key attributes to the relationship:
- Product Mindset. The product development partner must possess a Product Mindset. Insight into what customers want today and in the future must be aligned with the intersection of trends, current technology, delivery gaps and business process to generate desired (revenue) business outcomes. A Product Mindset includes a business outcomes aligned lifecycle approach to product development, working towards long-term sustainability.
- Thought Leadership. The successful partner will be thought leaders, take a strong position on your product strategy and positively impact your product strategy beyond technology and methodology. They will challenge the status quo and make the best businesses, better.
- Emerging Technology. Your product development partner must have deep expertise in emerging technologies not for technology sake, rather to apply them to your business. Only those partners that can work at the intersection of business and technology can best serve your needs.