What’s the one thing that will set your business apart from the pack? According to our founder Ross Mason, it’s the rising role of integration and an emphasis on speed.
In a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, Ross elaborated further: “The way in which companies are driving their competitive advantage is … in the way in which they can move the information and the assets they have around their organization and deliver that to their consumers in the right way. Increasingly, it will be about how quickly you can change.” Ross noted that in the financial sector, for example, he expected the time horizon to deliver new products to shrink from about two and a half years to six to nine months.
How, exactly, is IT going to deliver these changes and capabilities? The current IT model is broken, Ross says, and needs to be changed. “[It’s] a cultural shift, a mind shift in the way we think about solving problems,” he says. This shift will require IT to fulfill three obligations as part of its changing role:
- Maintaining the network and keeping the lights on. (IT’s traditional role)
- Managing the services that the business requires, as the business becomes a technology platform.
- Partnering with the business on strategic technology decisions while automating and decentralizing as much technology as they can.
If IT fulfills these obligations, the business will see tangible and dramatic results. “You don’t enable IT to move faster, you enable the business to move faster,” Ross notes. “Every time you build an API something gets more packageable and reusable. That is what we are doing with our application network.”
Take a look at more resources on how IT’s role is changing and how that change could help your business.
