360°IT Blog

I was recently a mentor at the Seedcamp event in London, a prestigious startup incubator event where selected firms get coaching and mentoring from industry professionals to help them with their business plan, go-to-market strategy, technology, etc.

One of the reasons I do this is because it allows Headshift to peek into the future. Some of today's startups today will in all likelihood disrupt established Fortune 100 companies and whole industries in two to three years time.

An example is Matchik, a crowdsourcing platform for design and architecture work. Professionals in that industry from all over the world can showcase their work, but even more interesting is the fact anyone can put a request on the site asking people to pitch ideas. They can then select the best or cheapest.

The big challenge I had was to validate Matchik's business model. If I was a British architect, I might be reluctant to participate because the platform allows architects from other countries to undercut my rates severely. But such reluctance really only shows one thing... that an established industry is set to face major disruption. If the platform works out well, it will turn the relationship between buyer and supplier in the design and architecture industry upside down.

Regular readers of this blog will know one of my favourite themes is to focus on large organisations' 'business agility versus IT stability' problem, i.e. their inability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and business requirements because of a rigid and inflexible IT infrastructure. By contrast, these little startups don't care about IT governance, don't have week-long risk review processes, don't have inflexible ERP systems with 15-year-old legacy systems. They're often a bunch of twentysomething geeks in a student flat, backed by venture capital and with an idea that might very soon disrupt an established market.

Quite possibly your market.

My advice? Run your internal organisation more like a startup. Say no to the decade-long industrialisation of processes, the famous 'process over people' approach. Run your projects like startups would: in an agile fashion, with 'product owners' (close collaboration between IT and business), short iterations, releasing often and early, without a lengthy requirements-gathering process, etc. Focus on delivering business value first, worry about enterprise architecture hocus-pocus later.

Because the choice is stark: adapt or become obsolete.

Lee Provoost works at the London-based social business consultancy Headshift on enterprise social software and technology strategy.

Tags:

cloud computing security, SaaS, IaaS, utility computing, authentication, cloud-jacking, cloud surfing

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