Mesh Collaboration: Creating new business value in the network of everything (excerpt)

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Chapter 3

Flowing Toward Synergy

I

t’s now just one hectic month of hard work for the team

since Jane Moneymaker expressed her deep dissatisfaction with the

failure of the company to contend with rising costs and inefﬁciencies

related to Vorpal’s Long Tail initiative. Though there is still much

work to be done, the team has managed to overcome its immediatechallenge of finding a way to control costs through increased opera-tional efficiency.Initially the team had failed to recognize the difference betweenthe new generation of technology that provides “interactions” basedon services across the Web in the front office enabling the ability to

create new markets and revenues from the traditional applications inthe back ofﬁce, which are used to automate the capture of a “transac-

tion” as a cost-saving capability. This crucial difference had resulted

in a fracturing of not only their internal IT systems, but also their

whole business model.

Further, with the speed of change being a crucial success factor in

capturing new markets in the front office, it was difficult to impos-sible for the more static and difficult-to-change back office systemsto keep up.

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Mesh Collaboration

This lack of synchronicity caused what had once been efﬁcient

end-to-end systems to break up and become inefﬁcient and discon-

nected subprocesses, leading to increased costs and replication of

activities with little visibility.

However, Moneymaker and her team have realized that at theheart of their problems is the need to transform Vorpal’s businessmodel. The company needed to ﬁnd a way to express both its new

business and its older IT systems in a common manner that could both

support the existing relatively static mass-market sales processes and

accommodate the new, very dynamic and fast-paced market nichesto be found in the Long Tail without fragmenting.

This realization and the resulting transformation that it will lead to

means that Vorpal will be better able to ﬁnd and execute in a numberof differentiated markets and products. The company will understandwhere differentiation creates value, as well as be able to identify where

shared and synergistic systems supporting those markets should be

common and thereby understand where differentiation increases

costs. Put simply, they have found the way to connect what is com-

mon—back ofﬁce operations—with what is differentiated—front

ofﬁce operations.

1

In reality it will not be that simple as there are degrees of com-monality and differentiation in all they do, so they must learn howto break down their activities into granular tasks that can readily bereorganized, extended, edited, or reused as and when needed. To dothis, the concept of a business task must become synonymous witha technology service.

However, the increased efﬁciency created by addressing the most

obvious issues has reduced the level of stress that employees hadformerly felt. In particular, Moneymaker is able to breathe a little

easier.Her improved mood is evident as she opens a meeting with theteam to discuss the company’s ongoing efforts…

1

See also the discussion on Diamond Model in previous chapter

Feeling Like a New Company

“Hello everyone,” says Moneymaker, surveying the room. “As I said afew months ago, my father was a CEO and one of the things he oftentold me as I began my education and career is that upper management

is in the business of being dissatisﬁed. Well, he was right, though I

must say that I am a bit

less

dissatisﬁed today than I have been in therecent past. But I believe we still have our work cut out for us in orderto continue the changes we have begun, but it feels to me, and there is

strong evidence to support this, we know that we are a new business

now; we’ve identiﬁed that we need to be doing things differently—that

we’re in the process of a real business transformation. One based ontechnology changing the game for us and our markets.

“For example, maybe as Hugo pushes our online marketing efforts

he no longer has to be so concerned that the markets and productshe was trying to develop could be supported…”“Jane?”“Yes, Hugo,” responds Moneymaker.

“Well, to clarify, I have to be mindful that what I’m doing is beingnoticed by the back ofﬁce operations, and yes, you are right I’m much

freer to focus on those activities that have the most effect on generating

sales. But it still is not exactly easy to do new things out front without

it being a signiﬁcant strain back in the operation.”“Right, but I still want to make the larger point I was driving at,

which is that we can feel that we are moving toward becoming a much

different company,” says Moneymaker. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes I would,” says Wunderkind, anxious to show his agreement.

“For example, a little more than a year ago a lot of my time was con-

sumed by mass solicitations such as direct mail—something which wewere lucky to get a return of less than 1% on—but now I am interacting

with various web communities who help me, through collaborative

efforts, to ﬁnd new opportunities. The other day I was reading through

a couple of blog entries by a chef in New York when he mentioned itwould be great to have utensils—spatulas and spoons, the things he