There is a lot of talk of disruption in business at the moment, particularly with regard to that created by the fast pace of technological change. It’s almost universally accepted that we have never known such rapid uptake of new tools, with smartphones and mobile data being the classic example. It’s also well known that we’re creating more data than ever, we’re able to store it in vast cloud data centres and we’re able to make sense of it with Big Data methodologies, machine learning and visualisation tools. All this is true - yes there is a lot of hype and snake oil, but fundamentally it is absolutely correct to say that we live in a fast-changing world.
Let’s look at three very simple and very common examples.
- If you are in business now and your customers can’t, for example, access the information they need from you on a smartphone, can that be sustainable? Are they calling you and tying up expensive resources asking questions that could be answered with (relatively) simple software solutions?
- If you need information from customers, suppliers, warehouses, etc - are you able to collect that without adding to their burden and/or cost? Can you use the information they provide through their systems, or to their smartphones, or from low-cost internet-connected monitoring technology?
- If your customers (or your customer’s customer) have questions, do you provide communication methods that suit your needs or theirs? Do you use social media, email, SMS? Are you missing a trick or leaving people feeling neglected?
If these things are a problem for you, you can be pretty sure that competitors will fill that gap - or are building the capability. One thing that people say to me is ‘we don’t know who can do this for us’ - sometimes they don’t have a view of the market, but often meaning that they see advertisements and hear sales pitches but are wary of sinking time and money into white elephants. Inaction is attractive with many other things to keep us busy, but rather like the bony guys in the picture, you could be ignoring the problem and find yourself starved of business in the long term...
Working with a software development partner that understands the digital landscape but also the need to work in an agile way, delivering fast and then improving and modifying as customer expectations grow, is a very effective way to tackle these issues. At Amdaris we've moulded our business around the way customers want to work, focusing on quality and efficiency across our organisation. Talk to any of our team and you'll find people that are immensely proud, not just of the software they've produced but of the business challenges they've solved. We think that makes us a little bit special in our market
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