The Modern Enterprise is a Collection of Start-Ups

Just yesterday I met the CIO of a consumer company and he told me that his boss has asked him to work on only three projects at any given point in time. If for some reason a project doesn’t gain momentum then it should be dropped and the focus should shift to somewhere else. In essence each project is a “start-up” assignment and is treated as a startup. Consequently, my experience in the start-up world now informs my decisions in Oracle and brings value to my enterprise customers.

Key factors in start-up success:

1) Right product

2) Quick deployments (one or two quick customer wins)

3) Improve on the move

4) Expand as you grow.

This is now equally true for enterprise IT projects as every project is about:

1) Usable technology

2) Quick deployment

3) Add functionality as you move and

4) Scale with usage – the idea here is to make it so simple and easy that users accept the solutions rather than IT pushing for this.

Lastly, enterprises are increasingly focused on business transformation rather than complex technology deployment. Many are willing to take a leap of faith and trust their instincts. Therefore technology today must be about ease, usability and expansion.

Appropriately for a company that preaches transformation, Oracle today is a company that is itself transforming and transforming at scale. Everything that we sell is focused towards addressing customer business requirements, agility, quick wins and scalability.

Observations on customer behavior:

1) IT decision makers are no longer afraid of making bold decisions – every CIO I have met over the last few months is willing to experiment, willing to take risks and is not afraid of evaluating a new technology or exploring a vendor with no brand or product.

2) Gone are the days when a customer spends months and years in evaluation - today everyone wants to make a quick decision. What they look at is an IT provider’s capability for quick deployment and achievable goals. One of my favorite statements of late has been “leaders are looking for quick wins – this keeps a project moving forward and builds team morale”.

3) Every organization, and I literally mean “every organization” wants to go Digital. Most recently I was engaged with a large logistics provider and during the engagement one of their executives remarked “we want to set our organization to Zero and restart, for us this is more an IT decision. This is a decision which would help us transform to address the needs of digital customers”. Imagine that, the executive of a classic brick and mortar company talking about digital transformation

4) Many prospects are considering ways to reduce their dependency on technologies that they see as redundant or not adding any value Re. usage or analytics

5) Lastly almost every customer is talking about one integrated platform – unlike the previous years wherein an IT project involved multiple vendors for infrastructure; software; business applications etc, now customers clearly want to engage with a single vendor offering all of the above.

Conclusions about tech solutions:

1) Ease of usage – any solution should be extremely user friendly with no frills

2) Quick deployment – they do not want to wait for years for a project to go live. Decision makers are happy with small but quick wins for immediate business results

3) Scalability – I recently met a CFO of a travel agency and I was surprised to hear that he is OK even If we implement a reduced scope, he says that we must start and scale as we move along

4) Ease of interface – no more integrations; no more discrete solutions just a standard solution on one single platform

I returned to corporate life six months ago after a period in start-ups, and I find the two are no longer so different. The best enterprises now have something of a start-up ethos.