The Reversal – Consumer It Transforms The Corporation

By Author: Jennifer Lewis
Total Articles: 304
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We live in an era of changes and paradoxes. The business and technology landscapes are both evolving at a mind-boggling velocity, with each one trying to outpace the other. IT is difficult to judge which one is leading the other. However, one thing is certain – the traditional model where the business defined IT outcomes is fading fast. Today, the consumer technology is transforming, and in many cases, defining the business.

Consumer technology today has broken the conventional barriers and given rise to innovative business models, where none existed. It has also been responsible for the failure of a number of conventional business paradigms. These paradigms, though having been time tested and proven successful, could not match up to the wave of evolution, and crumbled under their own weight.

Unlike the previous waves of IT transformation, where the improvements and additional value were both incremental, the current wave is an entirely new surge which is radically different from everything we have ever seen. It goes without saying, that the value to be unlocked is also huge.

Let us look at some examples ...
... of how this wave of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud had reshaped the business landscape.

1. Classified Advertisement – Once a primary source of revenue for the newspapers, classifieds today are no longer good for even sustenance. In the US itself, in the year 2000, the money earned through classifieds was over nineteen billion dollars. In 2012, this figure has become less than a third of that, to five percent.

2. So have people stopped advertising? Quite the contrary. People are advertising more than ever, but on Craigslist, which receives over eighty million new ads monthly, to show to the more than fifty million individuals. The most surprising fact is that while it takes a large team to run a newspaper, and a significant investment, Craigslist’s HQ has a total staff of thirty two employees.

3. Knowledge - Encyclopedia Britannica has stopped the production of its physical versions, with the last one coming out in early 2012, last year. Most of you wouldn’t know, but this popular and respected organization is just 5 years short of being a quarter of a millennium old. Established in 1768, and upgraded annually, the knowledge warehouse has 65,000 articles, all in English language, and costs US $ 729.

On the other hand, Wikipedia is free to use, is available in 271 languages, with over four million articles (in English, 2), and is accessible anywhere and everywhere. Wikipedia is mere 12 years old,

The two examples above point us to the reason why the new models are beating the old. The simple answer is – technology. The advent of distributed, mobile, and inclusive computing has changed the user requirements and perceptions. Users want freedom of location and content. They may still be reading the newspaper every day, but they are now doing it on a smartphone, or a tablet.

What truly led to the downfall of the traditionally well established business houses is just that, that they were ‘well established’. When organizations and industries find a process or methodology that works, they nail it down, and stick it to the wall to show everyone how things should get done. This makes them rigid, and unwilling to change. So even if someone came up with a new idea to do things better, it was squashed.

Technology offers many new opportunities to improve and improvise. If it is well understood, and openly accepted, it can do wonders for your business. If however, it is ignored or avoided, it can lead to failure faster than any other single factor.

The author works with a reliable enterprise applications development company in Dallas. One of the trusted mobile app companies in Noida backed by a team of renowned enterprise application developer Dallas has offering app development solutions.