How to keep up the pace in the fast-moving market? Business development

Most of us (myself included) at the moment are experiencing a change related to the COVID-19 outbreak.

I remember how I started the first one of these articles, back in March 2020:

Nine months have passed since then, but it seems it has been more than that. I haven’t predicted where it will take us all.

So far, honestly, 2020 was a wild ride, and one thing we can say about it for sure: It just keeps on giving!

How has the industry changed recently?

By now, you and your company will have adapted in one way or another: work policies, tools to make work easier, taking care of employees and their welfare.

We operate across many countries. And we’ve seen that among our clients, in the last nine months, technology adoption has accelerated!

What does it mean?

Adoption of technology for business development and bringing more results from it has ACCELERATED. There are jokes about digital transformation delivered not by a CxO but by COVID. In a way, they are not really jokes, but the truth.

Those nine months gave us all the impulse for change.

Now the real question is, what are we going to do with it?

How to deal with this change?

I recommended it to our leadership team, and I recommend it to you.

Read this report from the Leading Edge Forum.

If you’ve been following my articles for a while, you will recognize familiar themes:

• The business value of data and the need for organizations to act on and manage it (DataOps). Data can answer the “what-if” questions, and it has more value than reporting on the past.
• The Zero Trust approach to security is the way from now on. There is no return to network security closed around the perimeter. Users are your perimeter.
• Turning company infrastructure, but also business transactions, into code. Quick iterations, fast experiments on small investments – this is what will keep your flywheel turning.

To allow your business to grow and develop, you need to be capable of FAST ITERATIONS.

Let’s pause for a second, to make sure we’re all on the same page.

What do we mean by business development?

It’s the ability of your organization to grow, evolve, and adapt to what the market and your customers expect from it. Your business capability is the ease with which your company can meet these demands.

What about fast iterations?

This is a crucial skill. It’s the ability to test new business ideas regularly – and quickly. No 6- or 12-month experiments. Set up your experiment one week, run it the next, then evaluate. Draw your conclusions and repeat!

You may have seen it in my recent video (if you missed it, watch it below):

Watch the video for key insights on the future of cybersecurity!

To quote from it:

Not the biggest (sure, your capacity may sustain you for a while, but will eventually run out if you don’t change anything).

Not the one with the largest market share (it can be carved out).

If you want to improve your business capability, you need to be able to adapt and iterate.

Experiment, observe the outcome, move on if there is no outcome, and start another experiment.

Your competition will certainly do it. If not that which already exists, then for sure those who decide to start a business in your area.

What do you need to know about iterating quickly?

Here’s the essence:

1. Building all the solutions in-house from scratch will not help you with it at all. Use cloud components and cloud economy of scale. Create interfaces to interact with your services.
2. Keeping in-house systems, which become cheap utility, will not be your advantage (think email, documents, voice, and video communication). Business results from Microsoft Teams and Zoom clearly showed where the value and speed are.
3. Stay away from investing in your servers and storage infrastructure (unless you have a good reason for it).

What will help you in this process?

Nah – I will skip the whole list of cloud things this time. You’ve heard it before, or you can check it in our blog archives:

• Using the cloud as a foundation for building services
• On-boarding 4xOps (Dev, Fin, DevSec, Data)
• Connecting cost and gains (FinOps) of projects with business output.

It all will contribute positively. But the most significant shift is in changing our thinking: the world (including IT) will not get back to “normal” (whatever “normal” was). We are defining “the new normal”, and it is about:

• The speed of change and adaptation
• Experimentation and fast iterations
• Changing the business status quo and building new value streams.

We all (us at Predica included) need to make our decisions in the short- and long-term based on fast iterations.

We have just released a tool to help our clients orient and gain situational awareness – get your copy here. And let me know what you think.