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Article – McKinsey Quarterly
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Top performance follows a fast cadence
for critical management practices.
Quickened
Want to move faster, fly higher, and perform like a top technology company? Try the modular approach to platforms.
Fast and modular
In this edition:
The drumbeat of digital: How winning teams play
Article – McKinsey Quarterly
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The drumbeat of digital: How winning teams play
The creed of speed
The creed of speed
Economist
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A quick briefing in five—
or a fifty-minute deeper dive
Sclerotic
Everyone else, by contrast, can seem
to move more slowly.
Discover more Five Fifties
The creed of speed
The creed of speed
Economist
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
Article
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The drumbeat of digital: How winning teams play
The drumbeat of digital: How winning teams play
Apple eyed
Technology companies tend to be the fastest of the fast.
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Get modular
You can quicken your own responses
by organizing around a set of modular “platforms”— logical clusters of activities and technology targeting specific business goals.
The rule of three
You’ll need 20 to 40 platforms in three broad areas, each big enough to provide an important and discrete service but small enough to be manageable.
The hard evidence: Business is slowing down
The hard evidence: Business is slowing down
Fortune
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The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
Article
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Annually or less often
Quarterly
Monthly
Weekly
Defund underperforming initiatives
Reallocate digital talent
Share test-and-learn findings
Integrate customer-data sources
Median frequency for 4 of the 10 practices
Respondents at top-performing companies
All other respondents
A customer downloads an app from Apple every millisecond. The firm sells 1,000 iPhones, iPads or Macs every couple of minutes. It whips through its inventories in four days and launches a new product every four weeks. Manic trading by computers and speculators means the average Apple share changes hands every five months.”
“
—Economist (2015)
Average time in months to deliver a new corporate IT project
Average time in days to hire a new employee
10
9.5
9
8.5
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
42
63
2010
2015
—Oliver Bossert and Driek Desmet
[Modular platforms] operate as independent entities that bring together business, technology, governance, processes, and people management and are empowered
to move quickly. They are run by a platform owner, who takes end-to-end responsibility for providing the solution and operating it like a service.”
“
Customer-journey platforms
Business-capability platforms
Core IT platforms
Customer-journey platforms
Retail
In-store browsing and shopping for weekend
Same-day home delivery
Subscribing
Banking
Account opening
Searching or transacting
House purchase
Business-capability platforms
Retailer as a service
Mangement of store and warehouse inventory
Merchandising
Bank as a service
Payments
Real-estate valuation
Credit underwriting
Core IT platforms
Retail
In-store, live-video data-management platform
In-store face recognition
Cloud platform
Banking
Omnichannel IT platform-development environment
In-branch face recognition
Cloud platform
Service examples
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
Article
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Mission control
Success requires tight integration and coordination across all your platforms, orchestrated in three primary areas by
a centralized group:
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
The platform play: How to operate like a tech company
Article
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Get factual
Go beyond the typical plus or minus 5 to 10 percent that dominates allocation at many companies. Make more radical reallocations in budgeting and resourcing across platforms.
Interoperate
Enforce the business and technology standards on which interoperability relies by, for example, not releasing any budget for project elements that deviate from them.
Coordinate
Act as the design and oversight authority to identify the dependencies, such as data access for a given business platform, that only become clear as work progresses.
The hard evidence: Business
is slowing down
The hard evidence: Business
is slowing down
Fortune
Get factual
Go beyond the typical plus or minus 5 to 10 percent that dominates allocation at many companies to more radical reallocations in budgeting and resourcing across platforms.
Interoperate
Enforce the business and technology standards on which interoperability relies by, for example, not releasing any budget for project elements that deviate from them.
Coordinate
Act as the design and oversight authority to identify the dependencies, such as data access for a given business platform, that only become clear as work progresses.