By Jim Houghton & Rupert Chapman | Forbes | December 20. 2021
The post-pandemic economy is shaping up as the age of innovation. It’s an experimental time in which accepted norms have been discarded and future success depends in large part on the evolution of modern ecosystems, a component that has long been talked about but too rarely put into practice. The relationships aren’t just alliances, strategic or otherwise. They’re connected networks that are interdependent and generate value for all involved.
It’s a new model that signals a new reality: No one entity, no matter how mighty, can do it all in today’s technologically intense and complex business world. As companies build for the future, extending their ecosystems and carefully planning the digital stack that supports it is the most strategic bet they will make.
Reassess, rethink, reinvent
In the wake of COVID-19, businesses are reassessing every aspect of their organizations. It’s a stem-to-stern review, and the intersection of technology, work and experience forms the focal point. That is, to gain the full business value of technology and integrated (and somewhat invisible) processes, companies are rethinking how work gets done. They’re also examining experience across the extended enterprise — a new and more expansive view that takes in all stakeholders: employees and partners, as well as customers. Technology’s role brings it all together: To enable the wide-angle view of work and experience, businesses must double down on technology’s criticality in making them happen.
Powering it all is the modern ecosystem, the network of relationships that is fundamentally the biggest change of all. While organizations are evolving work, experience and technology, the ecosystem is getting a wholesale makeover. Importantly, industry leaders have come to the realization that ecosystem optimization requires orchestration that typically comes in the form of a master systems and business process integrator.
It’s critical to view the rise of ecosystems in the context of the post-pandemic economy, which has delivered a jolting, real-world education in the value of extended partnerships and communities. We witnessed how the tightly coupled and global supply chains created over the past 20 years turned out to be surprisingly brittle. As businesses built out footprints worldwide, cost efficiencies took precedence over resiliency, which is often measured by the efficiencies of time and place. The results were networks so highly optimized and massively dislocated that they’ve been unable to survive the pandemic’s disruption.
Until now, ecosystems have been interesting but largely academic for C-suite executives measured by quarterly results. But the global shutdown and its lingering ramifications — supply chain fallout and inflation — have catalyzed our thinking. Concepts that once appeared abstract suddenly came into sharp relief, and the value of antifragile ecosystems became crystal clear.
The seminal work of MIT Center for Information Research (CISR) is making its way into mainstream business discourse — and with good reason. CISR’s view of adaptive business organizations highlights the dominance of ecosystem drivers among emerging digital business models.
