Gartner recently released an article on the business moment http://gartnernews.com/the-rise-of-the-business-moment/. In simple terms, “A business moment exploits the connection of people, business and things and allows companies to innovate for entirely new scenarios, like when a house orders new paint and laundry detergent” or your fitness tracker automatically orders new shoes when you have completed a certain mileage based on your level of use.
The scenario may seem a bit far-fetched, but at the same time it is not far off of where we are in reality. The innovation is happening in everything from cars to smart appliances to smart homes and beyond. The underlying technologies that enable this level of dynamic interaction already exist through the enablement of sensors, notifications, workflows, messaging, etc. The pace of innovation has accelerated, but at the same time is held back by time, standards and the acceptance of change.
From one perspective the innovation has only just begun and what we are starting to see is a major evolution in the way technology will impact our lives. From another perspective balancing this amazing automated and interactive world with privacy and security becomes the next challenge. The complexity and issues surrounding the implementation and adoption of this level of value stream will certainly not be without dialogue.
In terms of creating business moments, business needs to clearly understand what consumer’s desire, create business moments and allow personalization of the business moment. Obviously some complexity here to overcome, but existing analytics can be used to understand consumer behaviour in order to create the business moments. Building on this, the business moment “fuzzy style” would also be desirable where a business can leveraging technologies such as IBM Watson to predict and create moments. In these cases, I think that consumer choice needs to be an option in which moments become learned consumer behaviours. Adaptation is the key to delivering a desired outcome.
Business will invest in business moments as they will deliver real value to customers. Business moments will raise the bar of consumer expectations. The blurring of the digital and physical worlds will change our reality resulting in many exciting things to come. We can see this emerging with the recent announcement of the Apple iWatch. Devices are one side of the equation. On the other side are the applications combined with (fuzzy) logic, messaging, notifications and transactions. It will take time for people to adjust to business moments and I suspect there will be many questions and setbacks in this journey.
A couple of questions, what value do we put on “things” and from a societal perspective how disconnected do we want to become as a result of the connectedness? Secondly, in Higher Education, what are the business moments that will differentiate and create a competitive advantage?
Exciting times with great possibilities. Be in the moment – the business moment.