Talkin’ SMAC

Are You Talkin' to Me?

When it comes to sussing out the future of enterprise IT, you gotta talk SMAC.That would be: Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud.(A little shout out to Malcolm Frank at Cognizant for this acronym.)

This is hardly new news, of course, but what is still in play is exactly when any given enterprise places its bets and exactly how far “all in” it goes. Here are some thoughts to help calibrate these technology adoption decisions.

Social. For consumer brands, this is way past the chasm and inside the tornado—like it or not. The big questions now are: How well can you listen? How fast can you respond? And can you really keep from seeming like a dork?

For B2B enterprises, on the other hand, here the goal of social is to tap into tribal knowledge in an ad hoc and timely way, social is still crossing the chasm. Some segments, like telco tech support and IT consulting, have been using community-based forums to such effect that they are in the bowling alley. Elsewhere the millennials are still waiting for the elders to get the memo (OK, email, I mean, text, I mean post—well , you know), but it is slow in coming just for reasons of inertia but for legitimate concerns about security and liability as well.

Mobile. On the consumer side, this tornado has been driving disruptive innovation for more than a decade, redefining the whole social contract around digital, reengineering relationships with consumers, employees, students, patients, and citizens, and reconfiguring the very boundaries of the Worldwide Web as the next 2 billion new users come on line. But the extent of these changes only underscores the vast chasm B2C enterprises still have to cross, namely, the reengineering of every digital business process to incorporate the presence and power of an actively digital end user.

On the B2B side, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has been inside the tornado long enough to have become the new corporate norm. But once again we are leveraging a tiny fraction of the capability unleashed when a single device that fits in pocket or purse is a PC, a phone, and a video terminal, all in one. Collaboration, historically constructed around document sharing, needs to be re-architected around real-time face-to-face sessions (that are still document enhanced and enabled). And administrative daisy chains of approval that represent a staggering loss in cycle time and productivity can be drastically compressed through enterprise mobile apps—but only if and when they are actually deployed.

Analytics. On the consumer side, analytics applied to Big Data has transformed the balance of power first in media and now in retail, to such an extent that iconic brands in both industries have already gone under, and it is not clear even now how the remainder can sustainably compete.

In B2B enterprises, save for niche applications in credit scoring, fraud detection, and the like, we haven’t even got to the chasm. That’s because IT’s goal for so long was to reduce the amount of data we stored, not maximize it. But in the new digital landscape it is not about the data—it is about the metadata that can be derived from it—and to get at that, you have to keep the raw stuff at hand. Benchmarking is a great metadata application, for example, as is process improvement, and both are fundamental to virtually every B2B endeavor. So if your enterprise finds itself at the cross-roads of any high-volume data flow across your sector, you are sitting on some prime real estate—but only if you develop it.

Cloud. In B2B this is the force underpinning the universal digitization of all human culture. Like electricity before it, it is reshaping the fabric of virtually every social institution—except maybe the enterprise!

To be sure, virtually all enterprises are leveraging cloud computing in some way these days, but most are doing so in the spirit of “paving the goat paths”—using disruptive technology to perform the same old workloads, hopefully a litter better, faster, cheaper. But if you look at the cloud as simply another kind of data center, you miss the entire point. It needs to be understood instead as a different data distribution system, particularly in an era where wireless connectivity is redefining the edges of that system. How your industry engages with principals and exchanges value is likely being transformed beneath your very nose—you might want to put your best and brightest on this to figure out how you should adapt.
So much for the SMAC stack in the context of enterprise IT. There’s a lot of cheese here, and it’s all getting moved. That said, when you step back from these changes, I think there is a natural progression “up the SMAC stack,” if you will. It begins with Mobile. Without that, you cannot get into the game. Then comes Cloud. Without that, you are playing the game largely by yourself and in not very interesting ways. Then come the other two. In B2C, Analytics precedes Social—without it, you are walking blind and deaf out onto an interstate highway. In B2B, Social comes first—it is the new dynamic for ideation, implementation, problem detection, and solution resolution, and you have to find ways to integrate it into your traditional workflows.

That's what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Escape Velocity | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube

(Image: Guinea Pig appcraver.com)