Category Archives: Ecosystems

A Statement of Ecosystem Intent Inside Our Business Enterprise- the CEO letter currently missing

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Ecosystems have become a really hot topic. As we gain the understanding of what a dual strategy approach to what our business could look like, you need to recognize what you still need control of, those you call your core assets. Yet at the same time, to explore and expand out more today we need to build better external collaborative approaches.

To achieve this reaching out and collaborating will require participating in platforms and building up your Ecosystem Management understanding.

The word “Ecosystem” is getting as much “air time” as the general use of the word “innovation” in business recently. It generates buzz, it projects the impression you are looking to the future, managing your business in that progressive, outward way, that shareholders and your employees love to here.

Well as we well only well know with innovation, if it does not align to strategy, integrate within the business activities, it stays a little out on one side. Also, innovation stays so often a necessity to “call upon” but not as your core focus of activity. That focus still is, sadly today focused on managing the assets for short-term performance, where the consistent focus is always on efficiency and effectiveness to “work or sweat those assets”. Maybe we might be seeing a change in ecosystem management design. More of the “assets” outsourced or in collaborative partnerships.

Well, Ecosystems are entering the lexicon of top management. It does sound good to talk about “building our ecosystem” in every possible way. You need to ask though, has management actually sat down and defined the type of ecosystem it wants to design, to participate in, or become part of. Or do this simply happen, a sort of drifting into, a grand experiment, as if that made real progressive sense? Let’s take a different approach

What if the CEO and the board decided to open up the discussion around the future pathway, one of managing within a federation of ecosystems. Continue reading →

Biting off more than we can chew can be a good thing……depending.

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I had mentioned in a related post on my other posting site that I wanted to understand a recent Siemens event.

This was partly presenting 3rd financial quarter results but more on their future course with a Vision 2020+ and its respected parts being the design that is going to take the business out further by exploiting the parts within this vision.

There was a lot to take in on limited information and understanding. View the post “A feast of opportunities for Siemens?” for my first reactions on this.

The whole expansive story around Siemens new structure announced at this event offered some of the opening details, yet it is still to be “fleshed out” later in the year, by their management.

I specifically zoomed in on the new Digital Industries (DI) structure and where it is seemingly heading. Presently this new operating group will have 78,000 employees and a business revenue of around Euro 14 billion, that contributed a profit margin of around 16% in their fiscal 2017.

The expansion of the digitalization business has a very exciting acquisition announced the day before, with the Mendix acquisition, a leader, and pioneer in the area of low-code application development platforms, where you can potentially program and deploy apps up to ten times faster. This has been one of several “pain points” for Mindsphere, the Siemens digital platform, on providing a menu of apps to support client problems, so we should see some significant improvement on this point.

This purchase of Mendix can make a significant difference and propel the platform into a new value proposition, a 2nd generation digital platform where “smart” becomes central. I will be coming back to this once I have undertaken a little more research and assumption undertaking, in the next few days, as it has some compelling value positioning for Siemens, I believe.

It was the other part of the digitalization expansion that stopped me a little. This is what I want to discuss here. Let me work it through.
 Continue reading →

Opening up our thinking towards ecosystems has a powerful effect

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ecosystems-abstract

Our whole understanding of innovation is changing, it is opening up to ecosystems and the necessary thinking and designing; there are numerous shifts occurring.

We are evaluating and changing our existing focus from closed (internal orientation) into ones that are having a far more open stance. We are searching for more collaborative innovation (external orientation) combining external partners into more ‘collective thinking’.

This shift is offering us extra acceleration that is needed to improve our innovation performances from concept to market delivery.

Collaborative innovation is also leading us to higher chances of achieving greater impact and success, as nearly all novel ideas lay outside the organization’s domain of understanding.

As we increasingly include the customer and their needs within our understanding, these multiple collaborations and dialogues are building this better internal understanding.

Continue reading →

Platform Providers need to think more about Ecosystems Principles and Design

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In my opening post (here) I was thinking where platform providers seem to be, in their current value proposition. I cannot see their approaches as sustaining. Now, this is a personal opinion and observation but let me lay out an alternative view.

I believe we are at an inflection point where the design of IIoT platforms needs to be integrated into a new way of Ecosystem Design.

There is a real need for a more shared value, breaking through the old traditional boundaries of single companies working with ‘selected’ providers of service and highly selective platform providers.

Ecosystem design is about being open in all potentially valuable proposals and co-creation possibilities. It is using multiple platforms as being part of a very different future design. You go where the best collaborations can take place not get .locked into one.

We need to stop and start to think about Ecosystems and their design for platform providers. Platforms have been amazing in their design, recognition, and value in a very short time.

Platforms are changing the way we undertake business. We have passed through the early phase of their design. It is now time to bring platforms into their place within a greater Ecosystem design.

Continue reading →

The case for changing the IIoT platform providers value proposition

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I have been reflecting recently on where we are in all the efforts, focus, and resources, that have been going into the building of our IIoT platforms. This has mainly been around the questioning of where they should fit within the needs of an ecosystem, the end outcome of our new industrial design, in my opinion, that enables digital transformation.

Let me offer up an initial case of why there is a need for a change in where we are on IIoT platforms and their current emphasis and focus on how we need to change the value equation out in the future in our solution designs and positioning of platforms, as a need to achieve. This is based on considering a greater ecosystem perspective, one that provides a sizable move towards a digital transformation we need to make.

Here I attempt to lay out the current position and suggest there is a case for change. The IIoT platform provider needs to change their value proposition urgently, in my opinion, or move along a faster evolutionary curve certainly, to get clients seeing their own value-add endgame, not just the IIoT providers race for dominating the platform space.

So let’s look at where IIoT platforms currently are, and in my related post where we might consider some changes in how we are evolving the platform story. Continue reading →

When is a partner not a partner?

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As I have been focusing on the Industrial platform providers like Bosch, Siemens, Schneider Electric and GE, you constantly see part of their partnership validation has been with Microsoft Azure, or Amazon and AWS or even both in some form or another. Comforting, reassuring perhaps, or is it?

Both Microsoft Azure and AWS are building their own platforms also. Where would you put your money or fee’s to join?

Now if you are offering solutions that are focused specifically on solving industry problems where do you go, sign up, pay significant fees into and learn?

Would these decisions to join a platform take you towards those within an industry, the industrial builder of platforms, that build the physical assets and increasingly defining their digital services, or the providers of the digital kit, in the form of cloud, applications, data storage and security and the base platforms? Both have value but are the offerings clear enough in value or are they still leaving many potential clients still ‘sitting on the fence,’ not sure, watching what ‘plays out’

I am not sure how those within Partnership arrangement on platforms presently separate their knowledge and contribution but with the recent “slew” of Microsft Azure announcements, I wonder who is working for whom in some of these relationships?  Is the one with the digital architecture just piggybacking on the industrialist back, so as to understand industrial problems and then bring out their own ‘stand alone’ solutions? Where does that leave the industrial platform providers like GE & Siemens if the likes of Microsoft and Amazon seperately offer their own platforms? Take a read here and let me know your thoughts, please? I want to understand the dynamics going on here a little better. Continue reading →

So are clients resisting IIoT platforms- Why?

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IIoT platforms-as-a-service are gaining ground. In my first part of a two-part post, I was raising a number of questions. That questioning continues here in part two, at a deeper level. I do recommend you read the first post to place this more into the context required.

IIoT Platform providers are building new digital solutions. There are constant daily gains. A new client win here, a new contract there.

Yet the battle is one of attrition, client by client. Do you win in this approach? To gain traction, all the IIoT platform providers seem to have pressing needs to overcome massive client resistance at this present time. Platform uptake is gradual, it needs a higher depth in resolution, in the value of platforms, in their momentum. What is its value proposition to the client, the one who buys that solution? Is it still too early in their own digital transformation journey? Actually, clients are having a hard time in this and many other digital decisions. Continue reading →

There are dark clouds surrounding IIoT platforms

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I am getting fascinated by platforms and ecosystems. Does it show? This is why I am increasingly spending more time in this area as it is highly innovating in its potential.

I am constantly educating myself on this, as there is so much of this being new, or emerging, to make the connections for where innovation is going in “dual” tandem with technology and digital. A recent post I made tells of this growing connection for a new ROI.

I decided to become focused on business platforms and ecosystems for a number of reasons- firstly they are fascinating me ( I know I have to get a grip!) and more importantly for my business advisory work going forward in connecting innovation into this world.

So this posting site is a place where I share a number of strands of thought to provide increased understanding, to get others to become comfortable on their “learning journey” of new emerging industrial digital technology models, ones that offer a very exciting connected future but evolutionary in their nature.

I want to help shape, influence and amplify the breaking story of IIoT platforms-as-a-service as part of my advisory business model (as-a-service) and take them to the most important level of need to understand; the ecosystem building that is required.Taking on new journeys of understanding and potential for innovation is exciting, well for me.

Commercial break over so let’s get back to platforms and ecosystems…

At the moment I have been specifically looking at the questions that seem to be holding IIoT platforms back? There are a number of inhibitors. So how can a number of dark clouds dissipate for IIoT platforms to really become the future way of connecting up so much within your specific industry sector? This is first of two posts…. Continue reading →

The ABB Ability to bring intelligence to industrial plants

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I continue to look at the world of IIoT solution platforms that are being offered to their customers which are digitally enabled, requiring connected devices to improve efficiency, productivity and increase profitability, all being provided through digital platform offerings

I’ve looked at Bosch and its IoT suite, Siemens and its Mindsphere, GE and its Predix platform, and Schneider Electrics with its Ecostruxure to begin to explore and understand their digital platform offering. I do need to revisit GE and its Predix platform with recent changes occurring inside the company.

I then wrote a summary of the fact that Industry is lagging but catching up in its choices of platform offering, taking three of these examples and how just within a few months this seems to be accelerating into a real race of the IIoT digital platforms to seize competitive advantage as well as I term it “taking the IIoT hill” to make sure customers align with them. A digital industrial application offering has increasingly become central to growth for many of the infrastructure providers.

This post is about ABB and their ABB Ability™ to offer a common platform across the industries they serve of a digital end-to-end set of solutions.

ABB has been investing in building their ‘digital operations’ to control, interrogate and modify the operational task in response to the external signals, mostly through distributed sensors. The aim is to transform clients activities more into software-driven activity, where the operational results in identifying trends and possible failure modes and equally, how they can transform the whole maintenance regime, to reduce downtime and anticipate potential failure.

ABB has a fairly powerful business case for being a trusted partner. Continue reading →

The Emerging World of Connected Industrial Ecosystems

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Whenever I seem to read about Platforms and Ecosystems, it mostly seems to relate to technology-led organizations and how they continue to connect us all up in our private lives.

As leading examples of the disruption that occurs and the connected value, we get offered the likes of Uber, Facebook, Apple, etc., all bringing new value to transform our world.

Yet, for me, the area that is shifting dramatically is where Industrial organizations are providing platform solutions to solve industrial problems. Good examples are Bosch, Siemens, GE and Schneider Electrics.

They transform their solutions and clients businesses by offering digital on top of the existing products in some awe-inspiring ways. They focus on connecting up their solutions into their client network on platforms to build the industrial internet.

The building of these platforms has prioritised specific industries to master and progressively transform their business into a digitally connected one. This seems to me to be so much harder than those like Facebook, Google or Uber.

Industrial solutions have had to deal with legacy “big time,” overcome entrenched positions or views and begin to collaborate in highly sophisticated ways, with often very demanding and sometimes sceptical clients. Continue reading →