Innovations precede a strategy change
According to Moisio, companies cannot simply decide to become disruptive but the opportunity to adopt a new strategy comes from innovations.
“If you only seek to make things in the same way as before, but quicker, you should ask what Henry Ford would have done. If he had asked people what they want, they would have said “faster horses”. Ford built a car with a piston engine and tyres. In practice, the piston engines already are already present in today’s IT systems. We are already in the position to make next-level big things.”
According to Moisio, the important thing is to make the existing systems and their data produce modern services. Companies must find out how an enabling layer can be created in an ERP on top of which new services can be built. In addition, they must also take the future service user into consideration:
- Why is the service relevant?
- What is its goal?
- Who is using it?
- Who has it been designed for?
They must know where the data is and how it is consumed. Integrations and APIs lie in between these. “When services are good, they attract users like a honey pot”, Moisio says.
The platform economy and APIs allow access to the international series
Juha Moisio challenges companies to think bigger: “Are they content with improving things within their existing business model or are they ready to build a platform economy and introduce API solutions and artificial intelligence in order to bring their business benefit to the global level?”
“APIs are the same thing now as web pages were in 1993. At that point, companies did not actually realize the value of web pages but just knew that they had to be present on the Web. Today, we know that the value of the data available through the Internet is immensely high.” There are numerous commercialization mechanisms. The data on which money is made is not necessarily the same data that the company’s customers are using.
“After five years, we will see practices where the budget for IT costs is covered by selling data”, Moisio believes.