The Ecosystem and Platform Economy Is Now

For the past five years, our internal IT organization at Accenture has been implementing our platform-first IT strategy. We are leveraging major platform providers to deliver more value to the business and to be more technologically agile. Being platform driven is allowing our internal IT to develop new business solutions in a different way. We focus more on orchestrating and integrating new platform services—cloud, analytics, artificial intelligence and automation at scale—all faster, all more cost-effectively.

Many organizations are similarly making the shift to platforms. Leading businesses are recognizing the need to embrace the ecosystem and platform economy to reap its advantages. But is your organization ready?  

This shift is different than those in the past. The current wave of technology change is fundamentally altering the relationship between businesses and their supplier ecosystems. We’ve learned that to harness this wave, you must think about things differently. A new approach is needed for ecosystem management, along with new skills, talent, operating model, and mindset.

A New Enablement Mindset

Traditional procurement and supplier management that focused on grinding out the lowest price with legacy suppliers is today hindering growth. Businesses and CIOs must instead adopt an agile ecosystem and platform economy enablement mindset and operating model to enact new technology-based partnerships quickly and safely.

For Accenture, this has meant establishing a specialist group within our internal IT organization and investing in how (people, process, and technology) we build, nurture, and govern our ecosystem and platform relationships. We have brought together the focus and skills to strategically address Accenture economics, risk management, governance, and 360-degree relationship management of our ecosystem and platform providers

Six Fundamentals

Our journey has required our internal IT organization to work through new situations, rethink our ways, and develop new approaches. Based on this experience, I share with you six useful fundamentals we’ve identified to enable the ecosystem and platform economy:

1. Digitize the core – Digitize and centralize all ecosystem data and processes for efficiency, veracity of data and speed, enabling ready access to new capabilities. Real-time access to accurate supplier ecosystem data and digital information sharing enables businesses to unlock hidden value within the ecosystem and rapidly engage with new supplier partners.
2. Innovate with platforms – Focus R&D funding on platform innovation. Businesses must leverage the R&D investments made by platform providers and invest in innovations that integrate and extend platform capabilities to create new differentiation and competitive advantage.
3. Renew the ecosystem – An effective partner ecosystem must be dynamic with participation earned, based on differentiated offerings and innovative “win-win” commercial models, not historic capabilities and performance.
4. Focus on ecosystem risk management – Operating in an interconnected ecosystem and platform environment has changed the risk landscape, increasing the importance of the ecosystem risk management function, and demanding an integrated ecosystem risk control framework.
5. Invest in talent – Harnessing the ecosystem means securing and retaining talented individuals with the right set of skills—including negotiation and relationship management, combined with commercial and contractual acumen and digital fluency.
6. Secure your data – Continually monitor and assess the security of the data you share with the ecosystem. Businesses must understand how data is controlled at all steps in the processing chain, particularly when passing data to ecosystem and platform providers.

These fundamental elements will enhance your organization’s Ecosystem and Platform Management capabilities. We believe organizations that successfully integrate the capabilities of their ecosystem of innovative, disruptive partners with core enterprise platforms will be better poised to drive rapid product and service differentiation, among many additional benefits.

How is your organization faring in the shift to platforms? I’m curious to hear.

 Andrew

 You can follow me on Twitter at @andrewxwilson.  

Andrew Wilson is the chief information officer at Accenture.