Business in Real Time

When Bill Gates wrote the book "Business at the Speed of Thought" in 1999, he was well ahead of his time. In the following decade, he envisioned a trend towards the decision-making speed of companies becoming the primary one - as a decision-maker in a company no longer waiting for reports, but just constantly making decisions based on the latest information.

Here, 20 years later, I think we have only seen the beginning of that development.

In the introduction, Bill Gates writes:

When the increase in velocity of business is great enough, the very nature of business changes. A manufacturer or retailer that responds to changes in sales in hours instead of weeks is no longer at heart a product company, but a service company that has a product offering

There are probably still companies that see themselves as product companies more than service companies, but today there is actually an argument to be had that all companies should see themselves as service companies: the social media. With both the social media and the speed of decision-making growing rapidly, the question will probably be whether traditional strictly production companies can compete at all.

If you accept the idea that modern companies are service-based, regardless of whether products are sold or not - then you also face a data challenge. It is no longer enough to keep track of key figures for the company's own processes, as via social media there are also huge amounts of communication and processes that happen outside the company walls, but which can still be crucial.

The fact that most companies already have more data than they can really analyze just makes the challenge bigger.

This data challenge, I believe, is the primary reason why most companies are still running on the back of weekly or monthly analysis and reports. The amount of available data has simply increased as fast as technology development has made data analysis faster.

So the exponential evolution of computing power has been followed by exponential development in the amount of interesting data. But exponential developments all stop at some point, and it seems that the most likely thing to happen is that companies will begin to appreciate the faster processing of data rather than having to exponentially analyze more data. If that happens, we will soon be able to achieve the vision of "Business at the speed of thought".

What does this vision look like? Probably we already know it in parts. With Google Analytics we can see charts and reports on the number of visitors to the website. With a tool like New Relic, we can analyze the server response times and whether our software is failing. Industrially, SCADA-based systems are used to keep track of critical data on machines and sensors. The Bluetooth Low Energy standard enables small electronic devices to communicate status with years of battery capacity.

If you take all these technologies and combine them into one large virtual control panel, you probably have an idea of what to expect for version 1.0 of the vision. There are companies today that have done just that. Below is the command center for the company Paypal:

However, what is quickly becoming obvious is that it takes a whole team of people to keep track of all that data. There is a need to make it less technical and more operational if it is to make its entry into the director's office.

Paradoxically, I believe that it will be utilizing more technology, in the form of machine learning - that version 2.0 can be made clearer and operational.

With machine learning techniques, you can detect when some of the company's processes are not working as usual - and this can be used to completely store most of the data away and just show a warning if there are irregularities. Think of it like modern cars that are stuffed with technology, but it is only if the check-engine light starts to light up that you need a technician.

There are also techniques that allow the computer to understand what you mean, even if you just write it in everyday langauge. So you can just write to the system: "Give me the number of sales by country and month" to get a presentation of the company's sales month by month and by country. It may sound very futuristic, but one example of a system that already does this is IBM's Watson Analytics, you can see it approx. 10 min. Inside the video here.

It will be exciting to follow developments in this area. It is not a given that the way IBM is doing it will give them the leading position in the market. There may be a small entrepreneurial company tomorrow with a better dashboard product than IBM, because development is so fast that even though IBM seems to be ahead, it is very difficult to hold such a leadership position for a long time.

I remember a conference I was at where a lecture on creating creative ideas had just ended. A reporter from mashable.com got up and said throughout the hall, "There are no ideas, only execution!". And while it may be to put it bluntly, there are probably not many successful companies in history who have not focused primarily on executing old ideas rather than getting new good ideas.

A business that is run minute by minute is the epitome of that philosophy, and one must also expect it to be the business of the future.