Daniel Burrus’s latest article focuses on how to successfully plan your organization’s strategy during a time of rapid change. It is not enough to be agile, to be proactive or to study the “best practices” of the industry’s best performers, he argues. Instead, it means engaging in “future benchmarking”-- “skipping over today’s best practices and benchmarking what the best practices will be in the visible future, based on hard trends and future certainties.”
Burrus then lays out how to engage in this “future benchmarking”-- look at the hard trends we know will happen and project where your best competitors will be four or five years from now, and determine your course of action based on those insights into the future. Burrus suggests that you can become a creator of change in your industry in this way rather than always trying to react to change that happens “from the outside in.”
Industry data standards provide a platform for your future innovation in many ways. First, they eliminate the spend on what should be a utility. Do you really want to create your own language? Second, they allow you to spend on real marketplace differentiators in products and services. Third, they provide incentives for vendors to invest in solutions because they have a bigger market. Fourth, they allow you to integrate seamlessly into everything else you build or buy. Let's face it, having a cool anything that does not work with everything else is seldom good and we've all been there. Well I could go on... but let's stop here and save a few ideas for future posts.
Burrus is essentially saying that we need to look ahead and not become overly focused on short term gains when longer term investments will have a much bigger payoff, like industry standards I would add.
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