Batch vs. Real Time Organizations
Today I was drinking a coffee and reading a technical book about Reactive Microservices Architecture and was funny to see how everything is converging to zero, this new tyrant, The Now, and how technology concepts can be applied to understand the challenges that organizations are facing in this new economy.
Existe uma versão em português de este artigo aqui.
As the Digital Tsunami advances into the XX century industries territory, more and more organizations struggle to keep up with a stream of ever increasing changes that puts pressure on the current configuration of the organization's, their structure, business models, products, services, assets portfolio, positioning and culture.
A great analogy is how we used to build software systems. Most software even today is created as big monoliths and data is processed in batches. We used to have to wait a month to know how much will be the credit card bill of last month.
For years we have been reducing the time to process data, reducing the batch size, from having available data from the last month, to having data from the last week, to having data of yesterday.
Yesterday, the last hour is not "now". There is something magical about zero when we are talking about price, like in freemium, and there is something magical about zero time. Now is the next frontier that is being seek by the realtime organizations.
Humans prefer “now” to “later”, on the other hand for businesses “later” may become “never”, or “never mind” as the windows of opportunities close and they pass the event horizon, the point of no return, of the disruption black hole.
In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish.
— Klaus Schwab
Never have been so true the idea that time is money. The startup venture capital business model is based on how much faster a given business can capture customers than the rest of the market, and if a new small and fast organization can execute faster and better than existing organizations that may create an inordinate amount of value for their founders and investors.
An existing big organization will pay millions or billions to buy an startup that had the capacity to execute faster and better.
While last century most of the businesses were optimizing efficiency and compliance, this century the opportunities to create value are in the efficacy and timeliness, the right solution at the right time. The winners will be the organizations that will be able to create adaptable streams of value, that can continuously and effectively hit the moving targets.
If your organization have invested in the last years to become more and more projectized, you made it more batch, less realtime. Instead of reducing batch size and lead time it increased them, maybe that improved "visibility", "control" and "cost efficiency" but sacrificing "responsiveness" and "efficacy".
If your organization invested in agile, scrum and kanban, you are in the right direction but these are operational and tactical level interventions and they not change the whole system, the whole organization responsiveness.
I have been literally thinking and helping organizations for the last 15 years about this problem and i'm putting together a workshop about Rethinking Management with the Pragmatic Management Approach to help agile coaches, management consultants, managers, executives how to rethink their organizations for this new economic context. This edition is in portuguese, but we are going to deliver it in spanish and english in the future, just make us know in the comments if you would like to know more about it.
I would love to hear what are your thoughts about this matter and please share what kind of challenges are you facing in this incredible interesting and challenging journey we are all in. Exciting times ahead!.
