Then the Internet and global e-commerce arrived. Practically overnight the market for just about anything extended to include the entire world. The global business economy and the infrastructure to support the aspirations, abilities and energy of more than six billion people continue to expand. But the services, support and operations management to enable this expansion, while maintaining the high level of trust required, are not growing in lockstep. If anything, their expansion is flat at best. And here’s the rub: The new growth is not linear. It’s exponential.
All of this has a direct impact on perhaps the single most important elements of business today—the customer experience. Customers don’t care what your system challenges are, how complex your infrastructure is, or how many resources you had to divert to other projects to keep the business competitive. They only want to know that when they provide their credit card or purchase order number that the transaction will be completed in a timely manner, and the products or services will be delivered in line with their expectations. In other words, they want to know they can trust the transaction and their trading partner. In this they are not much different than customers 500 years ago—or 5,000 years ago for that matter.
Exponentially expanding business puts a strain on that customer experience. With the type of volume that is demanded today, it becomes increasingly difficult to offer both the new and more exciting interactions customers want and maintain the infrastructure behind it. There are only so many hours in the day, and something has to give. And if you try to do too much, sometimes everything gives.
So how do you decide where to place the focus in this chicken-and-egg scenario? Two years ago the always-insightful Geoffrey Moore wrote a book called Dealing with Darwin. It dealt with this issue from a strategic point of view, breaking the business into core versus context. According to Moore, core is anything that strategically differentiates your company. Context is the processes required to fulfill commitments to stakeholders. In the military it is called the tooth-to-tail ratio. Infrastructure (the tail) is that thing you drag around after the attack units (the tooth). It’s what slows you down and gets you killed.
If you have to choose one, it makes more sense logically to place the focus on the tooth, the core, the thing that differentiates you. If you can’t manage the rest, then you find someone to do it for you.
One of the keys to the dominance of the Roman Empire was its ability to build roads. These roads made it easier for the Romans to keep in touch with the provinces, move armies, and generally be more nimble than previous dynasties—an important consideration in a time when the speed of communication depended on the speed of a horse. Once roads became the norm, however, they were no longer a strategic advantage and thus fell far down the list of Roman priorities. They were no longer core. They were context.
