In the Internet of Things
One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice.
As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine.
Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!
The rash of start-ups that are trying to create a new world economic order are no different than the man described in the above story. And the mice are of course the VC's!!
The internet of things economy is a thing like riding the tiger. If you don't manage to ride it you can easily be its prey; as an individual, organization, society and / or nation. I was in a conversation with a fund flushed technology VC today.
And our conversation centered around the focus of their investments. The VC told me as a matter of fact that they made investments in B2B businesses and avoided all B2C investments.
I countered that in this age would it make sense to draw those walls such as B2B and B2C or even P2P & C2C? Especially when evidence points out that the need of the hour is to build ecosystems because the internet of things facilitates it and it is such a Value Chain driven ecosystem will obliterate the above mentioned boundaries of B2B, B2C, C2C or P2P!!!
The idea was lost on the VC....but that does not take away the truth of the matter. However this has a bearing on the investments they make and the economies that they are trying to reconstruct. This cannot be a clever design where nature has just unwrapped itself from the monopolies of the previous generations and humankind is working hard to create new ones such as Google, Apple and Hold - Your - Breath Facebook.
Believe it or not, I had a technologist ask me last week why his business needs to develop customer profile when there is Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and other social media. Can you understand the modern business philosophy where a customer can be engaged without understanding their latent requirements?
You can definitely draw data and push data without having to necessarily plug into each other's systems. But understanding your Master's Data (Read Customer) is still your business. No one else can do it for you....
The discipline of interplaying Metadata and Master Data Management should be the defining factor metamorphosizing the Information Systems Development in the modern era for ecosystems to work efficiently in the Internet of Things based economy.
The temptation to continue doing point to point apps is like eating the strawberries in the story above. One can easily be distracted by the relative ease to fool oneself and everyone around that they are doing what is relevant. If you can picture yourself in the story you will as an entrepreneurs strategize how to ride the tiger or be fleet footed enough to run away from it. The reality is that there is the tiger looming on top of the vine and there is a deep ravine down below that can obliterate you beyond recognition. The VC doesn't care as is evident from the above narrative and that is also what I heard in my conversation today. They make their money and necessarily don't care about your health. The choice is of course what the future beholds....
