The marketplace keeps speeding up. The pace of business appears to be accelerating at every turn, from the pressures of quarterly financial reporting to the onslaught of constant product innovation.
No matter the topic, the flow of available information has turned into a torrent. No sooner have you gotten up to speed on the latest developments, something new appears. In today’s marketplace, the only constant is change.
We need to make smarter, faster use of information that is already available. Several factors contribute to the rapid pace of today’s marketplace; when these factors combine, the potential for cost disruption is enormous.
These factors include the following:
- The Internet. The Internet has changed the rules of the game. New and faster competitors have learned to use this new type of information handling and processing to increase their internal and external velocity. The old ways just aren’t good enough or fast enough anymore.
- Mobility. Businesspeople need to be equally productive from any location—on the road, from home, in transit, in a foreign country, or at a customer site.
- Globalization. The elimination of trade barriers has led to new competitive market entrants. There has also been an unleashing of entrepreneurial cultures in the emerging marketplaces, creating a vast array of new competitors that are using technology to eliminate the traditional constraints of physical markets to reach customers globally.
- Financial reaction to opportunity. Global investment has grown enormously. The opportunities for growth under stable governments have replaced older measurements of capital investment and risk assessment.
