It wasn’t so long ago that you would have needed a NASA-size budget to launch a global supply chain control tower. In the days before the Internet it would have been an economic impossibility for just about any company. The notion of a supply chain control tower is predicated on connecting partners electronically to enable richer and more immediate information exchange for all parties along the supply chain. Its central feature is that it gives companies the ability to “see” and to “act” on a super base of supply chain information immediately, no matter how near or far. The technology behind control towers is advanced, and complex; it wasn’t even available until well after the Internet arrived.
The most famous example of a pre-Internet control tower is Wal*Mart, who in the mid 1980s developed and deployed its own private extranet and large scale satellite system to connect suppliers to a proprietary computerized network which allowed suppliers to see point of sale and inventory information in near real time from across the world. Getting the news more quickly allowed suppliers to plan better and execute processes more efficiently, creating new savings in literally hundreds of areas. Wal*Mart passed the savings on to its customers. This was how Wal*Mart scaled. The rest is history.
But how many companies can make an IT commitment of that scale?
Fortunately, today, companies don’t have to.
We are now fifteen years beyond the launch of the commercial Internet, and the “cloud computing” phenomenon – arguably the most important technology trend in business today – is fully upon us. With cloud, you access software and IT infrastructure over the Internet as a service. You don’t buy it, or install it; you pay for it as you go – like cable TV, or electricity. Your vendor manages everything for you, on your behalf, to insulate you from the painful and expensive work of managing the system and upgrades and fixes over time. Cloud provides better economics for everyone; it makes large scale IT initiatives possible for companies that would otherwise never be able to afford them. And in nearly every business process area, companies are looking for cloud delivery alternatives for their business software.
But while control tower technology certainly includes software applications, it is more than just software applications, and the software is fundamentally different. It is designed specifically for inter-company collaboration and information exchange. Below the software applications is a deep IT infrastructure for connecting companies electronically and harmonizing the data that flows between them. Finally, at the core of any control tower technology platform there is a business-to-business “network” data model that is very different from the “single enterprise” data models of traditional business software. Thus, simply moving traditional business software “to the cloud” to enable an information super base spanning hundreds, potentially thousands, of partner processes and systems, won’t scale; it doesn’t work. Control towers require a unique combination of technology ingredients, and to deliver the right economics, these ingredients must be fused into a single cloud platform that can make it easy, fast and affordable for companies to engage.
The good news is that the technology is here, it’s proven, and hundreds of companies are leveraging it today to drive new value and efficiency in their businesses.
Today, because of cloud, and because of technology platforms made specifically for the cloud, the “on demand” control tower is a reality. And it doesn’t require a NASA size budget. Every company can now afford a control tower. In the cloud, it’s economic, it’s fast, and it’s low risk.
