2010 to 2020 is the decade that devices get connected to the net and that devices and systems really start to aggressively share data. This is well known. The effect however isn’t as clear for business owners.

The internet IS NOT simply about convenience through getting your data available online. Web based email, CRMs and accounting web applications are just the first layer. This is the first level of understanding and observation. It’s the outer most layer of the onion. It’s also an easy way for web application companies to sell the benefits of the web to you the customers. You should however look deeper down and expect more from your web application providers.

The internet has the capacity to add to your business system intelligence and process your workflow in an automatic way. You might not have taken advantage of this yet. If you swallow the red pill so to speak it is a wonderland of triggers and events that we are all creating. Let’s use a real life example to explain this. A trigger might be a customer of a business clicking checkout on your shopping cart that then causes a series of designed workflow events actioned by Saasu such as:

• Capturing the customers contact record and storing it.
• Passing credit card details to a payment gateway.
• Listening to the payment gateway for success.
• Emailing the customer an invoice using a specific email and PDF template.
• Emailing a purchase order to a supplier with instructions to deliver the goods to the business customers address (drop shipping).
• Emailing a shipping slip with an embedded Google Map of the customers address to the delivery driver.

Deeper down in Saasu’s inventory system a lot more is happening automatically.

• Stock volumes are adjusting.
• Serial numbers or other inventory attributes are being allocated against items just sold.
• The value of stock on balance sheet is changing.
• Stock is moving to “Committed” for the Sale and “On Order” for the Purchase.
• Cost of Goods numbers are being updated.

Saasu has a real inventory system, rather than just a price list mechanism that you see many basic web apps now providing. All these events above are occurring in an automated way.

This is one example of workflow automation based on a trigger event. Customers are inventing new models all the time and as we add features the models become more effective and handle more situations.

This doesn’t mean humans aren’t part of the picture. It is a symbiotic relationship now between the controllers (the users) and the the system (triggers, events and data). Most importantly if you have devices or systems not connected to the internet then they can’t contribute effectively without requiring manual work to be done. Manual work and intelligent, automated systems aren’t good friends. Manual work is all about labour gravity which I have covered before. So our responsibility now as business owners and employees is to remove these old technology blocks from our new system. Work on the worst blocks first and things will begin to improve quickly.

Nature is full of examples we can look to for inspiration in our thinking on this topic. Speed and complexity of communication is a major factor in the success of species evolution. Just look at humans, we got wired, our brains and communication capability grew. We used the complexity of language to evolve a highly advanced species. You should help your business do the same. Getting online, getting automation tools and having fewer systems (versus many disparate ones) that talk well together is an analogous situation.

I’ve just mentioned fewer systems. Fewer systems is a strategy nature uses to reduce interdependence or dependence risk. An example of the the later can be found in cockroaches who have evolved a single system mechanism. One reason they are so successful is because they have internal organs that produce seven different vitamins and lots of complex amino acids that they need so that they don’t have to rely on food quality to get them. They reduce their dependence risk on nutritious food sources.

When businesses get connected online they can actually start to self organise and grow at faster rates. Essentially an off-line business simply isn’t a part of this primordial web soup of activity and thus it can’t evolve. Contrary to this an online business can’t help but be prodded, communicated with, added to, seen by others and thus grow and evolve. The potential ceiling for the businesses momentum and growth prospects is lower. Businesses in this new online world can grow in orders of magnitude rather than the typical single or double digit growth rates.

Lessons from nature are worth listening to.

Photo by raneko