Idris Mootee’s excellent blog, Innovation Playground posted on “What’s the Difference Between Platform Strategy vs. Business Strategy vs. Product Strategy?” This is a great post, and a opens up a huge area for analysis, speculation and discussion around platform thinking.
Platform thinking emerged as an important dimension in our recent Reaching Level 3 Multi-company research. I believe platform strategies build strongly on the disciplines of architecture, marketing, product, program and portfolio management. These are not necessarily the strongest capabilities of many IT organizations. This is not an indictment – it simply reflects how IT has evolved – these were not the core disciplines (e.g., project and infrastructure management) that have traditionally been valued in the enterprise IT world. Companies that seem to be doing this well, frequently have very strong marketing capabilities – and these have seeped into IT (and vice versa!)
“Platform” and “Collaboration” go together like the proverbial peaches and cream. Good platforms enable collaboration. Creating a good platform demands collaboration – across business units and IT organizations, and across several disciplines, including architecture, product and program management.
Can you articulate your company’s platform strategy? Is there one? Should there be? What is the role of the IT organization in defining and executing your platform strategy?
We will dig into these questions in subsequent posts.
Filed under: IT Management, IT Maturity Tagged: | Architecture, collaboration, platform thinking, Product management
