In days gone by, the CEO and her team could concentrate exclusively on delivering shareholder value, including good returns. That drove a real emphasis on efficiency and customer satisfaction. But in an age of eroded trust in institutions and employer/employee/customer relationships, many more considerations drive ultimate shareholder value. The C Suite “worry bead” list now also includes IP protection, supply chain management, talent management, geographical distribution and associated “local” governance, physical accesses, and cyber protections. And sophisticated competitors now include nation states with considerable reach and resources.
What that translates to, in practice, is more and better combinatorial tools that represent all of corporate engagement, leveraging trusted corporate data and the capabilities to integrate it cleanly and easily. For example, infrastructure security can’t be simply delegated to the IT department to address and resolve; talent management and legal should be made aware of missteps for pattern tracking. An unhappy system administrator can compromise key system components or leave doors open – actual or virtual. Those datasets include both log and video files and should inform facilities, CISO, and legal analyses. A developer can introduce or incorporate exploitable code; talent management, IP management, and legal must be involved. Legacy libraries, whose provenance have been lost in the mists of time but underpin key capability, may be predicated on security practices that naively assumed clean run-time environments and no sophisticated attacker; the CISO and corporate logistics responsible for supply chain management should be engaged. And so on….
World class investment firms understand this expanded set of challenges and are actively working to identify the innovators and operators who can bring distributed, configurable, combinable platforms to bear that ease integration and provide the C suite an accessible common operating picture of the business. Those are the teams with which to work and to watch.
Why platforms? Because no one needs one more screen to view, or yet another concerning set of metrics that don’t integrate with anything else and have to be shared and integrated manually, or one more “exception” to the corporate protection policy because this “essential capability” can only run in a commercial cloud. With today’s demanding business timelines, the C suite should not be the point of corporate integration nor should they be solely responsible to ensure appropriate corporate actors stay informed.
By focusing on platforms, Sine Wave supports integrated solutions across our portfolio. The enterprise can choose the display capabilities it prefers, whether maps or spreadsheets or reports. The enterprise can host the capability locally, in an enterprise cloud, or in the commercial cloud. The enterprise can integrate data and data models to minimize manual integration and mundane corporate data passing. C Suite and their teams can see the same data and drill down to diagnose and take action on those items that matter most to the business. Fundamentally, the C suite can spend more time prosecuting their corporate goals and less time tracking down and integrating information.
