What if the United States Postal Service (USPS) were among the first to wholly embrace e-commerce?
What if they were quicker to accept the fact that a package could be delivered overnight?
In case you are not aware, the USPS has been under siege in recent years as a myriad of technology, personal communications options, mobile devices, high-speed bandwidth, and budgetary factors have put pressure on its rapidly graying business model.
This brings me to a conclusion that this is what happens to companies and individuals who do not accept change, refuse to reinvent themselves and simply take the status quo as their standard mode of operation.
They end up with a plaque, similar to this one on a USPS mail chute I saw recently.
If you haven’t noticed, EMC has been reinventing itself since its founding. Of course we are still a technology company, but the EMC of today is vastly different from the EMC of the past. We have grown organically and through acquisition, enhancing our core storage products and capabilities and acquiring technology to fill the portfolio.
VMware is also transitioning from an “operating system virtualization company” to a virtualization software-defined data center company. They, too, recognize that the industry is changing, the customer demands are morphing, and both EMC and VMware, along with Pivotal, are leading that thinking.
This brings us to “Services.” We, as services professional individuals, put the capital “S” in services. We are the technical engines behind the delivery of all services. We should ask ourselves, are we embracing technology, are there new ways of enabling our services, are we current with our education—and, above all, are we engaging our customers and asking for their feedback?
I find our most productive meetings happen when our customers are not timid in their feedback. Customer councils, surveys, and impromptu feedback should be driving our services innovation. Don’t look for technical innovation without coupling it with your own innovative education roadmaps. In my role at EMC I am tasked with driving our services innovation, and I get to participate in all of our transformative thinking. You can bet, the capital ”S” in services is on the same trajectory as our products, and we are not standing still.
Of course, if you really like plaques…
