The Silicon Valley Mindset - Enterprises Secret Sauce in Changing their Game

By Lionel Lim, VP & MD, Asia Pacific and Japan at Pivotal Software, Inc.

Lionel Lim, VP & MD, Asia Pacific and Japan at Pivotal Software, Inc.

It seems like only yesterday words such as innovation, agility, creativity and disruption were associated with Fortune 500 companies. Today, younger, more software-driven companies have usurped their position as industry leaders.

To regain pole position, we’ve heard that businesses need to push the boundaries of human behaviour and how business gets done. But businesses rarely understand what it means to design an organisation that lives and breathes the values of innovation and disruption. Put simply, big businesses lack agility, because they are not designed to be agile and innovative.

Silicon Valley is a state of mind that companies need to embrace to be innovators and disruptors. It bridges capabilities and infrastructure with an organization’s core expertise and values to allow them to be faster, more agile and competitive into new eras. It is about putting a technology-centric strategy at the core of a business. Unleashing this power on companies with decades of industry know-how, combined with the right tools, will rapidly change the way software builds the world. The reality is that the real revolution will begin when companies with decades–if not centuries–of inherent industry know-how are empowered with the tools to transform and make profound changes in today’s world.

Cultural Change Fuel Business Transformation

Business transformation requires all parts of the company to shift their mind-set to a ‘digital-first’ company culture. Transformation does not necessarily have to be about IT. In fact people and culture is the biggest obstacle to business transformation.

New disruptive business models will not function on old organizational structures, traditional innovation approaches and dated management techniques.

The shift to a Silicon Valley state of mind needs people to adopt new process, find new ways of working and break down organisational silos. It’s the relentless will to adapt to change which is a fundamental requirement of innovation in any organisational culture.

Business should be about solving problems. It requires an agile development and data-driven intelligence approach to work better, smarter and faster. Just because an operating model may have served your organisation well for the last decade, does not necessarily mean it will be suitable for the next decade.

Rethink IT; Rethink Enterprise Software

In the past, IT innovation meant moving from silos legacy architecture to embracing virtualised infrastructure that allowed for scalability. Deployment of new features still took months to roll-out.

Today’s social, mobile, always-connected consumers constantly challenge businesses to deliver consistent, positive and high-value omni-channel customer experiences. Meeting this challenge requires businesses to quickly build, deploy and update cloud-native applications.

“The shift to a Silicon Valley state of mind needs people to adopt new process, find new ways of working and break down organisational silos”

Software engineers are becoming world builders, using technology to understand their customers like never before. Tight feedback loop between software capabilities and customer response combined with data aggregation and analytics tools will enable businesses to meet customer demands in the right context, at the right time.

Bringing People and Technology Together

Technology is essential to any transformation journey and adopting new infrastructure and up skilling employees can be an expensive proposition. Organisations need to make a clear financial commitment to the transformation but this should be done with a clear strategy in mind.

In addition, businesses must empower their employees to become more agile and more prepared by improving workflows and providing them with the information they need in a simple and easy to digest method. The technology should work and should not get in the way of innovation and disruption. In this manner, organisations will be agile enough to deliver the new ideas and innovations that will be able to fully capitalise on customer demands.

It’s not just about people, or having the right or latest technology and tools – it’s how it all comes together.

Today, digital technology is a key differentiator for successful businesses. By empowering employees with the tools and work streams they need to become more efficient, the business will benefit from having a team that will drive productivity and deliver at the speed of a start-up.

Embracing a Silicon Valley state of mind is about enabling organisations to act quickly, responding to customer and market demands and working out the right way to address them. But, more importantly, it is about building a contagious business culture that constantly evolves and adapts to change.

Founded in 2013, Pivotal Software, Inc. is a provider of Cloud Native platform that drives software innovation. It is based in Palo Alto, USA