Car racing is, first and foremost, about speed. The fastest car wins. But, looking at it another way, racing is really about innovation. Engine design, of course, trumps all. Top drivers also spend hours improving their seat. And monitoring the heat emitted by tires to achieve the perfect temperature on a given course with given weather conditions. In racing, innovations are made with one goal in mind – to shave seconds off a lap.
All businesses care about speed but it matters more to some than others. For those, their very existence depends on their ability to do something faster than everyone else, and that means fast-tracking innovation to constantly explore faster ways to give customers what they want or to define new markets more rapidly than anyone else. What matters is being first past the post...runners-up often end up with nothing.
Arguably, ever since the first reporter filed the first “scoop” that sold out that day’s newspaper, the need for speed has been paramount for the news media industry. Today, while the first to file the story still wins, breaking news can be transmitted in seconds from almost anywhere in the world. One of our clients, Journal Communication (operator of 33 radio stations, 13 television stations and several newspapers) is rolling out Google’s enterprise platform to all 2,700 employees to give them the edge in a business where seconds count. How exactly is it doing this and what can other industries, where seconds also count, learn?
When the race is on, a cloud-solution:
- Ensures that adoption of a new technology happens at the right pace for that particular organization. Changes can managed incrementally and with minimal disruption, which is especially critical to 24/7 operations, whether a newsroom or a global bank
- Enhances how workers collaborate and therefore the speed of collaboration
- Streamlines processes when coupled with the right business transformation initiatives
- Empowers mobile workers to contribute as much and as quickly as desk-bound co-workers
According to Journal Communications CIO Michael O’Brien, Google Apps is transforming the Milwaukee-based business: “We’re entering a new age at Journal Communications. We’re not your grandmother’s newspaper, nor your grandfather’s TV or radio station”. To read more about his experience and perspective read this post on Google's Enterprise blog.