Process maturities for marketing operations

PvT: And how have you seen organizations change or shift their global marketing efforts based on these changes.

MM: Most, now well. Why? Most of the major organizations, with the exception of those that area really far down the maturity process model of say, Lean, Six Sigma, or something like that – some other management process-control framework – most companies do not have the operational capability for engaging in the customer-making process as an integrated process.

I believe that innovation has undergone a fundamental discontinuity. And in turn, that continues to disrupt marketing as we know it.

You know, when the 1990’s came along, we had saw a number of enterprise software firms emerge: operating systems, office applications, financials, databases, and so on. You could say that the 1990’s brought a fairly uniform wave of innovation to large and small business, with a whole bunch of little micro-specialties in it; but the overall wave of innovation move everyone off of batch data centers, into more online interactive systems with enterprise software, and enterprise databases, and enterprise reporting, and all that kind of stuff.

A whole wave of innovation just washed across large, medium, and small enterprises.

With the Web, and the Internet, we all experience another wave that roll through from say 1996 through 2007.

We now find ourselves in a new era; as a function of advances of web services, service-oriented architecture or SOA and application mash-ups, we’re not just talking about mashing up content or on-demand applications. This calls attention to the wonderful, stupendous, and almost unimaginable implication of the Apple AppStore: the near complete dis-integration and dis-entanglement of hundreds or thousands of single-function capabilities of large, complex, and bloated software suites, including enterprise software applications. I have already seen very sophisticated, enterprise applications built from the mash-up of dozens of software widgets—all within an iGoogle framework.

Functions-as-a-service at 99 cents

While this puts a lot of stress on integration, user requirements, and just-in-time training, it brings us the reality of “function as a service“—sold at the AppStore or the Google equivalent of for $0.99. And, yes, that will transform the iPhone tablet computers and those running Android-Chrome into the next trillion-dollar market. Trillion with a ‘t’!

Right on the heals of that we will have the next wave around the semantic web and semantic applications—where everyone can exploit industry metadata standards and schemas, innovation will not just accelerate; it will hyper-accelerate.

We now live in an era that Michael Schrage– I think he’s with MIT – speaks about; the age of hyper-innovation.

50-plus Innovation Vectors

The age of hyper-innovation means that enterprise planners no longer grapple with two to five major innovations that influence their ability to market and innovate. Enterprise planners must now grapple with 50,100, or potentially hundreds of innovation vectors, any one of which could disrupt their market.

So most marketing organizations are, I would say, suffer a deep myopia as to what drives or will soon drive marketing and innovation in their particular businesses.

It’s as if you’re just out flying down the road, 90 miles an hour, fogbound with, you know, 20 feet of sight. At some point you’re gonna hit somethin’, and at some point there’s gonna be a big splat.

And so the inability for marketing organizations, 1) to prioritize innovation vectors, is a pretty serious challenge. Then the next thing is mastering the operational capability to incorporate those innovations, that is building new or enhanced operational capabilities with the technology.

We’ve found persistent trait in execution systems: change generally and, innovation in particular, become sand in the gears of execution.

Calls for innovation leadership

Most medium to large size companies do not have a structured repeatable process for innovating new processes.

Now I know that sounds circular, almost tautological nonsense, but it is fundamental to the challenge that confronts most global marketing organizations. They do not have an effective change management practices or disciplines as it relates to fundamental changes in marketing and innovation across the customer-making process.