“Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they have the opportunity to speak to each other.” So wrote Gabriel García Márquez in his literary masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera.
Businesses in the time of the coronavirus might be suffering a similar fate as nations struggle to cope with billions of people under lockdown. Some estimates have millions of companies feeling the catastrophic effects of shrinking global demand. Not surprisingly, business decisions are being put on hold as leaders weigh their options, wondering what comes next and impatiently waiting for signals from their largest partners and customers. Borrowing from Márquez, in this delirious spring, businesses are looking for “the opportunity to speak to each other.”
All this paints a bleak picture, but it does come with one caveat: while not every business will survive this crisis, not every one of them will cease operations either. So, the critical question becomes how to assure survival? The answer is more straightforward than one might expect: by breaking away and out-performing others. It is here where ecosystems play a crucial role, enabling businesses to differentiate themselves from others through diversity in reach, consistency of enablement, quality of engagement and depth of footprint.
Diversity in Reach: In times of crisis, limiting ecosystem interactions to a handful of alliance managers is a high-risk strategy. What if in a pandemic, the entire alliance team becomes ill or is under lockdown? Should the whole relationship between two large organizations forming an ecosystem come to a screeching halt? A smarter ecosystem strategy circumvents such a scenario by diversifying reach beyond the transactional staff and enabling ecosystems to deliver on automated enablement at scale. This means expanding reach to non-transactional roles, including pre-sales and post-sales support, technical support, consultants, downstream partners, and even customers. And by scale, we mean true scale–ecosystems running on TIDWIT on average reach 10,000’s. Businesses relying on partner portals that are limited to a dozen are missing out and will struggle.
Consistency of Enablement: Automated ecosystem enablement provides consistency and swift adaptation, boosting competitiveness. For example, during the current economic lull, many of our customers are seeking breakaway advantage by using remote ecosystem enablement to get their employees learning, certified, and ready for the next business upturn. We have seen more than a 100% spike in Learning Path completions in the past 30 days alone! Businesses that insist on running behind traditional motes will be slower to react, rendering them uncompetitive.
Quality of Engagement: Businesses continually face a trade-off between quality and scale. But what if enablement technology could offer a consistent, enriched quality user experience that is automated to scale, all the while adhering to strict compliance requirements? Organizations offering this enhanced experience will surely fare better than those offering a flat, inconsistent and non-compliant user experience. Ecosystems operating on TIDWIT provide a variety of applications, touch points, and content types all meant to enhance the quality of the engagement. Real-time consumption metrics help them determine what is working best and what their ecosystems most value.
Depth of footprint: Deepening the footprint means going beyond a single-tier approach to a multi-tier ecosystem approach. It allows an ecosystem to reach deeper into a channel for automation, visibility and insight. It provides businesses in ecosystems with the necessary analytics to adjust strategies and tactics in real-time, adapting to signals coming from the market. The deeper the interconnectivity and footprint of an ecosystem, the greater its’ competitive advantage and resiliency in times of crisis. Single tier solutions limit reach as well as visibility. TIDWIT’s architecture allows for a multi-tier approach that allows ecosystems to be launched and interconnected in a multi-tiered manner in pretty much any direction (upstream, downstream or sidestream). This depth in reach provides the benefit of expanding the enablement footprint
Ecosystem enablement has become TOTAL ECOSYSTEM ENABLEMENT in the time of the coronavirus. We are seeing this in the metrics and in the change of behavior of users on the TIDWIT ecosystem network where content “starts” and “completions” have shot up by double and triple digits respectively. This is a reflection of organizations doubling down on their ecosystem strategies by shoring up partners, enabling them fully, making them more resilient, competitive, confident and ready for the brighter future that awaits us all.
