Business Innovation Machines

Business Innovation Machine

The Software as a Service disruptive wave is cresting. The economics favor a new approach to Business Innovation with software. As with any disruption this one is will generate lots of opportunity. We call our approach to taking advantage of this opportunity building a “Business Innovation Machine”, which we define as the following:

“The unique, adaptable, intentionally-built network of applications, services, devices and people, which defines and powers an innovative business”

Here is an outline of our premise.

SaaS applications and services available to any one on the internet are getting very good. They have the resources to keep improving at ever quickening pace.
Integrating different applications together is getting easier.
The network effect created by 1 and 2 is so powerful that many organizations are building networks of applications without realizing what they are doing it or why they are doing it?
Because they don’t understand the economic impact of this new paradigm the invest in the wrong areas, building systems they don’t need, and ignoring the benefits of integration.
Understanding how this disruptive wave works, and what benefits it provides can help organizations decide what to build, what to buy, and how to manage the distributed nature of the custom application network, they must build!
FileMaker is the perfect platform to solve the technical aspects of this problem, because it is full stack, and has few relevant limits.
We can help you by becoming the Geist in your Business Innovation Machine.

Ready?

If you’re ready to find out how we can help, please contact us.

Connect your Business Innovation Machine to Quickbooks Online with

LedgerLink, is the anchor node of our own Business Innovation Machine, because it lets us “script our financial app”.

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Find out what it can do for yours.

Introduction

When a disruptive wave is about to hit an industry, it may not be clear what’s happening. The pace of change increases, and old rules don’t seem to apply. This is happening now to the software industry. Truthfully this is just the latest wave of a storm of disruption the released by the internet decades ago. This one is sometimes called the API Economy, but broadly speaking it involves the ability of Applications and Services running in the cloud to talk to one another to a much greater degree than ever before. It is so good now that you can begin to think of every application and services on the internet as part of one giant system. As each them improves, the whole improves, and as the whole improves, each of them do. This virtuous cycle is known as the Network effect, and it changes everything.

At Geist Interactive, we have a framework for thinking about how to take advantage of this disruptive wave. We call it “Business Innovation Machines”. Read on for more about how we got here and what it is, and what we can help you do with it.

It isn’t about build vs buy. Businesses today must do both. The question is “what to build” and “what to buy” and how to integrate it all together.

Why does the average business in America use 6 to 12 SaaS? Wouldn’t investing in there own custom applications make more sense?

The internet economy is driving organizations to create ad-hoc collections of applications

The average business in America uses 6 to 12 Software as a Service applications to manage various aspects of its business. Why? Why would so many businesses choose the same software their competition is using instead of investing in their own applications? Based on old models of investment in technology this would see to make no sense. But yet, this is happening. Why?

Software as a Service applications provide the following benefits.

They solve real needs the businesses have right now.
They are often cheap to try and have a fixed price
They are good and getting better all the time
There are no maintenance costs.
They are increasingly capable of integrating with other applications.
Most of what they need is not unique to them

Yes, there are downsides to this approach. Integrating applications has traditionally been hard and costly. Getting a unified view of your data can be hard. Having everything together just feels easier. But like all disruptions that have come before, the new methods continue to improve and the positive benefits they bring end up swamping the negatives of the old methodologies.

This is happening now. It will continue for the foreseeable future. And the pace of change it brings will only increase.

Business innovation is tied directly to network of applications

If most businesses are using half a dozen or more applications to run their business, then by definition their ability to innovate is tied to how well this ad-hoc application network is working for them.

Can they rely on it to handle the parts that are essential but not unique, without wasting valuable resources? For example, can the company run payroll easily and on time? Or can they close the accounting books on time. Conversely, can they build custom applications and integrations into this application network, that truly do power whats makes this business different and therefor valuable? If the businesses can’t do either of these things it will have difficulty generating enough innovation to keep it ahead of the competition, in the long term.

If you want to create new an interesting businesses, or reinvigorate more mature companies, figuring out how to manage this custom application network, decide what to build and what to buy, and to integrate it is essential.

If this “network of applications”, if this “system” that runs your business isn’t flexible, you can’t innovate.

Business Innovation Machines are created intentionally to feed off of the Network Effect. They don’t reinvent the wheel. The use what’s available, and invest in the parts that are truly valuable to your business.

Business Innovation Machines

When a company realizes that this ad-hoc network of applications could actually drive innovation if it’s ever changing and distributed nature of was embraced, they begin to build it intentionally. They begin to understand that its uniqueness can be described by the unique configuration of applications and services it chooses and how they are connected. There is as much value in the integrations, the connections between the things as there is in the things themselves. They learn they can focus on just the bits that make them different, and connecting them into collection of applications and services.

As a result they plug themselves into the awesome power of the Network Effect that fuels the entire internet economy. They get access to a constantly improving network of applications and services, for cost that often drops year of over year instead of increasing.

When this happens to an ad-hoc network, when it becomes something that is built with Intent, we call it a Business Innovation Machine.

The FileMaker Workplace Innovation Platform

Organizations need ways to connect up to and build on top of what’s available out there. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel, and everybody wants to move fast. There are lots of different approaches being tried out there. You have no code/ low code solutions like MS Flow. You have integration platforms like Zapier, new simple database applications like AirTable. Everyone recognizes that we need ways to build integrations and integrated applications faster. But all of them are missing key parts of the toolset you need to build Business Innovation Machines.

The FileMaker Workplace Innovation Platform has all the features you need to build a sizable fraction of your Business Innovation Machine, if not all of it. You can build all the custom apps you need, and you can plug them into any of the applications and services you get from the internet. You can build desktop apps, web apps, mobile, apps, APIs, integration connectors, dashboards, data visualizations. Not only does

FileMaker has starts with LoCode / No Code approach to UI design and data modeling. But it can extend all the way up to Pro Code when things get more complex. You can even jump into JavaScript and web technologies to build complex visual interactions and APIs.

And of course it runs in the cloud 🙂

Taken together all these features make FileMaker the perfect platform to build your Business Innovation Machine.

FileMaker is the perfect platform for building Business Innovation Machines, becuase it is “full stack”. It has all the capabilities you need to build into the network at any level. You can make, apps, connectors, complex integrations, API, data visualizations, etc.

It’s not just about the technology. Business Innovation Machines come from a different perspective. We can teach you how to build your own. Or you we can build it for you.

Let’s Get Started

If you’re ready to get started, please contact us. We can’t wait to get started building your Business Innovation Machine.

The Geist in your Business Innovation Machine

The tech is all there in the platform. Every capability you need to build your Business Innovation Machine is there. Like many other companies we have have shared lots of sample files on techniques from standard FileMaker script steps, and calcs, to building web viewer widgets with JavaScript. If you want to integrate with SaaS application, you can find example files out there that will show you how to do it… technically. But thats only part of what you’ll need to learn.

Building a network of distributed applications into a Business Innovation is not the same as building an old school style monolithic application. The rules are all different. And even when you being to learn the rules, it’s easy to go down the wrong path. Here are some questions that come up when building an innovation machine that don’t when building an old style application.

- What should I build and what should I buy?
- How do I handle integration errors.
- What is the source of truth for my data? Is an invoice “real” in FileMaker or in my accounting system?
- What happens if a web hook is sent to my FileMaker application, and it was down?
- Do I need a local cache of my accounting data?
- How do I break my FileMaker applications so they don’t directly depend on each other, and can evolve separately.?

This is just the beginning. The list goes on and on. If it seems daunting, don’t worry. Mostly it is just new, and also we are here to help. We can be the Geist in your Business Innovation Machine. We can help you answer all these questions. We can also coach you on how to handle the trickier bits, or build the whole thing for you. Or anything in between.

When we are done you will have confidence in your Business Innovation Machine, and you will know how to keep it going.