Your Success Is Dependent on Immersing Yourself in the Sharing Economy

While the glitz and glamour of the latest generation of digital giants have held the attention of IT leaders, another more impactful dynamic has been at play—the sharing economy. Sharing—whether through a how-to guide on YouTube or a proprietary solution in an app store for industry peers—is very much in vogue. In fact, if you can’t embrace the powerful facets of the sharing economy today, the future of your business could be in jeopardy.

The evolution of this powerful sharing economy has transformed aspects of our personal and professional lives, often without us noticing. For example, how many times do you reach for peer-to-peer forums for the answer to IT questions rather than pick up the phone to the service desk? Now is the time for IT professionals to open their eyes and understand the dynamics at play to make the most of them in their operations.

Amazonification move over, there are new adjectives to play with!

The urge to adjectivize businesses is becoming almost unbearable, particularly when it treads a hackneyed, well-travelled path. The number of articles that say we need to be Amazonified and Uberized or risk downfall is laughable. While there is truth in the need to learn lessons from these ultra-customer-focused firms, we need to look beyond these obvious hacks—these firms succeeded because of their ability to differentiate.

When the ponytailed Fussball superstar invites you to give your ideas in the next design thinking lab, what are some other suggestions you can offer? Frankly, there are plenty of other adjectivized business names we should add to the list for consideration. For example, how many of you have considered how Linuxed or Wikipediaed you are? It’s not about copying one of these tropes. The real question is, “How should your business make use of the developing sharing economy?”

The sharing economy is here to stay, but are you using it to evolve your business?

From social media to Wikipedia, and from crowdfunding campaigns to online group therapy, the sharing economy is overpowering everything. We haven’t even called out the obvious stuff like flexible car leasing or gig work. In the enterprise IT services space, we’re no strangers to the sharing economy, whether we realize it or not. Cloud computing, open-source software, and knowledge-centered support are all classic examples of the power of sharing, from industrialized data centers to tips and tricks shared among support engineers.

So why isn’t anybody mentioning this stuff? Probably for the same reason that marketing teams jumped on outbound GDPR messaging with enviable funding, but stories are already tumbling out about back-office systems falling foul of the regulations with information security that seems to be the digital equivalent of putting a sign in front of your house saying, “Please don’t steal from us, we’re nice!” There isn’t any glory in it. Better to divert funds to the glitz and glamour of the front office and leave the back office to soldier on.

And, while Uberized apps and Amazonified personalization are great, we need to shine the spotlight on innovations and dynamics that will also help us achieve our ambitions of a digital customer-first enterprise. Even if the potential impact isn’t quite so noticeable, it’s still likely to give you a sustainable edge. Let’s dig into a few of the examples mentioned so far.

Four ways sharing is transforming the modern business environment

• Cloud computing enables you to scale your business exponentially. The cloud revolution shows no sign of slowing down. Thanks to this scalable and agile infrastructure, digital-native firms have been able to grow exponentially, and century-old firms have been able to reinvent themselves. But at its core, what is cloud if not an example of the sharing economy? Why pack out your data center when you can borrow somebody else’s capacity for a reasonable price? Plus, businesses can underpin new business models with the cloud where the IT cost and project risk would be prohibitive during the startup phase.
• Open source and crowdsourced development can save you a fortune in IT resources and boost outcomes. Often overlooked, there isn’t a more powerful example of the sharing economy than opensource software. A suite of crowdsourced solutions can offer businesses benefits that include transparency, affordability, and security over proprietary solutions. For those of you rolling your eyes at the potential security benefits, think of all those bug bounties the big software firms are running now, except that with open source software they take place regularly and are executed by a decentralized team of stakeholders dedicated to the software. Even proprietary tech is coming under pressure to embrace sharing-dynamics—we’re now seeing countless app store style facilities geared toward­­ providing a marketplace for stakeholders to share solutions. Indeed, in a recent piece of research analyzing the ServiceNow ecosystem, the firm’s app store function was one of the most highly valued by clients.
• Knowledge platforms allow you to communicate with your market at scale and with ease. This is the big one. We keep singing the “future of work” song but without paying much attention to the significant role knowledge and, crucially, how we will consume it, is going to play. Generations have grown up with Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and a raft of other innovative knowledge platforms where experts and (often amusing) non-experts can share experiences with ease. The future of work will undoubtedly involve decentralized crowdsourced knowledge. You better make sure your operations are ready, because not only will your competitors be able to outmaneuver you with their YouTube-esque sharing platform, but you may also be confronted with a workforce that can’t work without one.
• Social media provides instant access to experts and crowdsourced information. In a world where social media is becoming a dirty word, in many cases it does not deserve the “fake news” engine label politicians have given it. Crowdsourced opinions and information on social media are fast becoming a route to news and insight so powerful it would be mad to ignore it. In the modern world, people are eager to share—on hotel review sites, recipe sharing forums, or just throwing out their opinion on a company’s strengths and weaknesses. Enterprise leaders must embrace social media as both a facility to access expert opinion and as an engagement and insight platform to help supplement business decisions.

These are just four of the many ways that the evolution of the sharing economy is impacting the modern business place. However, there’s plenty more room. Economist Jeremy Rifkin argues that the future will rely on the development of the sharing economy to deliver a variety of benefits, in particular, the significant reduction of marginal cost supported by the next-generation of economic infrastructure. Ultimately, the time to act is now to ensure your business is ready.

Bottom line: The sharing economy is evolving quickly and it is unavoidable in the modern world. The only question is, how will your business benefit?

From helpful people on YouTube walking us through getting water out of an iPhone after it’s accidentally gone through the dishwasher to businesses realizing economies of scale through industrialized processing power, the sharing economy is already making its mark on our personal and professional lives. We need to recognize these successes and implement them in our enterprises just as readily as we gawp at the achievements of Uber and Amazon. Nine times out of 10, the funniest joke on a topic of the day is posted by a random person on Twitter, not a professional comedian—although you do have to pan through a lot of **** to find the gold.

All of you sitting in the skeptic camp, ask yourself this: Can we keep up with the collective ingenuity of billions of humans? More to the point, can we keep up with the rapidly changing demands of our customers and employees?