Business On-Demand: Seeing Through the Eyes of a Child

The proverb or old adage "See through the eyes of a child" is commonly used to emphasize love, compassion, equality, friendship, happiness and satisfaction. Most people use to it to remind us to look back to where we came from and use that to go where we will become. However such a proverb also applies to business. You might wonder how, if you have not realised it yet.

Let me put forward an example very common and can be easily related to any of us who have children. Do you ever notice that kids seem to demand too much of everything? They demand time and attention, they demand things be done the way they want it. Did you ever think of why they make such difficult demands? The answer is actually quite simple they observe what we can do and expect us to do more for less and get what they want when they want it. This comes about because children see what we are capable of doing but for us we don't realise what we really are capable of, since our attention is focused somewhere else. Children at an early age have figured-out the real meaning of efficiency, effectives, multi-tasking and performance on-demand. What can we learn from a child?

Now going back to business, we receive similar demands all the time. The pressure is there to always make and get the most for less. Is there a good answer to this challenge? I believe there is and it is simple, it is called Business On-Demand. Business On-Demand could very well the best things in business we can learn from children. This means operating your business to:
- make and get more for less (cost effectiveness)
- produce more for less cost (efficiency)
- pay only for what you really need (sensibility)
- shorten response time (agility and responsiveness)
- implement changes easier (flexibility)
- create new and exciting products/services (innovativeness)

So what is Business On-Demand? Is it another fad or a valid solution? Business On-Demand is making the most out of your business, getting the most for less cost. This is done by paying only for the things you really need, when you need it, where you need and how you need it. This also means the elimination of costly infrastructure such as service delivery platform (SDP). In SDPs this can be achieved through multi-tenant operations wherein more companies benefit from a single infrastructure instead of each single company having their own infrastructure.

Let's consider a simple analogy. Take into example houses in a small island where we designate (and correlate to real business that)
- the island is the money/funding
- houses are companies
- roads are SDP infrastructures
To go from one house to another the house owners would need to build a road to the other houses. Now if they work independently without collaboration they will be building a mesh network of roads while turning a big chunk of the island into roads that can not be used for other purposes. Now if they work in collaboration with each other they can build the most optimal road infrastructure that connects all houses with the least use of land. Which approach do you think is better?

Does this make sense to your business? If it does and I believe it will, then we have learned a very important lesson in business by seeing through the eyes of a child.