Our focus much of the time in business these days is about strategies to deal effectively with the latest disruptive tech — that it’s up to us to have an abundantly clear vision of the big picture of what we’re actually aiming for as a whole. This is particularly true now since the choices we make today on how we build and evolve our businesses will either lead us to 1) break out of the box and thrive or 2) just make incremental improvements that are unlikely to propel us towards a sustainable and successful future. Key to this discussion is this question: Are we building businesses? Or are we building platforms? Of course the answer to both is yes, but most of us still possess a very 20th century notion of what a business is. We think of business in very solitary, disconnected terms, where partners can’t rapidly connect with us and integrate their supply chains, where we can’t even readily reuse and build upon what we have ourselves, and most of our data and systems are closed off from us and each other. Unfortunately, we now live in a new time and this is no longer an option. In the big data era, those days are definitively over. For a good backstory, I urge you to read Steve Yegge’s epic and widely discussed rant recently about how Google doesn’t get platforms (and how Amazon does). I think it clearly conveys the new chess board that next-generation enterprises must be playing on. From: Are We Building Businesses? Or Are We Building Platforms? Yes. | On Web Strategy See Also: 2012 Is Shaping Up As the Year of Open APIs | ebizQ Consumerization in 2012: Cloud and mobile blurs into other people's IT | ZDNet This Year’s Ten Digital Strategies for the Next-Generation Enterprise | On Web Strategy Transforming Software Architecture for the 21st Century | Slideshare Connecting Digital Strategy with Social Business and Next-Gen Mobility | Collaboratory