Developing products is the heart of keeping a business viable. Simply producing the same old thing for years without acknowledging the changing directions of consumer tastes and innovation by the competition is a sure recipe for the slow, painful death of a business.
Perhaps the most common miscalculation made in businesses that flail as others thrive is being short-sighted in their view of the expenses incurred in the process of developing new products. The days of gathering everyone into a conference room for long hours of brainstorming and evaluating options are over. While this tried-and-true process has resulted in some of the most brilliant ideas on the market today, it is costlier and slower than modern cloud-based options.
Getting new things onto the market is now much easier, faster, and cheaper through the use of cloud technology. Even something as simple as editing a book can happen much faster because a writer in one country can get input from countless colleagues worldwide, all done online without using a single sheet of paper. When that process involves products for health care, aviation, or communications, the complexity grows to levels that only technology can manage.
The investment in flip charts and water pitchers has been replaced with industrial PC board specifications in company computers that expedite the movement of data from one contributor to another. This ability to get input from multiple players without ever physically bringing them together helps in three main ways.
Collaborative Development
While most firms have a core development team assigned to a project, they often seek the input of specialists or other knowledgeable individuals who can help create solutions for specific gaps in the process. By being able to move data quickly from one site to another via the internet, that tidbit of brilliance needed from someone thousands of miles away can be secured quickly and cheaply. The resulting product hits the market faster, performs better, and costs less to create.
With so many concerns about the security of cloud systems, hybrid networks that combine public and internal cloud storage make a helpful final ingredient to this process, permitting the data to be only as widely shared as management wants it to be. The key to the effectiveness of these systems is fast processing for heavy data loads, a component that is easily met with the powerful boards now available.
Security of Intellectual Property
On a broader note, overall project security is stronger with electronic collaboration. When complex diagrams or technical specifications must be physically sent from one user to another, there is always the potential for industrial espionage to intervene and steal or alter the product. The layers of security needed to protect files make them that much more demanding on networks and processors.
But a well-secured network allows these critical products to go around the world quickly and securely, keeping the company’s best ideas internal and away from the prying eyes of competitors and hackers. When a company’s computers can handle these large, rapid transactions, the product develops quickly and more cheaply than with older technology.
Distances Overcome
When those teams are formed, managers are sometimes in a quandary about where to place certain individuals. It can be tough to decide which projects should get the full investment of a particularly important person and the efforts that don’t get that help are viewed by their teams as less important. Damaging morale on top of denying resources can help kill a project faster than almost anything.
By being able to move information quickly from one project member to another through the cloud, teams can include multiple “hired guns” who step in to handle certain parts of the process. In this way, every project gets the benefit of the best minds on the staff, creating better products in every development effort.
There will always be value in getting a company’s best thinkers together in one place, sharing ideas and bouncing them off one another. But once the idea begins to take shape, there’s no need to burn through thousands of dollars in hotels and airline fares. Instead, the detailed work done as the project is farmed out among contributors can be executed independently, shared electronically, and finalized collaboratively in a system that is faster, cheaper, and more streamlined than once was impossible.
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