As most of you know, our Best Practices document starts with “Strategic Management” in the first chapter. It asks, “Does the integrator have a clear strategic planning process?”
The CSIA board practices what it preaches. During the in-person board meeting held Oct. 25-27 in Madison, Wisconsin, we reviewed our main strategic topics with a medium-long term perspective.
Prior to the meeting we had outlined four main themes and assigned them to sub-groups to prepare in advance to lead full-board discussions. Thanks to the thorough preparations we had very productive discussions. The output of the meeting will make its way into an updated strategic plan to guide our actions in the near to medium term.
These were the themes:
1. Membership scope and global expansion
2. CSIA Certification/Best Practices/training
3. End-user/client reach
4. Web presence and content strategy (including the Industrial Automation Exchange)
As you know, these are not new themes. Over the years we have generated good ideas from our discussions and special task forces. Our strategic plan attempts to build into a plan and implement based on available resources. Some of the challenges we face today are not new and it would be false to claim that in the past we haven’t tried to tackle them. If we get to move the needle in the right direction we will have made progress.
While these themes have been around us for a while, the environment for system integrators (SIs) is changing rapidly. We may be facing a very real growth opportunity, perhaps similar to what the system integration market faced when large end users opted to outsource their SI services starting in the 1990s. That led to a wave of new SI company creation and significant business growth for the existing ones. The present opportunity is developing through the confluence of important technology and social trends. There are real underlying drivers behind heavily promoted terms like IoT, IIoT, Smart Manufacturing and Industrie 4.0. SIs will continue to deliver the critical role of integrating disparate systems into real solutions required by end users and in the process ensure broad adoption of technology across the board. What is changing dramatically is the scope of work, which includes areas that were previously off-limits. Borderlines between domains keep changing. In addition the market will push for different business models that shift the delivery toward subscription-like services. With the increase of IT everywhere, a more extensive use of open platforms and open sharing is expected. In short, real value added by SIs is shifting and we will have to adapt if we want to not only survive but thrive.
On this note I would like to invite you to attend the November 24 business webinar “Demystifying smart manufacturing: Getting past the hype to reality” by Mike Yost, president, MESA International.