Since there is nothing going on here. Here is food for thought courtesy of John Unwin's blogspot http://jdunwin.blogspot.com/
Three Value Disciplines
While thinking about the way my start-up company (KaiTrade) works, I was driven to ask the question: what sort of organization are we? and decided to look at an approach where you analyse things in terms of three value disciplines:
1 Operational Excellence
This is characterized by supply chain optimization, stressing efficiency and reliability. For example, in the case of a fast food corporation or large retailers – the financial goal is increasing ROI. These organizations hold critical skills and control at the centre of the business with less emphasis on empowerment. The systems in use support command and control, standard operating procedures and quality management.
2 Customer Intimacy
In this case the organization concentrates on customer service. They focus on the needs of individual customers as with, for example, a boutique store. Their goal is to reduce their margins; operationally the firm will focus skills at its boundaries (the customer) and will significantly empower its people. Management systems will seek to measure customer equity and satisfaction, and will provide a single view of customers, seeking to find new market segments and offerings – they will employ a wide range of distribution channels, including social networking.
3 Product Leadership
In this case an organization will be driven by product development and time to market - for example BMW and Nokia. They will have an organic structure and will value technical excellence. Management will focus on risk and on rewarding innovation; key IT systems will support collaboration and simulations. The organization’s goals will concentrate on increasing market cap.
In our case, the boundaries are blurred, with product leadership taking the primary position, followed by customer intimacy – since we must deliver the latest technology and high performance for algorithmic trading systems, yet need to accommodate customers’ (traders) individual needs.
It is certainly true that operational excellence is a vital characteristic of the trading process in terms of handling high volumes of messages and orders, and we have chosen to work with our customers’ (larger firms and institutions) existing transaction-based systems rather than try to provide an end-to-end system ourselves.
In this way, we concentrate our core competencies on the value disciplines where we can make the biggest impact and complement the disciplines that our clients do best.
Understanding our own value discipline helps us identify what matters when making business decisions: what we can do to incease value, how we partner to benefit from the value others add, how we use our resources, and which target markets we engage.
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