Gaming innovator Daniel Bobroff spells out how to become an IT superhero

It's the IT ABCs

The tech world is full of divisive figures. Marc Benioff. Larry Ellison. Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg. Daniel Bobroff.

That last one might not be familiar to you, but is well-known in video game circles. In the early 1990s, Bobroff pioneered a new way of building games and funding their production: in-game advertising. He was a leading figure behind (the admittedly terrible) Peperami game ‘Animal'.

Whatever your opinion on advergaming (and yes, even typing that word brought us out in a cold sweat), Bobroff's work changed the industry, with some titles today managing to secure funding in large part due to their advertising potential. Now he specialises in spotting the potential for innovation in other areas.

Managers need to make a career out of managing failure, because failure is going to give us knowledge, and knowledge is our unit of growth

All of the companies Bobroff rates highly share four qualities as foundations, and three qualities as ‘superpowers', he explained in his keynote speech at Computing's recent IT Leaders Summit.

The foundations are:

1. The customer is at the front and centre of what they do and why they exist. The modern customer demands immediacy, consistency and increasingly high-value experiences; ignoring that risks handing them to a competitor.
2. Be brave and take risks. "You need to understand that today, we are long-gone from the managers of old who were described in my day as wearing suits made of Teflon. Why? Because nothing bad would ever stick to them. Today, managers need to make a career out of managing failure, because failure is going to give us knowledge, and knowledge is our unit of growth."
3. Drop the silo mentality. Bobroff urged the audience to build cross-functional teams, to demystify themselves as ‘the bad guys' (everyone is familiar with IT as the department of ‘No').
4. Be agile - or lean, or whatever works for your team. "Do little increments fast. This is the engine of growth."

These are essential to success, Bobroff argued - but it is the superpowers - Convenience, Connectedness and Creativity - that make you stand out.

Convenience

Customers reward companies that make consumption easy, said Bobroff, drawing on the example of Gerry Thomas. Today, as many as 98 per cent of Americans eat "some form" of Thomas' (claimed) invention: the TV dinner.

Convenience boils down to four elements: Filters, Automation, Signals and Teams (FAST). Filters make it easier for customers to shop; automation improves efficiencies; actionable signals, or data, improve workflows - but must be accessible to everyone. Finally, ‘teams of one' (which we'll admit is a bit of a stretch, but was necessary to complete the acronym) mean focusing on personalisation.

Connectedness

This should come as no surprise to anyone with open eyes in the last decade. Being connected is all about pairing - and yes, there's an acronym for that, too.

P is for platforms and platform thinking. It requires a shift away from the pipeline processes that have dominated since the industrial revolution, where a company owns the means of production. Under the platform-based approach, ownership and control of assets are separate: see Uber, Airbnb and YouTube.

A is for augment: a big subject in the retail sector today. It means constantly striving to improve your environment, "whether you are a pure play online or you have stores as well."

The I is for integrate, which is all about building an ecosystem. Salesforce did this in the mid-2000s with AppExchange, which today handles close to $3 billion in transactions and is used by 89 per cent of Fortune 100 firms.

Bringing it all together is R - relating all of those technologies back to the consumer. Businesses must now accept that omni-channel, which was all about connecting the offline and online worlds, is dead. The new buzzword is ‘harmonic' retail, where the different journeys that customers can take can feed off and react with each other. Bobroff described it as "omnichannel 2.0."

Creativity

Creativity is the difference between seeing a cardboard box and a pirate ship; or between seeing a new technology and the products it can shape. "We are entering a new age of creativity, which is about finding the gems [opportunities]," said Bobroff.

The acronym here is GEM, unsurprisingly. G is for Gamification, which involves moving away from task-based to human-based design; E for Engagement is all about the sharing revolution ("Millennials and Gen Z are our barometer" said Bobroff, adding the Marc Benioff quote: "Loyalty is dead"); and M for Mobilise shows what people will do when they have sufficient motivation.

Bobroff fundamentally changed the gaming industry with his work, and said that anyone who masters the above elements would also be a game-changer. But he warned, "If we don't change the game, the game will change us."