The term ecosystem is a cliche of the day, but its very ubiquitousness illustrates its core truth: the nature of interactions among economic actors is changing dramatically. It may be summarized as: digital interactions are replacing analog interactions. The very simplicity of the formulation belies the profound shift it represents -- and the way it changes how companies interact with their customers, vendors, partners, influencers, various government entities, and on and on. One way of describing this change is to characterize it as the replacement of analog interactions by digital ones -- which means the role of an organization's computer applications must change to reflect and support that replacement.

The illustration above depicts what has changed. In the distant past (i.e., the year 2000), inter-company interactions were carried on in an analog fashion: a user phone call into a call center; a sales conversation with a prospect, a document shipped overnight to an outside service provider like an attorney. An employee of the company could then turn the analog interaction into a digital one -- an invoice, a CRM notation, a memo placed into the document repository system.

I got a view of that in a discussion I had with Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net, last week. Box.net is an online collaboration system, which bills itself as the "anti-Sharepoint." Really, it's a much more approachable, much less complicated application, hosted in the cloud, which facilitates the new kind of cross-boundary collaboration. It is built for the new digital interaction world, while Sharepoint labors under the limitations imposed because it was designed for the old intra-company collaboration.

Levie noted that many of the company's enterprise customers use Box.net to quickly set up cross-company working groups -- for example, the marketing department of one company working with an outside media company -- with the documents, digital media, and other artifacts that are the basis for the collaboration being stored (and shared) from Box.net. The headache of setting up Sharepoint to support this quick working party creation -- how to get the other party's personnel (not to mention other parties with specialized personnel that are also involved in the project) into the identity management systems, with the firewalls configured, etc., etc., etc. militate against its use.

Today, instead of an analog transaction being translated into an internal digital one, the initial transaction is carried on digitally, typically with the external party interacting directly with the company's own systems. This implies:

• Much more direct and much quicker interactions. Coalitions, consortia, partnerships all come (and go) very quickly -- because the systems support quick inter-company setup and tear down.
• More accurate records. When the customer can directly input what he or she wants, there's less possiblity of transcription errors by the intervening party (e.g., the sales rep).
• Much richer interaction. When multiple parties can directly and quickly work on shared documents, creativity goes up as timeframes go down.
• New business initiatives. As companies become more familiar and comfortable with the capabilities of the supporting systems, new business initiatives become possible and are created, since they are no longer hampered by the previously existing barriers of technology overhead.

The transition from analog outside/digital inside to all-digital interactions is changing the way we do business, the expectations placed upon company IT systems, the amount of data companies will need to manage, and the nature of collaboration itself. I expect the trend will accelerate in the future.

• Bernard Golden's blog
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