After the separation of China and Taiwan, Ali's major adjustments came to an end.
Ali Group has recently carried out a round of adjustment and diversion of the group's technology, finance, human resources, marketing and other middle-end businesses.
Ali Zhongtai is divided into technical middle platform and organizational middle platform. The technology center is mainly used to improve development efficiency and reduce development costs; the organization center brings various functional businesses into the group.
In this adjustment, the CTO line that assumes the role of "technical middle platform" is divided into two:
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"Data Center" became an independent subsidiary of Aicheng Technology, with former Alibaba CTO Wu Zeming (nickname: Fan Yu) as CEO. The new company needs to develop its own business and market, and be responsible for its own profits and losses;
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The teams of "Business Center" were merged into Taotian Group (namely Taobao Tmall Commercial Group), and merged with the original Taobao technical line team according to specific businesses such as marketing and trading.
According to "LatePost", after the adjustment, Wu Zeming's jurisdiction has not changed much. Yu Gang (nickname: Ruohai), head of the technical line of Taotian Group, still reports to Wu Zeming. Wu is also in charge of the local life business technology line.
Ali Group's "organization middle desk" (functional line) adjustments include:
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Most of the employees of the customer service and experience department managed by CCO (Chief Customer Officer) Zheng Junfang (nickname: Shitai) were merged into the customer service center of Taotian Group, and Wang Mingqiang, the former head of the platform, strategy and operation center and vice president, was in charge. A number of middle and senior managers (director level) resigned, and some employees were laid off.
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After the adjustment, CPO (Chief Talent Officer) Jiang Fang is only responsible for the salary center, organizational culture department, and human resources business of a few departments such as Hema and Cainiao. A large part of the original CPO line team was merged into Taotian Group Human Resources Center.
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CFO (Chief Financial Officer) Xu Hong is still in office and continues to be in charge of the group's finances, but the finances of the spun-off business groups no longer report to him. Each business group appoints its own CFO, who reports directly to the business CEO. For example, Li Bo, the head of Taocaicai, took over as the CFO of Taotian Group and reported to Dai Shan, CEO of Taotian Group.
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CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Dong Benhong continues to serve as CMO of Ali Group. However, most of the marketing department of Alibaba Group was assigned to Alibaba Cloud Group; the media department responsible for advertising was reduced from hundreds of people to more than ten people. The former marketing department was renamed as the strategic development department, and only the Olympic group and the strategic customer group were retained.
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CRO (Chief Risk Officer) Zheng Junfang (nickname: Shitai) led some employees to join Alibaba Cloud. Part of the remaining team will stay in Taotian Group, and part will form a security company to operate independently.
Ali first proposed the concept of Zhongtai in 2015, which provided basic technology and general capability support for various businesses. However, as the group's businesses become more and more diversified, this system can no longer solve all problems.
A typical new retail business such as Hema Xiansheng, because its discount method and logic are different from those of e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall, a lot of adaptive transformation needs to be done after invoking the capabilities of the middle platform, which will reduce its transaction efficiency.
The growth of Pinduoduo, Douyin e-commerce, and Meituan also reminds Ali that Taobao and Tmall need more independent decision-making power, and other businesses also need to have a more agile ability to respond to market changes.
In recent years, Ali has begun to try to thin the middle platform, including changing the functional positioning of the business middle platform and splitting the organizational middle platform. In 2023, after the overall split of Ali Group into "1+6+N", each business group will have its own CEO and independent board of directors, and the decentralization of the group's technology and functions will make their organizational system more complete. The "big, middle and Taiwan" system has finally become history.
1. After the listing, the technology "big, medium and Taiwan" once improved Ali's profitability
Alibaba's strategy of "large, medium and small front desks" has its historical background. In 2015, Taobao Tmall has become China's largest e-commerce platform with more than 400 million users and nearly 3 trillion yuan in GMV.
At the same time, their business systems have become complex to a certain extent, with more than one billion products, millions of merchants, and thousands of categories. They need to span publishing, trading, marketing, stores, and payment to sell a product. , After-sales and other dozens of business systems, which lead to slower and slower responses to business needs.
In 2009, Ali established the "Shared Business Division", which is mainly responsible for the development of general functions that are used by most businesses.
At that time, the "Hundred Regiment War" among online group buying platforms started. The business department used its accumulated large number of users, transactions, products and evaluation related capabilities, and only called a dozen employees to launch for Ali in one and a half months. Group buying platform "Juhuasuan".
Zhong Hua, a former middleware architect at Ali, once recalled in the book "The Way of Enterprise IT Architecture Transformation" that in mid-2015, Ma Yun led the group's executives to visit the game company Supercell in Helsinki. The $1.5 billion annual profit company has a team of fewer than 200 people.
With the help of its middle platform after precipitating game development materials and algorithms, Supercell has almost no management role involved in the game development process, and the iteration is very fast. This shocked Ali executives a lot.
At the end of 2015, Ali Group officially launched the "2018 China-Taiwan Strategy", and established a China-Taiwan business group to support front-end businesses such as Taobao Tmall, Cainiao, and Alibaba Cloud. Group CTO Zhang Jianfeng served as the president of the business group.
In the following three years, the China-Taiwan business group successively established "Data Center" and "Business Center", in which the Data Center stores, calculates, and commercializes various business data, and finally forms data capabilities for the front-end business to quickly call, such as Algorithmic model capabilities such as price and inventory, data security capabilities such as authority management and risk management; the business center refines and integrates the core capabilities of each business, and finally abstracts a batch of common capabilities that can be shared, such as the established users and transactions. , commodity, marketing, logistics and other business modules.
With the support of Zhongtai, the wholesale website 1688, which was launched in 1998, finally had marketing technology capabilities in 2017. The situation of AliExpress is also very similar. Wang Mingqiang (nickname: Sihan) who came from Taobao in 2018 tried to use the capabilities of China and Taiwan to transform this overseas product with a simple technical structure.
In 2020, Zhang Yong, Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO of Alibaba, said in an internal sharing that the "bayonet fight" style of play on the front line is a thing of the past. thousands of miles". He also mentioned that in the five years since the start of the construction of China Taiwan, the cost of various businesses has been reduced several times.
In the last quarter of 2020, Ali's operating profit exceeded US$7.5 billion, five times that of the same period in 2014. This is also a few years in which Ali has operated relatively smoothly. Dangerous competitors have surfaced, but they have not yet threatened the profitability of the group.
2. In 2018, there was discussion on weakening the technical middle ground
In the early days, the technology center improved the utilization efficiency of the group's technical resources and avoided the repeated creation of wheels in various businesses; however, as it had to undertake more and more demands, its efficiency gradually became low, and its relatively single ability began to be difficult. Match Ali's increasingly diversified business.
Take the business platform "Jushi Tower" as an example. It was originally established to provide general capabilities for e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall. However, new retail businesses such as Tmall Supermarket and Hema Xiansheng will be very complicated to call.
In terms of transactions, Hema Xiansheng involves offline credit card payment, and this set of technical capabilities can not provide support. The same problem happened to Lazada, Xianyu, Cainiao, and Alibaba Cloud.
In 2018, Ali began to discuss whether to reform Zhongtai in a small area. Two years later, then CTO Cheng Li (nickname: Lu Su) organized the group’s technical committee and more than 30 business CTOs to hold a meeting to discuss the efficiency of Zhongtai. question.
A CTO of Ali's business line who participated in the meeting told "LatePost" that one of the topics at the time was "de-centering Taiwan", and there were both opposition and support opinions. After a day of debate, everyone reached a consensus: China and Taiwan should be thinner.
The above-mentioned CTO explained that the original business center would intervene in the business process and directly develop work software for the business team.
After the adjustment, the business center only provides lower-level technical capabilities, allowing the technical teams of each business department to develop specific software on this basis. After this adjustment, the team in the business center has been reduced by nearly half, while the data center has retained a size of 600 to 700 people.
Starting in 2020, more and more innovative businesses have begun to abandon the middle office and form their own technical teams. For example, Taote, which is known as the "special zone" business, if it puts forward a demand to the middle office, it has to wait in line for at least one to two months to get a response; and when it sets up its own product and technical team, all needs can be solved immediately .
In terms of the spin-off of the "organization middle office" with functional business as the core, Ali proposed "diversified governance" at the end of 2021 to replace the management idea of "big middle office and small front office".
Among them, the HR and public relations of Ali's various businesses have changed from reporting to the relevant person in charge of the group to reporting to the presidents of each business.
The human resources department has also introduced a general salary package system. The unified recruitment function of the group has been delegated to each business. Each business president has to consider how to allocate the budget, how many people to recruit, and what the recruitment standards are.
After this round of spin-off, each business group of Ali will strive to operate independently. When Ali is no longer a large group that advances and retreats together, it no longer needs a middle office. (end)