Synergise IT

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2006.

This is a truly fantastic book if you are interested in enterprise 2.0 / collaboration. This book rocks!

5 out of 5 stars.

Below are two book reviews I picked randomly:
Blogcritics
itmanagersjournal

Personally, I DO NOT think that facebook will be the next big thing in the enterprise environment. However, it will be part of the next big thing in the enterprise environment - after all facebook is about connecting people. I do believe that the next big thing in enterprise is about effective communication, connection and collaboration between different groups of employees/teams across geographical locations, time zones and cultures.

Organisations need to analyse their business operations and find out what can IT do to help them improve their processes which is aligned to the culture of the company. Though its relatively difficult for IT systems to provide sustainable competitive advantage (as competitors can replicate the technology relatively quickly in this highly advanced market), reducing information asymmetry within the organisation, providing the correct information at the correct time and improving work processes in the long run might provide some level of sustainable competitive advantage for the organisation. Work processes are different across organisations and unlike IT, its not easy to replicate the successful combination of IT, culture and work processes from one company to another.

Quote of the day:
Technology is only as smart as the person/team who developed it. - Sean Lew

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P.S. The quote has nothing to do with the post below.

Personally, as a technology consultant, I believe that technology is all too hard for the average person on the street. I am passionate about what I am doing and sometimes I struggle to learn new technology, ideas and just analysing some of these stuff can be a pain. So for the average Joe, wouldn’t this be too much for him?

For enterprise software, its even more complicated. It takes so much understanding, analysis, development, testing and support for the system and IT keeps changing, new stuff has to be implemented and new business rules.

I do believe that IT should be simplified. Instead of large Oracle / SAP implementation, SOA should be used. Build them in modules, change whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want - at a low cost. Data should be organised in a smart and logical way using Mike2.0. Websites/GUI should be 100% user friendly.

I do believe that IT is moving towards the path where everything is simplified for the user and more AI is built in to understand what the user is thinking off. One good example is when excite, lycos was around, searching for anything was hard. One needs to type in the correct phrase and understand search technology to get the results that one is expecting. Google made it simple.. just type and go.. and Google enhanced it by storing your search history and understanding your general needs thus providing a better search experience.

IT outsourcing has changed the IT industry dramatically, India’s strong economic growth is partially due to the huge IT investment made by large corporations worldwide from the simple call centre operations to global development centres for IT firms. The drivers for outsourcing are simple: cost-effective, better resource management, access to special skills and allowing the company to focus more on their core business.

What people do not see very often is that setting up something like this is not cheap and risks are rather high. Its not as simple as hiring a team in India, switching on the computers and start taking calls or programming. The team has to work well with the team at the head office. There are also other risks like culture, language and political issues in developing countries. Hiring a large team also means a fixed overhead every month.

However, mass collaboration allows organisations to acquire the right talent for the right job whenever the organisation needs it and they are allowed to source such talent worldwide. Anyone in the world can work for anyone as long as both parties agree to the salary paid and the expected delivery. There are some companies like programmermeetdesigner, odesk and elance that are providing similar services where you can outsource your web design and other IT requirements to any available people.

To bring this idea to the next level, organisations can start to think about doing this internally and search for people around the world to work on the organisation’s projects, provide good money for the expected deliverable and still be able to save cost and achieve similar results from outsourcing IT work to a developing country. There can be a team of five developers from five different countries arcoss 16 time zones working on the same project with the same objective.

Collaboration tools must be developed to help in the communication and excellent communication within the team would be the main success factor for mass collaboration. I do believe this is the next big thing in IT outsourcing - without the large risks, setup costs and fixed overheads. Someone in India or China would enjoy working from home in their PJs and earning similar salaries as compared a developed nation.

John McKendrick wrote an interesting review on Don Hinchcliffe’s predictions for Enterprise 2.0 for 2008.

As I followed this topic closely, it seems like IT is moving towards small SOA type development instead of large scale, end to end enterprise wide transformation. Traditionally, such large scale developments generally consist of multiple vendors and millions or billions of dollars being invested with high risks and great uncertainty. I am not saying that its the end of enterprise transformation, I just believe that organisations with a relatively stable IT infrastructure would rather develop components that adheres to the SOA framework than to embark on a large scale IT transformation.

So does this mean that large consulting firms like Accenture would be affected? Generally, these companies charge more than smaller firms and since smaller developments can be handled by small to mid sized consulting firms, which may be able to deliver the same or better quality work as compared to large consulting firms - this industry would be facing some fierce competition. Large consulting firms have to evolve to adapt to such changes. The cost of running a global company might be too high to be nimble to compete in local markets.

One way to make full use of a global firm is to make full use of resources worldwide. If you have worked in a consulting firms before, you would have realised that there are alot of people on the “bench” doing nothing when they are in between projects. Also, global firms have to make use of specific technical expertise around the globe to deliver higher quality work.