Synergise IT

Microsoft has been the market leader in operating systems and their office suite amongst many other products, however looking back in the past couple of years, Microsoft hasn’t been innovating much. Vista was a total let down, there wasn’t any too revolutionary about this platform except for its enhanced UI. Try the Mac OS X or even the free Linux on the Asus eee PC and you will be understand that Vista is nothing too special. I would like to call Vista the “super pro XP”

With Office 2007 costing ~$500 its pretty expensive for a tool that is slowly becoming free on the market with Zoho, Google Docs and Open Office in the market, the cost of $500 is looking less attractive. I do not foresee that Microsoft losing its market share in this area anytime soon but competitors are giving Microsoft is giving a go for its money.

Google and Salesforce has just partnered together to deliver Google Apps for SalesForce. In a relatively bizarre, but totally logical, partnership, Google apps would be infront of Salesforce’s one million paying business subscribers, and in return, Salesforce would be attracting “tens of millions” of business users on Google Apps. With this partnership, a company can reduce the amount of Mircosoft office suites being purchased and can get access to a word processor free of charge if the company is already subscribed to SalesForce. (Google Apps also has a cut down free version for the general public). See video below.

I reckon that for the continual survival of Microsoft has to innovate and challenge the market. There are great innovators out there like Google, Jive Software and many others. Microsoft needs to learn from some of the top innovators and challenge their products both on features and price. Having said this, they can choose to continue to doing whatever they are doing and still there will be heaps of people out there that would continue to by their stuff due to a strong brand name. They win either ways… Its a question of how much they win by.

E-commerce Times wrote a summary of the Enterprise / Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008 based on a Forrester article.

Interesting enough most of the stuff that organisations are interested in are relatively cheap. Social networks and RSS is something that any advance geek within the IT department can cook up within a couple of weeks. What I would be interested to see is how and which part of the organisation are companies applying business mashups to. Business mashups is clearly very powerful. With mashup applications going into exisiting data stores and aggregating / manipulating / processing data and displaying to the end user. This is a much cheaper way than doing a full fledge IT transformation.

Another thing that really interest me is whether these initiatives within the company is driven by employees (bottom-up) or by the senior management (top-down). In both cases, the implementation would be slightly different and I would like to know the adoption rate of both the implementation approaches. I believe that 2008 will be an extremely interesting year for Enterprise / Web 2.0 within the organisation. Stay tuned

I am currently halfway through this book and I must say that this is extremely insightful for people who are in the consulting industry. Even though I am an IT consultant, I feel that this book is target for any kind of consultant. Its about problem solving skills and the method to go about solving an complicated and complex problem. It studies ex-Mckinsey consultants and survey them on the way a Mckinsey consultant operates.

I have gone through advanced academic research and found alot of the ideas present is very similar however with a business twist to it. For example, academic research is really about getting the stats and the information spot on. However, its written in the Mckinsey Mind that ballpark figures can be accepted. Everything makes alot of sense and it really helped me apply my academic research skills to business research and problem solving.

I do recommend this book to anyone who wishes to advance their business problem solving skills at a high level.

Just another wondering thought would organisations treat resource/talent just like a supply chain in future - specifically a Just-In-Time supply chain?

Since Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing model has been highly successful in the market place and with enterprise 2.0 ideas, getting to JIT resource management might be possible as resource hunting can be extended to the whole world.

What do you think?

While some senior management believes that ‘ignorance is bliss’ and not letting employees have access to privately held information is seen as something that will result in less ‘trouble’ created by employees and also a way of retaining power within the senior management.

However, being an IT professional and also a knowledge worker, we are not the factory worker at Henry Ford’s factory in the early 1900s where people where told what they have to do each day and following strict instructions, lunch timings and toilet breaks. Many jobs have moved into something much more flexible and encourages employees to think out of the box and raise any concerns if it arises.

So is ‘ignorance is bliss’ better than ‘information is power’?

Personally, I believe its really up to the individual and the person’s attitude towards work and life. Surely, having lesser information and not knowing so much equates to less thinking and brain activity. While more information means more thinking.

To some degree, I believe that this applies to organisations as well.

Interesting enough, I have seen a good amount of fear mongering in the IT industry through working with multiple vendors in a large project. From pitching solutions to clients to hiring a potential employee, I believe its a widely used practice around. I have heard this too many a times. Please bear in mind I am NOT referring to a CEO, vice president or directors. I am referring to the senior managers and managers on the ground.

For example, another vendor said something like this “If you do not spend $500,000 on this functionality, you will be outdated and potentially lose alot of customers.” In this instance, when you look at the numbers, it doesn’t tally up nicely. Half a Million for a functionality that would save approx $20,000 a year and less than 1% of the client base is expected to use it. These people are really good at instilling fear into the management who doesn’t understand much about IT. If you do not do this, you will be screwed… and interesting enough many a times they manage to get a useless functionality into the system.

The problem with IT is that alot of the mid - senior people in IT used to be developers / architects but many of them do not have extensive education, training and experience in managing the details of accounting, finance and economics. We do need to understand more in terms of how technology and money can work together for the benefit of the company. At the end of the day its not how fast your system can process a workflow but how much money can you make out of the whole system.

I believe that Enterprise 2.0 can be a strategic system to a certain extent. However this is not purely based on the IT side of enterprise 2.0 only. As I have described here and here, there is much more to E2.0 than just the tech side of things. After all, systems that deal with E2.0 is generally not very complicated.

If an organisation can make all their employees working as one and delivering the information required at the right time with clear transparency across the organisation, decisions made would be of much higher quality. However, releasing information might be seen as a power loss / threat to the senior management. After all, information is power. Personally, I do think that a person’s capability is not based on how much information the person holds but more about how the person makes full use of the information on hand.

With a strong flow of information across the organisation, people can better decide on their course of action that would fit into the larger picture of things and as this builds up, the organisation would be constantly making better decisions thus achieving competitive advantage. There would be alot of cultural change in this space that is required but I do believe it is achievable especially if the company is predominantly younger people.

One thing that struck me recently was “Why would businesses implement Enterprise 2.0?” From the business perspective, spending money on a system should return one of the following:

1) Make more money
2) Save money
3) Increase efficiency (streamlining business process, reduce redundancy, capture knowledge…)

Depending on what the enterprise 2.0 project is about, it must satisfy some or all of the above, otherwise I do not see value in the project. For example, FaceBook (by itself) within a company is not quite useful. It basically just links people up so that employees have one more communication tool (or bitching channel). However, if Facebook is integrated with, assuming, wiki or KM, then it would potentially capture knowledge and increase efficiency. All these really depends on what the proposed project is all about.

No matter what we as technologist do, we must satisfy the basic premise of business - improve the bottom line (directly or indirectly).

I have heard about this term too many times and know what its about on the surface. On Friday, I had a conversation with Michael and he was explaining to me how social graph and resource management can be implemented hand in hand.

After reading Dion Hinchcliffe post on - The Social Graph: Issues and Strategies in 2008, I am convinced the social graph is a great tool to improve the efficiency of an IT consulting firm. Let me explain.

IT consulting firms relies greatly on good resource management - delivering the correct resource to the right place at the right time. Traditionally, this is done by the senior management and also the HR team where they control staff movement across projects and geographical locations. This is hard work as to the HR team, staff members is just another name, another resume, another head they can stick into a project to earn money. Feedback is seldom received from staff members until the news is broken to them.

For resource management to work well, a collaborative effort must be used. Employee / project managers should actively plan their schedule ahead, look for projects that interest them, use the social graph to get in contact with the relevant project managers or use it to get in contact with other resources on the team to find out more. With this approach, there will be less work for the HR team, less headache for the management team and achieve greater efficiency across the organisation.

I am not saying that the social graph is the answer to great resource management, but I am saying its one of the required tools to create a great resource management process. It helps to link people up and allow people connect to each other and allowing them to search for a project that they are interested in and capable of doing. A excellent resource management tool is a strategic tool and not just a back end process.

The internet boom since the mid 90s is more than 10 years now and kids and youth nowadays are more techno savvy than many adults. Just for example, I was in Singapore a month back and a primary school boy was chatting to someone on msn via his mobile phone in a train. There is also an advert on TV in Australia that says by the time a child is eight years old, the child would have taken in more information than their grand parents in a lifetime (not sure if this is true though).

I work in a consultancy firm with alot of young people and for us to learn how to setup and use wikis, blogs and stuff like that is just so simple. However, at my client’s project, getting some of the older folks to work on excel spreadsheet can be a nightmare. Adoption of technology is just much slower with the baby boomers - in general.

Therefore I would like to infer that if your organisation is predominantly younger people, Gen X / Y, then then likelihood of enterprise 2.0 to work is higher.