The World is Flat: A Presentation

This is a good summary presentation... worth having as a reference link.

The World Is Flat

View more presentations from Andi Boediman. (tags: insourcing education)

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Please feel free to adapt and extend the application of the ideas to your context..

Alignment Challenges

On Wednesday, we developed some initial ideas on multiple types of IT Strategy each focused on different modes of value creation--cost, profit, investment and growth.
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Here is a presentation that provides bit more details... It is dated April 2007 but the general ideas are still valid and applicable.

IT Strategy 2.0: Balancing Innovation and Implementation

View more presentations from Venkat Venkatraman. (tags: itstrategy 2.0)

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Please do feel free to add examples and edit the presentation as you see fit for your purpose.

Metcalf's law taken to a new level.

Today it seems that everything is made in China. When I was a child it seemed that everything was made in Taiwan, and the generation before me certainly can recall when it seemed that everything was made in Japan.

So, I would argue that China's economic rise is simply an inevitable cycle. I would also make the case that China and the U.S. are not direct economic competitors but rather complementary economies. U.S. economic power comes from the modularity and flexibility of its workforce that can add high end value, while China's comes from cheap labor, land and transportation for commodity-like products. In fact, one might even argue that the U.S. is more powerful because of the fact that other countries are mass producing products, thereby allowing the U.S. workforce to focus on higher end activities.

Brave new connections

Jan 28th 2009
From Economist.com

Will America's network power trump the Asian century?

EVERY few years a piece of writing comes along that throws the global intelligensia into a tizzy. The rise and fall of great powers gives way to the end of history, which must make room for a clash of civilisations. Tipping points and black swans abound. These days, the grandest notion making the rounds is Asia’s unstoppable rise coupled to America’s inevitable decline.

Into the mix comes a short, deceptively simple essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter (pictured), who recently stepped down as dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs to head the State Department's Office of Policy Planning. Ms Slaughter writes that power in the 21st century depends not so much on arms or wealth but on network connections. By this she means not just internet links, but physical ones such as immigrants have with their original countries, businesses with their trading partners, aid groups with the communities they serve and the like. Here, she believes, America has an extraordinary advantage.

More: http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/asiaview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13010794&fsrc=nwl

Outsourcing and Offshoring: A Viewpoint

Paul Willmott leads McKinsey's Business Technology Office in London. In this video he discusses the state of play in offshoring and outsourcing. He talks about live trends and how to make outsourcing deals work better.



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One difficult question for a CIO who wants to lead an Investment Center

Regarding our discussion in class about IT roles above the pure implementation line there is one question that might be interesting to answer. What is the new role of alliances between the business and its customers and suppliers if the new CIO needs to move his organization to an Investment Center?

Below the line, history has already been written by business accountants: “Do some benchmark” and find whether you need to make or buy (i.e. do it yourself or outsource). Above the line, it might be quite different: “There is no benchmark” so find who is prepared to take the risk with you. That seems to be tough. How do you convince your current customers or suppliers that you actually have a new innovation agenda and that you want to try with them? If any of these customers or suppliers denies your offer, are they no longer strategic partners for the business?

My answer comes from some leadership background. It's very fresh in my mind so that is why I'm using it and also because I thing it is very useful to frame a possible approach. Joshua Chamberlain, a US commander of the Union Army during the Civil War was awarded a Medal of Honor for his critical contribution in the battle of Gettysburg. Some historians think that his vision in a very specific moment during this battle changed the outcome of the war. In one of his famous speeches, he addressed to a group of twenty mutineers:

“There is nothing I can do today, we are moving up in a few minutes and we will be moving all day…I’ve told that if you don’t come I can shoot you. Well you know I won’t do that. Others can, but not me. We can surely use you. We are now well below half strength. Whether you fight or not is up to you. Whether you come along … well you are coming … We are here for something new, this has not happened much. What we are fighting for, in the end, we are fighting for each other. If you choose to join us and you want your muskets back you can have them. If you choose not to join us, well you can come along and when this is all over I’ll do whatever I can to see you get a fair treatment but for now we are moving out. Gentleman, I think that if we lose this fight, we lose the war. So if you choose to join us, I’ll be personally very grateful” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kdOKJXfTU4)

So there is a lot of humanity in IT, maybe more than buzzwords. To answer the questions in my own words I would certainly point to:

1) Be though with your IT goals (you are moving),

2) Be true about their novelty and about their risk (you are here for something new)

3) Make your organization's present critical for the future of everyone of your customers and suppliers but create mutually acceptable conditions (whether they come along or not is not the question. The question is whether they'll be active or passive).

Moore's law in a down economy

The Economist had an interesting article about Moore's law and how it applies during a recession. Essentially, rather than looking for increased performance at the same price, consumers want the same performance at a lower price. There's also a discussion of users moving towards "good enough" software to take advantage of cost savings. You can read the article here.

Interesting Slideshow about IT Management Objectives.

A slideshow about the current state of demands on IT in business.

It's interesting to see how this lines up with the McKinsey report on how IT is viewed as part of the business. For example:

The most popular top objective was cost reduction, by a 2-1 margin.

Granted, this is at the data center level, but it is probably symptomatic of the larger attitude toward IT detailed in the McKinsey report, which described less effort thinking about these assets strategically.

The Way to a Smarter Planet

This speech by the Chairman of IBM is an interesting read...and provides some useful ideas for our discussion on the new landscape and the context for IT strategy and its impact on business strategy.

Metcalfe's Law and Healthcare

To follow-up on my healthcare based comment from class, here a website for a company named Wellsphere that boasts around 4 million monthly unique visitors, according to TechCrunch. This company is an example of an innovator harnessing Metcalfe's law to change the heathcare industry through personalization and community interaction over a growing network.

From the company FAQ:

What is Wellsphere?

Wellsphere is the online destination for all your health information and support needs. You’ll find articles from the world’s best medical experts, patients bravely sharing their stories of survival, and inspiring healthy living professionals helping guide you toward a happy, healthy life. As a member, you can get your questions answered, have access to free tools to help you achieve your health goals, enjoy the support of our caring community, exchange tips and advice, find local resources, and have a chance to tell your own success story.

Most interestingly, Wellsphere also reports that:

"Wellsphere builds proprietary health community platforms to help large organizations improve their employees’ health, and reduce healthcare costs. Stanford University’s BeWell@Stanford platform – powered by Wellsphere at http://stanford.wellsphere.com – has demonstrated the power of community to engage tens of thousands of people in taking steps to improve their health and well-being. Within the Stanford community, Wellsphere’s BeWell platform has achieved incredible results, driving an unprecedented level of engagement in healthy activities and behaviors across Stanford’s faculty, staff and students. Wellsphere’s public community is beginning to replicate this success on a global scale."

As discussed in class, connectivity between patients could turn the healthcare model on its head to a more client or, as Mr. Barret of Intel says, "a customer-driven service." For example, networks give patients greater clout and will likely give rise to unmet needs because patients can now join together to create demands, share their unique knowledge and experiences, and give each other support. This networking and communication among patients was previously unavailable at such a large scale and speed.

Harnessing these networking/community based changes in healthcare requires a tomorrow based approach that healthcare providers would be wise to balance with their today planning to facilitate innovation before other competitors win in this emerging space. The key question is how business will use IT to enable these innovative changes in a similar way that technology facilitates Wellsphere's virtual network.

Congestion Tax in Stockholm

One of the issues that were mentioned in the articles about IBM and innovation was congestion and how urban areas are having to tackle this problem despite the "world getting smaller" through connectivity.

I was just in Stockholm, Sweden where they after a trial in 2005-06 now have installed a permanent congestion tax. The trial was one of the first, which have now been copied by many other cities, and it essentially entailed setting up sophisticated tolls around all of the inner city of Stockholm. The toll varies depending on the day you enter and exit the city with rush hour having the highest charge. It uses technology to read the license plate and then cross-references them against the equivalent of the RMV to bill the owners (which is also automated) and in the permanent version, you don't even need a transponder to communicate with the system.

Despite a big debate and initial public opposition to the project, it's been deemed successful in alleviating congestion and some more details about how the technology works and the positive results can be found in these two articles:

Swedish Road Administration: Congestion Tax in Stockholm

IBM: How it Works

Knowledge Control

I was thinking of an intersting idea from the GIO reading for today that we didn't mention; The idea that keeping knowledge or ideas restricted to the inside of a company limits that knowledge, people, and ulitmately society in general.  I can see how this would be true as letting the info out allows other perspectives to take it and improve it for the benefit of all (open source) - however as I think about this in application in the business world, much of the business world today is build around a company learning something, holding on to it, and deriving large parts of their company value from that information.  To release and share this knowledge would require businesses to have a much more global, "what's better for the world is better for us" type of view that doesn't seem realistic any time soon.  It seems to me that the structures of the business world in the US, backed by capitalism and shareholders demanding maximum value, is very very far away from taking such a global view.  Yet, there are examples like open source software that illustrate how this could work.  I have really no conclusion to make here, just bringing up the topic which I found interesting.  I'd love to hear anyone's thougths on it.

Welcome to IS714 (Spring 2009)

This is the first blogpost for the course. Please feel free to add to the discussions, bring up relevant topics as well as URL Links as you see fit to make our discussions productive and worthwhile beyond the class discussions.
Thanks.