Vision/Drivers of Enterprise Transformation

At the turn of the 21st Century, converging social, technology and political changes demand profound changes in how organizations relate to their customers. These changes question many of the assumptions on which 20th Century businesses are built. To turn this situation to their advantage, executives need to approach enterprise transformation proactively and quickly.

21st Century transformation drivers*

• The enterprise as we know it will disappear—The stand-alone computers of the 1980s are all but gone, and the enterprise will follow a similar path. It will be inseparable from its partner network, which will have redundant providers so that the enterprise will not be dependent on any node.
• By 2015, 25-40%of enterprise business will be executed by global partner networks—And much innovation will come from the network. Outsourcing is a transitionary practice that enables companies to build collaborative practices while moving non value-add processes outside.
• India and China will emerge as innovation and intellectual property leaders by 2020—Making the world's products, services and living standards available in radically different means and social contexts will demand unprecedented innovation, and these countries' talent, motivation and need will create the perfect storm for an explosion of creativity and IP.
• Consumer offerings will be forcibly unbundled through 2015, wreaking havoc with business models—As ultra-wired consumers grow in buying power, they recommend an ever-increasing array of products to each other. They will demand product and service componentization, so they can create their own products and services collaboratively. Yesterday's music package was the "album." Today, consumers buy songs, publish playlists and shuffle their songs at will. How much longer before book chapters go this way? Cameras? Amplifiers? Autos? Cosmetics? Consumers will specify components and force mass customization.
• Corporate IT will be virtualized, removing the IT barrier to change—Today's servers, networks, routers and other gear will disappear as self-standing devices. Instead, they will be "represented" as icons on a console, and their services will be delivered by fast pools of processing, memory and storage resources that will be adjusted on the fly. This will enable unprecedented, deep information exchange and collaboration in the enterprise execution network.

*From the Transourcing™ Adoption Curve, forthcoming 2006