Accelerating Forces Buffet the Enterprise
Volatility of customer wants and diversity of markets around the world will increasingly demand that enterprises innovate if they want to remain relevant because their current product introduction and innovation processes are woefully insufficient. In addition, several “structural enablers” are driving down the cost of collaboration—globalization, enterprise software maturation, e-collaboration tools and BPM solutions. I think it’s beyond dispute that “emerging” markets around the world look at India as a model, and there will be a cascading wave of new outsourcing providers entering the market in the years ahead, keeping downward pressure on supplier prices and forcing increased innovation across the supplier value chain. For example, many educated young people in these markets are native with e-collaboration tools, which should lead to new models of collaboration. SOA and Web services are increasingly ingrained in enterprise software, opening up legacy and new solutions to web-based, granular sharing of information. BPM, because it digitizes an increasing spectrum of the business process, is an enabler of outsourcing.
Reposition Outsourcing as Iterative Transformation
Outsourcing in 2006 is where e-business was in 1998, when the Internet was a tech playground in the mid-late 90s. The mission of “e-business strategy” was […]
Jim Champy, author of many management bestsellers, including Reengineering the Corporation, led a fascinating discussion 18 April 2006 at Chicago’s Standard Club, sponsored by Perot Systems. Beginning with the presentation, “Doing Business in a Flat World: An Exploration of the Next Era in Globalization,” Jim gave attendees an invaluable perspective on how executives needed to reengineer reengineering for the knowledge economy. He highlighted past transformational efforts in the industrial economy (the original reengineering) and focused on how to achieve change in the knowledge economy. As usual, I will summarize key points of the discussion first and follow up with my insights.
Reengineering: 20th Century
In the 80s and 90s, reengineering helped businesses improve their business processes. For example, an insurance company regularly required 24 days to issue a policy because 13 departments were involved, each of which had optimized processes for itself, not the enterprise (or the customer). In fact, to issue the policy took ten minutes of actual work; the rest was administrative time. Today, business models of the industrial era are becoming obsolete, but most companies haven’t yet changed how they manage their businesses. A default method of drastic organization change, often employed by IBM and many others, […]
The emerging knowledge economy will reconfigure the role of discovery in innovation in some surprising ways. First, a couple corollaries:
For most of the history of mankind, information has been scarce, and an important way that people innovated was through discovery. In agrarian and industrial economies, it was extremely important to discover new ways to transform raw materials in order to create new products. Since people lived in relative isolation compared to today, there was significant duplication of discovery efforts in pockets around the world. The pervasive TCP/IP network (i.e. Internet), combined with accelerating adoption of modern architectural approaches (i.e. service-oriented architecture) and messaging (Web services and XML) is unlocking the world’s data/information as a dizzying pace. It’s a cliché that we have too much information, and this trend shows no sign of abating. Moreover, software tools for automating the management of information are improving all the time. Of course, this development gives people an unprecedented ability to collaborate—on everything.
In the knowledge economy, discovery gets leveraged, pervasively and instantaneously. Discovery will remain extremely important to creating value, but I’m going to argue that it will play a cameo role in the hyper-innovation knowledge economy: crucial but supporting.
Anyone attending […]
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