Peter Sondergaard opened the analyst firm’s vaunted annual Symposium/ITxpo this week by admonishing CIOs to prepare for a consumer shift that will reverse the current state in which business and government control customer and constituent relationships. As reported by eWeek, Gartner’s head of global research didn’t pull any punches: businesses will have to earn the right to justify premium offerings by empowering consumers:
 “The impact of consumerization is the most important trend impacting IT in the next 10 years,” Sondergaard remarked. “There will be a shift in culture reflecting the dominance of the ‘digital natives.’ Consumer technology will be integrated into (the) home, home office, in transit or recreational areas, and users will initiate interactions from all of these settings.”
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If you have started to get the feeling that something new and big is afoot in the consumer Web world, no, you’re not having flashbacks to 1997
 Web 2.0 is a new phenomenon that is beginning to realign the balance of power between producers/providers of products/services and customers because it enables customers to self-organize and wield unprecedented influence in the market. “Web 2.0” refers to a group of (usually) free user-friendly Web applications like blogs, wikis, integrated video/phone services and social networking sites (more below) that enable individuals to connect, collaborate and concatenate with unprecedented ease. E-Commerce (doesn’t it sound quaint now?) first enabled consumers to gain a new level of information about products and services and, as adoption proceeded, to buy over the Web. That was “Web 1.0” and it was still largely one-way communication because information flowed from the Web to customers. “Web 2.0” is focused on letting individuals self-organize, interact, collaborate and be equal players in what aficionados call “the conversation” of the Web.
Before you B2B-focused readers yawn and turn the page, consider that this will turn […]
Part of the IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest Report
 The Williams Companies is a Fortune 200 energy company that currently distributes 12% of all the natural gas consumed in the United States and is a major employer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Marcia MacLeod, Vice President of Business Process Outsourcing, and Karen Caldwell, Director for Energy & Utilities at IBM, explained how the company pulled a Houdini in the early 2000s, using outsourcing to survive a near-death experience in which its stock dropped from $48 to less than one dollar. This case reflected outsourcing’s potential in dramatic turnaround situations while confronting some outmoded stereotypes about its impact on local employment.
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Part of the IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest Report
IDC analysts Brian Bingham and Barry Rubenstein cited extensive IDC research to describe how outsourcing is developing as a business practice. Although they didn’t explicitly delve into adoption itself, their treatment of ITO (IT outsourcing) and BPO (business process outsourcing) provided significant insight into how outsourcing is being adopted by global enterprises. ITO is several years ahead of BPO for several reasons, namely that IT has traditionally been managed as a support function and cost center in most enterprises and, as such, it has been a textbook candidate for outsourcing. BPO is often more intertwined with the business’s core competencies; in addition, it almost always requires sophisticated IT support. Clearly, ITO had well publicized failures in the early 2000s, but this proved to be part of the normal learning curve, and ITO successes have emboldened buyers and providers to push further into the business. This contrast between ITO and BPO patterns is particularly instructive.
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At the turn of the 21st Century, converging social, technological 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 how they create value for their customers, quickly and proactively. They must build a collaborative network of partners to discover, design and deliver differentiated experience to customers.
The new meaning of customer experience Pervasive e-business and global sourcing are creating new centers of excellence for knowledge, services and manufacturing around the world—these clusters of people and companies are technology-enabled, well educated and highly motivated. They will impact incumbents in several ways: 1) they represent new collaborative resources that can add significantly to the enterprise expertise network; 2) they are developing into high-growth consumer markets; 3) they will create new offerings that may change the rules of your business since their companies do not have legacy organizations and cost structures. Web 2.0 is mobilizing customers in high-value mature markets—”Web 2.0″ technologies are user-friendly, collaborative tools and work processes that enable customers to connect with each other and collaborate spontaneously. Examples are […]
Clear Outsourcing Adoption Curve Emerges
The IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest convened sourcing thought leaders from global enterprises, world-class outsourcing providers and IDC’s leading analysts in Chicago September 11-12, 2006. They shared pioneering experiences that are pushing the transformational boundaries of outsourcing, one of the most important management practices to emerge in the 21st century. Case studies from the Williams Companies, AOL, Lucent, Barry-Wehmiller and Procter & Gamble explained how to use outsourcing to satisfy multifaceted business objectives, and a clear adoption curve is emerging that describes how outsourcing is reshaping the world’s largest organizations.
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Surprising Manufacturing Case Study Featured at IDC Outsourcing Forum shows how outsourcing is creating more onshore manufacturing jobs.
 Readers of U.S. and European press are too familiar with the plight of manufacturers—and how outsourcing is increasing cost pressures and sending even more jobs overseas. What is less known is that leading edge manufacturers are beginning to use outsourcing to increase local employment by making local companies more competitive.
Forum attendees will hear how Midwest U.S. manufacturer Barry-Wehmiller, which was featured in BusinessWeek’s The Future of Outsourcing, is creating a new business that turns around manufacturers by improving their business processes, which makes them more competitive and ends up increasing local employment in many cases. Forum presenter Vasant Bennett is President of Barry-Wehmiller International Resources (BMIS) and a chief architect of BWIS’s emerging service offerings. He spoke to the Global Human Capital Journal last week.
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Part of the IDC Outsourcing Forum Midwest Report
Midwest executives will have an excellent opportunity to learn how to take their outsourcing strategy to the next level next week, when IDC will bring their Outsourcing Forum to Chicago. Themed “Reinventing your business through BPO and ITO,” the Forum will feature speakers from Proctor & Gamble, Lucent, The Williams Companies, NiSource, Goodyear, Barry-Wehmiller and Hydro One Networks. In addition, world-class outsourcing providers such as Capgemini, IBM, Hewlett-Packard will offer practical advice, and several of IDC’s lead analysts will offer their insights.
I was able to catch up with event chairman Bob Welch, who previewed some of the Summit’s key themes. I also have information on a special registration deal.
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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 […]
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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