Is the world round again?

While no doubt we are living through one of the tough economic times – probably the most difficult we can remember in the recent time. But are the policies that promotes protectionism the way out of the current economic mess?

Here are some of the discussions happening at our policy makers circle:-

• Protectionism as part of the latest stimulus bill may spark trade war
• Microsoft layoffs add more fuel to H1-B fire 
• Stimulus bill barring H1-B hiring
• EU warns Obama on protectionism in stimulus bill

Seems like Europe is not far behind…it is all about protecting that we care most – our own first.

• Protectionism on the rise in Europe

This is not an easy question. Even in my family, my wife and I usually end up on the opposite side (and kids somewhere in the middle) of this discussion. She is more conservative in her thoughts than probably I am.

Let’s look at the other side of the discussion. Our world now is so inter-related that it is hard to untangle countries to shore up just by itself. Can you fix economy of one country at a time? Look at how the global market now work in tandem. This is a chart of DOW (New York), FTSE (London), Hangseng (Hongkong) and Nikkei (Tokyo) during the peak of market crash in Sept/Oct 2008.

In some regard, we are part of one big system with our own uniqueness and differences - knitted together. It is one BIG market that goes up and down together.

Current global recession is about choices that will determine how America and the world shapes up in the decades to come. Will we remain on the path of open economy, free trade;  global competition; etc. or we start to see the rise of nationalism and protective policies. Will we fight or flight? It is about the choices we will make. 

Thomas Friedman recently penned his opinion in New York Times discussing the same.  I like how he captured the spirit of America.

“Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.“

I say – let’s go stir and repeat…

CIO Panel

Yesterday, I co-hosted a CIO panel session organized by the local TiE-Rockies group. We had quite an accomplished group of CIOs in the panel. It included:

• Kamalesh Dwivedi – CIO of TeleTech. A public company in global BPO space
• Tim Graumann – CIO of McData. A public company in Storage space.
• Kumud Kalia – CIO of Direct Energy. Growing energy firm in the North East and Canada
• Patrick Hellman – CIO of Mercury Company. A private company in real estate business
• Session was moderated by Jim Conboy, a partner at Wolf Venture and a local VC.

All are accomplished individuals in their own right and shared some insight of their challenges. Hopefully entrepreneurs were paying attention for opportunities that they can create to help ease CIOs pressure.

Some discussion – pay attention entrepreneurs, if you are looking for ideas or pitching to CIOs – were:

1. Challenge in keeping up with the turn over of employees in certain industries. Having a solution that can enable fast employee on-boarding and quick ramp up of knowledge will ease pain.
2. Integration with various suppliers and systems remains a challenge – particularly in the unregulated industries. Discussion was standardization, common vocabulary and integration. How to quickly enable 360 degree view of customer.
3. Skillset demand in the IT industry is shifting from programmer to more of an analyst who understands business process has business skills, knows/configures/tests the functionality, etc. is more in demand than a programmer.
4. If you are targeting CIOs to sell – don’t start with them. Start with their reports or managers so that you already have a relationship established with the people who will actually do the work and influence the approval process before reaching out to CIOs. This will help you since CIOs anyway will delegate the task of review/analyze to their reports. So start at the right level.
5. CIOs are going to be risk averse from the get go. They are hard at work balancing risk between keeping the business running on everyday basis (can’t stop the business and get fired) as well as ensuring their company can grow/launch/penetrate new market/product (can’t have systems that will prohibit company growth or get fired). So tailor your pitch to CIOs need rather than just another cool invention.
6. CIOs are not too concerned about outsourcing since much of the development anyway is done by Oracle, SAP and Microsoft of the world. They are typically configuring and using a system to the best use for their business processes – which is not a common skill to outsource. Also see #3.
7. CIOs are waiting and watching hosted/SaaS model. On one hand it is good for them as they have a service provider that can be held accountable and need to conform to their SLAs of quality, availability and security. On the other hand of loosing control – CIOs are just too good at deflecting question for now.
8. CIOs are increasingly confident of the secured perimeter around the company. It is strong and hold back external agents from penetration. They are more concerned about fraudulent use of company property by internal folks or company employees leaving their personal data outside of the company – like when visiting a doctor.

A good session with accomplished individuals – who shared their insight for budding entrepreneurs to understand and fulfill CIOs need.

SOA will kill ERP?

AMR wrote an article sometime back whether evolution of SOA will kill ERP.

I would think, if anything it will spur ERP backbone growth and help unlock various enterprise vendors to build better (and complete) stack for different industries, sub-industries, geographies, emerging markets, etc. that are currently unreachable due to the time and energy needed by the close systems. SOA based ERP system will create far reaching vibrant franchise ecosystem needed on successful ERP backbones to truly scale the business by reaching beyond the current markets/industries thus paying off better margins to the companies who end up having successful SOA enabled ERP backbones. Key will be around how to create and manage successful franchise.

Social communities and interaction within enterprises

Enterprise 2.0 is a catchy term. If our history teaches us something about hype cycle it is the over usage of trendy terms. However, well known terms also are the best way to capture much of the broader context to convey the essence and help with the mass adoption. So to better describe what Enterprise 2.0 to look like – I am sharing some examples here.

In my opinion – Enterprise 2.0 includes effort beyond just capturing collective knowledge for deeper insight into businesses. It should also provide application building paradigm mimicking interaction model needed within different social communities of an enterprise. Something unleashing new values and making current challenges in an enterprise disappear.

Let’s briefly discuss “Social communities” within an enterprise and their “Interaction model”. At a high level an enterprise consists of various social communities of internal and external stakeholders. Some examples of these communities are say Sales community – which includes direct sales organization, marketing organization and partners, etc. or say a Product community which includes development organization, contractors, implementation partners, outsource vendors, end user customers, etc. So a web of individuals that are stakeholders of some set of common interests like what is needed in a product, success of the company, working on similar project, need to solve similar kind of issues, etc.

First version of Enterprise, if someone calls it as such – was about automating much of the paper process. Applications were built to automate the work traditionally done by filling paper(s) – hence much of the current generation of enterprise applications are build around user experience that mimic the paper process – be it invoicing, pick slips, order, entry in financial books, etc. These applications did good job of automation of routine work and brought in a level of consistency within an enterprise. It established best practices for doing everyday task.  Quite a win in this regard as overtime companies shifted IT budget towards packaged enterprise software.

However, current solution limits the collective knowledge captured to the extent of the structures defined within an application – its schema model. Also, the focus is much more on routine tasks rather than enabling various social communities within an extended enterprise to have an effective interaction.

This is a promise that people are hoping Web 2.0 based technologies and emerging/successful web based models can be deployed in the enterprise arena. Today, much of the interaction within and across social communities is either done poorly by software (like having notes kind of field in all application to key in any unstructured information) or done in all sort of fashion – say pick the phone and call the other person, capture information in a spreadsheet and share, emails, browsing/researching multiple sites, etc.

Enterprise 2.0 – as the promise starts to get shaped – has the potential to overcome it and provide much more than that. Some of the macro reasons that are adding to the trends this time compared to in the past are: -

1. Confidence of the enterprises around adoption of Web based technologies to run the business (quite a jump from green screen to client server to web based computing)
2. Maturity of the work force and their comfort using web and computers
3. Shrinking geographical boundaries creating more distributed and virtual organizations whether it is for manufacturing or outsourcing
4. Thus driving the need to capture knowledge and effective knowledge transfer within a social community 
   • Also read – capturing of graying or displaced workforce vital knowledge for the new comers to be successful
5. Create more knowledge workers than routine workers

Some examples of successful interaction model within Social communities of a company that Enterprise 2.0 could address are: (My apologies in advance as my examples are biased towards product communities within an enterprise as that is my focus. But there are similar examples on every community that exist within an enterprise)

• End customers rating usefulness of a feature (and providing feedback to its implementer/developer) directly for future improvements – ala digg it; embedded within a product
• End users forming community and sharing best practices of how-tos and influencing industry wide business process definition and consistent adoption – ala wikipedia; available within the self service dashboard
• End users subscribing to the interests in product features/updates that are in development and getting auto updated when the feature/patch is available – ala RSS feed; embedded within the product administrative suite
• Distributed, virtual product development organizations effectively capturing knowledge, aggregating information to ramp new knowledge workers quickly
• Above can be extended to include Implementation Partners for know how to extend/customize right from the guts of the system
• Sales organization acheieving higher success rate of business leads converting to opportunities due to better visibility of contacts and degree of relationship with prospects within the community
• Quick growth and scaling of an eco-system across multiple geographies for a company by its Partners/Distributors
• Remain aware of the changes to business processes by learning from similar companies/industries and get knowledge workers transitioned
• Quick market wins due to an organization ability to pull together right skills/people from an extended enterprise
• Finding the network effect helping business open up opportunities not available/hard to do at present – say building economies of scale with like minded community to acheive desired results
• etc…

Anyway, there are tons of other example that people can think around Enterprise 2.0, which has the foundation around how to enable successful interaction model for various communities of an extended enterprise.

Think for a while couple of years back our daily work was around paper/pencil/fax/todo lists, etc. Now people find it difficult what it was living without email, internet, etc. This is just another natural progression as technology matures and the younger generation (read more adaptive) gets in the workplace. 

Also, while I am at this topic – seems like Wikipedia has brought back Enterprise 2.0 discussion now under “Enterprise social software”. Thanks to SJ for pointing this out to me.