Outsourced causes thoughts about technology and culture
I was reading Aubrey Daniel’s blog the other day where he was discussing the new sitcom Outsourced and the challenge of managing people in different cultures/globally. I called him up and we talked about the intersection of technology, culture, behavior and globalization.
Forces impacting the outsource and service industries
- Hyperdigitization – the concept that products are moving from atoms to bits. Everywhere today there are approaches to disassociate delivery with consumption. There are numerous examples to the point where we do not even recognize it is going on. The MP3 file or the ebook, the 3D CAD file from the manufacturing (via 3D printing) or even the people from the meeting.
- Globalization – This has been going on since the first ship sailed over the horizon and has been discussed in The World is Flat and many other books. It is a small world after all…
- Consumerization – To me this is about the expansion of consumer oriented expectations into the work place more than just the devices themselves. System users expect greater control and flexibility than ever, IT shops that understand this may be more diverse but with more satisfied clientele. Consumerization brings number of security concerns as well.
- The Cloud – I’ve said too much about Cloud already - it’s crested the peak of elevated expectations and how people are making it work.
- Intelligence Technology – I usually talk about this as context oriented computing. Shifting the burden of normal into automated systems and allowing people to turn anomalies into opportunities. Clearly this is an area that is advancing rapidly.
- Security and Privacy – There have been many posts on this space over the last few weeks. Security is definitely consuming more resources and the diversity of devices at the face of every enterprise is not making this job any easier. The use of service oriented architecture techniques is also causing a bit of a Tower of Babel to develop as well.
- Componentization – The whole concept of an “application” is starting to break down as development becomes more of an aggregation of services. We’ve only touched on the tip of this issue, but it is one that is with us for the long haul. What’s interesting is that with virtualization you are seeing a shift from physical components to logical components on the hardware side as well.
- Hypercompetition-This is one of the results of the whole cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, BPO) movement. Although the standards are not there yet to allow free movement of work between vendors, the foundational concepts are there. With the downturn in the economy cost has become king and this has become a force that is changing how whole companies function. When we come out of the downturn we’ll have a different expectation.
- Value Chain – The effect of this is that many IT organizations are becoming more service management organizations than providing services on their own. This shift in skill set has yet to be understood by many in such a way that they can reduce their management overhead over time.
- HyperVerticalization – I had a bit of trouble with this one, but it seemed that Gartner was talking about Business Process Outsourcing -- the purchase of systems, services, process and personnel that specialize in a particular vertical segment. This has been going on for a very long time, but now it is being applied to more industries and segments.
I was happy to see that there was nothing here that I haven’t covered, but having them all in one list makes me start to think of implications and behaviors. That might have to wait for the end of the year predictions post though.
What do you think is missing??
