1 Jan 2010
0 CommentsTechnology Visionaries in the 1990’s: A 21st Century Retrospective
“It is sobering to reflect on the extent to which the structure of our business processes has been dictated by the limitations of the file folder.”
-Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering Your Business
Recently, I unearthed a 10 year old book by Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought and took a bit of time to re-scan that 1999 book. On the first day of 2010, it seems appropriate to study technology trends to help give perspective to the future of the digital revolution.
Far from being an overtly partisan paen to Microsoft, the passion and enthusiam for change reflective both Bill Gates personality and the thinking of that era, shine through.
What is being presented is a prescription for a world, focused primarily on business, where mass adoption of networked computing unleashes a digital, knowledge-based revolution.
In the 1990’s, Information Technology (“IT”) was considered a “necessary evil” in business, being viewed largely as a cost centre, and consigned to report to the CFO with a major focus on cost control. Although we’ve made some progress in the last decade, there is still a huge need to educate all business people on how essential IT is to creating competitive advantage, mitigating risk and enabling new products and services. In essence, IT and the modern business, are inseparably intertwined. He suggests the notion of a “Digital Nervous System” as shorthand for a set of best practices for business to use. Although this short hand hasn’t really caught on, the ideas behind it remain.
And yet, it is easy to dismiss much of this early prosletyzing as impractical dreaming, a fact that the “dot com meltdown” probably exacerbated. So, how much of the 1990’s vision makes sense today?
Somewhat surprisingly, the answer is most of it. While some trends were completely unticipated by Bill Gates, and most of his peers in the 1990’s:
- cloud computing, driven by virtualization, in which vast arrays of commodity computing power is outsourced and interconnected with high bandwidth network connectivity wasn’t considered at all. The 1990’s ethos was company controlled, in house, server farms.
- social networking and social media weren’t even thought of. Driven by recent research into how ideas can spread and and recent breakthroughs in the science of social networks, coupled with cheap, pervasive and always connected computing, this is a real paradigm shift from the 1990’s world view.
- outsourcing and offshoring, in which large companies access “clouds” of talent and hence are looser federations of people, is perhaps only foreshadowed. The power of individual contractors and smaller businesses has been signficantly enhanced, thus levelling the playing field in our modern digital economy.
many of the predictions and recommendations remain true or have gone from vision to reality:
- Web 2.0 can be viewed as many pre-bubble Web 1.0 concepts finally coming to reality in the fullness of time. Whereas there used to be much talk about “bricks” versus “clicks”, the modern company is fully integrated with the Web as a part of the distribution strategy. Companies that were simply a “web veneer”, like Webvan or Pets.com are gone and long forgotten.
- The Paperless Office, long envisaged as part of the digital revolution, is finally starting to arrive. While some days I personally seem to be unable to keep the paper monster under control, many companies have made great strides. For example, Gore Mutual Insurance Company where I recently joined the Board, has completed a transformation to paperless insurance making Canada’s oldest insurance company one of the first in North America to go paperless.
- Disintermediation, or the death of the middleman, has accelerated recently. It could be argued that only highly differentiated specialist travel agents survive and the plight of the newspapers (when compared to the wildly successful wire services) are two great examples of this prediction coming true.
- Knowledge Based Management Style has been driven to a much more open and collaborative one, largely by the force of the digital revolution. Although exceptions exist, every company needs to encourage the “bad news” to flow up to the top. The days of the hubristic CEO who stifles the “inconvenient truth” or fires the naysayer are surely numbered. When almost every business starts to look like a knowledge business, and information is power, cultural or procedural barriers to real time information flow become a serious competitive disadvantage.
- Social Enterprise is being transformed by the digital revolution, and it would appear that BIll Gates was ahead of the curve in seeing this important trend. While much of government, healthcare and education remain in the 20th Century paradigm, IT has driven a remarkable change, such that the boundaries between for profit, not for profit and government enterprises has blurred signficantly. This transformation is an area of personal interest and enthusiam.
- Customer Centred Business is both enabled by, and made essential, in the digital age. The importance of using technology to understand, serve and delight customers remains a key strategic advantage for businesses. Of course, there remain issues and concerns. Specifically, greater customer profiling, can lead to privacy concerns and we still are seeking the right balance. Furthermore, some first generation customers like call centres, have left businesses with their only interpersonal touchpoints being unpleasant. Anyone who has dealt with a Rogers call centre will immediately respond to an environment where siloed IT systems and nonempowered call centre employees create customer alienation. Competition and continuous technological improvement should resolve this over time.
In summary, much of the 1990’s technological vision was spot on. Obviously, it has taken far longer to bring into practice than people then suggested. However, compared to other societal changes, the march of digital technologies has been ligthening fast.
Although it is less fashionable to be a technology visionary today, I believe we still need to look ahead to our future. There remain many unsolved issues IT and, even more important, there are countless opportunities that future digital technologies will be able to deliver. Business leaders, governments and concerned citizens all need to understand and contribute to shaping a future world that will be both efficient, yet retain a good quality of life for us all. A long term perspective remains important because business investments and decisions have a surprisingly long lifespan.
Thus, the promise of the digital revolution continues, and it will be improved by thinkers who can help us to shape our desired future.
3 Aug 2010
0 CommentsHow You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm?
“How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down On The Farm” (excerpt) by Andrew Bird
This week, my 18 month old Blackberry finally bit the dust. Out of this came a realization that led me to the challenge I issue at the end of this post.
Please don’t view my device failure to be a reflection on the reliability, or lack thereof, of Blackberry handsets. Rather, as a heavy user, I’ve found that the half life of my handsets is typically 18 to 24 months before things start to degrade – indeed, mobile devices do take a beating.
The obsolescence of one device is, however, a great opportunity to reflect on the age-old question: What do I acquire next? That is the subject of this posting, which focuses on the quantum changes in the mobile and smartphone market over the last couple of years.
I’ll start with a description of my smartphone usage patterns. Note that, in a later post, I plan to discuss how all this fits into a personal, multi-year odyssey toward greater mobile productivity across a range of converged devices and leveraging the cloud. Clearly, my smartphone use is just a part of that.
I’ve had Blackberry devices since the first RIM 957, and typically upgrade every year or so. I’ve watched the progression from simple push email, to pushing calendars and contacts, improved attachment support and viewing, even adding the “phone feature”. For years, the Blackberry has really focused on the core Enterprise functions of secure email, contacts and calendar and, quite frankly, delivered a seamless solution that just works, is secure and fast. It is for that reason that, up to the present day, my core, mission critical device has been a Blackberry. Over the last few years, I’ve added to that various other smartphone devices that have particular strengths, including the Nokia N95 (powered by Symbian OS), various Android devices and, my current other device, the ubiquitous Apple iPhone.
My current device usage pattern sees a Blackberry as my core device for traditional functions such as email, contacts and phone and my iPhone for for the newer, media-centric use cases of web browsing, social media, testing and using applications, and so on. Far from being rare, such carrying of two mobile devices seems to be the norm amongst many early adopters. Some even call it their “guilty secret.”
Over the recent past, I’ve seen my expectations of the mobile experience dramatically escalate. In reality, the term smartphone is a bit of a misnomer as the phone function is becoming just one application among many in a complex, highly functional, personal, mobile computing device. The state of the art in converged mobile devices (smartphones and, increasingly, tablets) has indeed crossed the Rubicon. I believe that this new mobile universe is as big a break with the past for the mobile industry as was the rise of the internet (particularly the web) to the older desktop computing industry. Indeed, in several markets, 2010 is the year when smartphones outsell laptops and desktops (combined).
To summarize this new palette of capabilities of this new mobile computing generation, they fall into several areas:
I want to stress an important point. This is not solely a criticism of Blackberry being slow to move to the next mobile generation. In fact, some of the original smartphone pioneers are struggling to adapt to this new world order as well. My first smart phone was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, similar to the device pictured on the left, and first launched in 1996. Until recently, Nokia with their Symbian OS Platform was the leader in global smartphone market share. Likewise, Microsoft adapted their Windows CE Pocket PC OS, also first released in 1996, for mobile computing market earlier in this decade, and that effort is now called Windows Phone, shown on the right. Both vendors just seem to have lost the playbook for success, but continue to thrive as businesses because smartphones represent a relatively small fraction of their overall businesses. However, respectively, feature phones and desktop OS and applications, are hardly likely to continue to be the growth drivers they once were.
I need to stress another point mentioned earlier. There will be competing approaches to platform, user interface, and design. While it is possible that Android could commoditize the smartphone device market in the way that Wintel commoditized the mass PC desktop and laptop marketplace, I suspect that being ubiquitous, personal and mobile, these next generation smartphones are likely to evolve into disparate usage patterns and form factors. That said, there will be certainly be signficant OS and platform consolidation as the market matures.
At last I get to my challenge. As an avowed early adopter, I have aggressively worked at productivity in a “mobile nomadic” workstyle which leverages open interfaces, use of the cloud and many different techniques. Even I am surprised by the huge enabling effect of modern hardware, communications and applications infrastructure in the mobile realm. Essentially, very few tasks remain that I am forced back to my desktop or laptop to accomplish. However, the sad fact is that the current Blackberry devices (also Nokia/Symbian and Microsoft) fail to measure up in this new world. Hence the comment about Farms and Paris. The new mobile reality is Paris.
My challenge comes in two parts:
I should point out that I have every reason to want and hope that my next device is a Blackberry. RIM is a great company and a key economic driver for Canada and I happen to live and work in the Waterloo area. Furthermore, I know from personal experience that RIM has some of the smartest and most innovative people in their various product design groups, not to mention having gazillions of dollars that could fund any development. Rather, I would direct my comments at the Boardroom and C-Suite level, as I am baffled why they have taken so long to address the above strategic challenges which have already re-written the smartphone landscape. Remember that iPhone first shipped in Janaury 2007 and the 3G version over 2 years ago, so it’s not new news. Android is a bit slower out of the gate, but has achieved real traction, particularly in the last few quarters. And, to be clear, I’m not alone in this – see “Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the US” – which goes on to show the the majority of Blackberry users plan to upgrade to something other than Blackberry. The lack of strategic response, or the huge delays to do so, remains an astonishing misstep.
Therefore, if anyone senior from RIM is reading this, please help me to come to a different conclusion. I very much would like to continue carrying Blackberry products now and into the foreseeable future.
For other readeers, please comment with your thoughts. What device would you carry, and more importantly, why?
[NOTE: this post was written a week before today’s launch of the Blackberry 9800 Torch with OS 6. There are definitely some promising things in this design, but it remains to be seen if, indeed, this device represents the quantum leap that the new marketplace reality requires]