The IT Beacon

AH1N1 - An IT issue?

Governments and public health authorities worldwide are bracing themselves for the so called swine-flu virus. The media seems to be the primary carrier at the moment. However it does raise a number of questions:

• Is a truly globalised organisation reducing or increasing its operational risks in the light of potential pandemics?
• Does such scares highlight that off shoring needs to be considered in the context of increased corporate resilience? Having a mirrored back office in Delhi that could take on the load if the Mexican site had a staffing issue seems wise in the current climate.

Business leaders need to be dusting down their pandemic response plans. They need to include the CIO in the response team.

CIOs should not wait to be asked. Despite the misery that the virus is unleashing, it does present an opportunity for the CIO to be the hero of the day. Collaboration is key here. As is disaster recovery and process automation. All squarely in the IT arena.

This is acutely important if you are a government or health agency CIO.

It's time for the CIO to drop the server spanner and take the strategic lead. Business and society are relying on a robust response.

Global sourcing in a world less flat

I recently cam across an interesting piece on the McKInsey - What Matters website on globalisation. It highlights that globalisation is not a new concept and that deglobalisation is a possibility in these troubled economic times. I added my tuppence worth as follows:

Interesting piece and thank you for not making reference to Globalisation 2.0! There are almost too many scenarios to contemplate. At one extreme we all enter the supply chain of a handful of mega suppliers, such as Wal-mart. Another extreme is that the West becomes the main source of low cost labour as the affluence of the East grows. As we flit from inflation to deflation at ever greater clock speeds, it is truly a fool that builds an organisation on anything other than chaos theory.

In my view the level of business agility needed to operate in an increasingly perturbed global market will lead to fragmentation of the mega corporations into more nimble and decoupled value-amplification units.

There may well be a holding company for the purposes of generating share capital. But each unit will have to win the business from the holding company. For a given market scenario the owner-buyer may well choose an alternative unit. Similarly the sell-side unit is free to pursue business beyond the parent organisation.

There are parallels here with the software development industry as it moves from the rigid functional decomposition model through to a loosely coupled service-oriented architecture.

Both have their strengths and weaknesses. But in a world where strategy, perhaps like capitalism, will increasingly be a topic of only historical interest, those that can think fast and execute fast will be most likely to survive.

The Impact of India Inc.

In The Impact of India Inc. on Telecommunications Nick Adamo writes:

"I recently returned from my first ever trip to India, and experienced firsthand the juggernaut that this country has become across most of the major industries in the world..."

Globalisation will shift power eastwards and India is currently best placed to exploit that reality. China will eventually grow companies of sufficient critical mass to give their western counterparts something to think about. I feel the Telecoms sector in general missed its opportunity to subsume the IT sector and so is stuck in a space between infrastructure and applications. Good at the former and aspiring but falling short on the latter. But the Internet is diminishing the value of playing in the infrastructure space; unless you are in the business of helping users migrate from the Telecoms vendors to the internet.

So the Telecoms industry's biggest threat is not the East but the Internet. There was a time when the Telecoms players had the money to buy out the IT industry. If that had happened they would be accelerating the production of mobile apps as we speak. Unfortunately today we have lots of bandwidth and very few interesting applications to exploit it.

Telecoms companies would be wise to hand over the keys if approached by eastern buyers. But I suspect the latter are too smart to fall for that.

The global future of IT

Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC, has laid out his vision of the future of IT and what that means for IT professionals. His perspective is positive but he highlights that today's technologists will need to adapt to a world where their focus is more on information than technology and how to integrate internal services with those of external suppliers. The implication is that technology will be increasingly encapsulated into services sparing everyone apart from the creators the need to get their hands technologically dirty.

I go along with this. But I would also throw into the mix globalisation. It will mean that many infrastructure roles will migrate to so called low cost countries. Only those roles that are user-touching are likely to remain local. And those that remain local will need to be skilled in working with distributed teams made up of multiple cultures.

However, the good news for those concerned about their livelihood drifting to foreign lands is that India and China (and Brazil and Russia) are growing economically more powerful. They will cease to be low cost and are likely to see western countries as useful from both from a holiday destination perspective  and from an investment perspective. Buying an ailing bank or picking up some cheap property will become more the norm.

Ultimately their economies will be such that IT services will be seen as a second class occupation and so will turn to those economically weak western countries to seek out cheap IT talent. What goes around comes around. Those that prepare for this future will feel they have the most control over their professional destinies.