The Next Organization

Trend Toward SaaS & Microsoft's Hybrid Web-based Strategy

In response to the increasing adoption of Software as a Service (SaaS), Microsoft has announced its new hybrid business model strategy. The move is a careful step amid the software industry's shift in licensing and delivery models to meet growing desire for new ways of paying for services rather than software licenses.

In the recent years, SaaS is gaining more acceptance from customers, though still in limited scale. CIO Insight's survey indicated that 51% of its respondent said their companies used or would soon deploy SaaS. Half of those deployments, however, are within specific business units, functions or geographic regions; fewer are companywide. Most companies use SaaS and application service providers on a case-by-case, application-by-application basis. In addition, there is still significant concern regarding security and skepticism in the possibility of total cost reduction.

Microsoft is well aware of SaaS trend. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, has also accepted that “today the transformation toward services is the most significant one in the software industry.” However, Microsoft is still in a position not to believe that the trend will be big. They want to move into the new space while minimizing cannibalization of its existing cash-cow software market.

Most interesting stuffs I found last week - July 28, 2007

The Psychology of Social Computing: What Best Explains the Success of Facebook?
This interesting article on Social Computing Magazine points out the motivations that create attract young generation to Facebook, one of the hottest social networking sites now. This also serves as a list of good features of the site:

1. Collecting. Members collect friends, or "relationships between people", similar to collecting Pokemon and stamp, in that it taps into the basic psyche of collecting things.
2. Not invited to the party. Facebook also digs away at the insecurities in people... This may be amplified by the lie-awake-at-night worry that your peers can see your profile on Facebook, and while they may have 50, 100, 200 friends they will mockingly see that you have a pathetically small number.
3. Twitching curtains - Curiosity. Facebook is up-front about letting you keep an eye on what your friends are up to. There's a status box. You type in – if you want – what you are doing. There's another page where the most recent updated status of your friends are listed.
4. People like us. Facebook users are of wide range of age groups, making members feel comfortable with "peers who are very roughly within my age range".

Seeing the big picture to be effective in complex environments

Complex environments present a very different situation, where causal relationship is often not clear. This environment however very different from the focused and simplified situations we are familiar with in classical academic, books and teachings. As the result, efforts to improve efficiency in the wrong place lead to reduction in effectiveness. Looking at the big picture and defer judgment can help.

In a previous post, I discussed the examples of when efficiency is the opposite of effectiveness. The most important reason why this happens is broken link between cause and effect. In teaching environments, books and talks, to be able to convey the method and tactics, the background settings are condensed into relevant facts. Frameworks and simulations make it worse by creating an impression that results can be directly identified and related to actions. Meanwhile, people are rarely taught of how to collect the most important facts and link them together in real life. As the result, there is a prevalent misconception that causes and outcomes are obvious and appear close to each other. People tend to fix somewhere close to where the problem becomes evident. When paying attention to short-term events, human is often concluded as the main problem. Many don't know how to find the right "button" distance in time or place in systems to solve the problem. This is also a reason why many MBAs are bad managers in increasingly complex market and corporation environments.

How to make Social Networking work for Service Organizations

While Social Networking is getting into daily discussions everywhere, social network analysis is gaining acceptance as an effective organizational tool. However, there is still scattered knowledge about how to bring these two seemingly related issues together in organizations. This post summarizes and points out some new ways service organizations can capitalize on these trends to address new challenges.

Major challenges to service organizations
Today's service organizations are facing high demand for knowledge-intensive works. However, ever changing knowledge and skills in the service areas require organizations to maintain current business while learning and unlearning at an unprecedented pace. It is only efficient if organization members can together create and learn from their colleagues. In another word, service organizations need to retain talents and be learning organizations to be competitive in the long run.

This great challenge is complicated by the fact that service organization's workforce is often distributed in time and location. By the nature of service business, a part of the workforce is spending significant time on site, or working in time shifts. Many large organizations have branches in many locations, sometimes countries and regions. As works are getting more complex and demand becoming unpredictable, many organizations choose to employ contractors to gain access to skills and at the same time maintaining a certain number of employees for the stable part of the workload. Together with flextime, remote working and outsourcing, these factors make traditional learning and information exchanging methods ineffective.

Peter Senge on Learning

I realized when I finished my graduate studies that all was just the beginning. I decided to continue to learn myself without going back to school. Learn to understand and redraw my view of the world, thus the I used to call this blog "Just another view of the world" before.

Nonetheless, most of people thought learning as being bookworm, just by reading anywhere and anything. "Learning" is very often thought of as getting high score in exams, repeating the things one read or heard somewhere at the right time, in the right contents, or finding ways to do things that other have thought of more efficiently. Learning in my opinion is not trying to find out what is expected out of me and strive to make it. Learning is not dissecting the issue and building skills to do small parts of it and forgetting the big picture. Sadly enough, I saw people spending a lot of time doing these and still called it "learning" or "studying."

Peter Senge's "The fifth discipline" is one of my favorites. In the book, Peter wrote a part about learning, which clearly makes the distinction between "learning" and "taking in information". The extract below from a couple of places in the book speaks for what I truly believe about learning:

Most interesting stuffs I found last week - July 10, 2007

1. Vietnam is likely to control blog contents

I wrote on my Web 2.0 presentation posted on this blog a few weeks back about government control can be one of the challenges for the development of Web 2.0 in Vietnam. Just a few days after, a piece of news on VietnamNet confirmed this. Vietnam is likely to control blog contents.

Controlling contents will cost Web 2.0 service providers human resource to review all contents. Registration data is not effective since there is no way to verify the real identify. On the other hand, controlling media contents is currently not technically possible. This means strict moderation will slow down time to post to Web 2.0 sites, and foreign sites that don't comply with this regulation (I see no reason why they will) will be banned.

After all, openness to new forms of media will undermine the power of the "official" ones, something that institutions may not like. Though I knew this would happen, I still feel sad.

Systems thinking - effectiveness vs. efficiency

Inspired by a discussion with John Beckford, I wrote this on the airplane to Palo Alto.

It's human natural psychology to improve the way we do things to achieve more. However, trying to work only where the symptoms are visible often times does not bring effectiveness, even when the efficiency is improved. Why? Because any object, being or process does not exist alone by itself, and thus the symptoms need to be analyzed in its relationship to related objects in the system.

Let's take a couple of examples of how efficiency means the opposite of effectiveness.

I have a couple of friends who felt that they didn't have time to do everything they wanted. Feeling time management issues, they tried to improve their productivity while getting more works in order to force themselves "to be more efficient". The problem however got worse and they felt even more under the pressure. What's happening here? My friends are good at getting more works, and actually spent more time to improve their skills of getting more works. As the result, they had no time to slow down and think about how they can improve their execution skills, their real bottleneck.

Trends in service offshoring and implications to Vietnam

Two recent studies indicated new trends in rationale and direction of service offshoring that differ from the conventional thinking. Vietnamese government, organizations and companies need to be aware of these changes to improve the country's competitiveness in the global market.

Duke University's Duke/Booz Allen Offshoring Network Survey 2006 showed an interesting trend, i.e. offshoring is no longer "moving jobs elseswhere", but rather "sourcing talent everywhere", which will be dominant in the long run.

Most interesting stuffs I found last week - July 02, 2007

Red Herring's report: Half of the Globe on Cells

Another example of technology is everywhere:

"Global mobile phone use will top 3.25 billion—equivalent to about half the world's population—in 2007 as cell phone demand booms in China,  India , and  Africa, according to a survey released Wednesday.

From African farmers to Chinese factory workers, mobile phone subscriptions will pass the 3 billion mark in July and exceed 3.25 billion by the end of the year, according to a report by U.K.-based telecoms analysis company The Mobile World."

Being the most popular technology access point, cell phone will become increasing important platform for content distribution and consumption. Believe advertising on cell phone will be more and more popular, as well.

The full article can be found here.

Google gives money to developers to create gadgets

Google is giving $5K grants for developers who have already had more 250,000 weekly page views to improve their gadget. More interestingly, they offer seeds investment of $100,000 to developers based on their proposal. It is another example of the business model I summarized in my recent post about Web 2.0. Detail of Google announcement is here.

What Sequoia is looking for in companies and good business plans

Probably the most respected Silicon valley Venture Capital company, Sequoia considers a few key success factors of companies they want to invest in and a couple of things people should include into the business plan. Detail is here.

Tool survey