The Next Organization

Why and how companies should be prepared for technology proliferation, even of the one they helped to create

No time in history before, technology is changing at the pace we are experiencing now. As the world is connected, network effect accelerates technology adoption and drives proliferation and commoditization very quickly. Once technology is everywhere, it is no longer a tool, but becomes the state of the environment that organizations operate on. Technology however is becoming embedded in our lives and therefore changes human behaviors. These fundamental shifts demand organizations not only to learn how to use technology, but to adapt to new environment and behaviors. The question therefore is not "how to use the technology", but "what my organization should be" given technology is the environment.

Let's look at a couple of examples to see how the fundamental shifts happen and change the rule of the game.

Just more than 10 years back, when doing commerce on the Internet was still very rare, most companies were trying to learn how to use it. The dotcom bubble motivated massive number of fiber optic cables to be laid, which literary commoditized the bandwidth. Enabling financial services flowering and quickly became readily available with minimal cost. Application vendors also made online transaction a standard part of their offerings, sometimes even free. For companies, the word eCommerce seems to disappear. However, companies had to go through a phase of redefining themselves given that the majority of their suppliers, customers and competitors now have the ability to do business using the net. Making it worst, many customers are getting used to it, thereby changing their purchasing behavior and refuse to do business otherwise.

Let's use government as another case. Governments within about one of two decades years back started to bring more PC into their business. The idea at the beginning was to automate their administrative works. However, as PCs and network are available at most of the citizens and organizations they are dealing with, the purpose of eGovernment changed. It's now how government should operate when parties they are dealing with are using and gradually demanding using PCs and network in their transactions. Peer pressure from governments in the same groups is another force to drive this change. Unfortunately, many didn't understand this and spent their money investing into technology without rethinking the way they organize and work. The disaster of the CP 112 program in Vietnam is one painful example of this.

The third example is different in the sense that it's about the company that created the "technology" itself. Founded in 1994, Monster.com was the first Internet job board. Since then, the company has grown to 75 million resumes on file and covers now 36 countries in the world. The new industry was so successful that it even increased the job changing wave in the United States, according to Stevenson's "The Impact of the Internet on Worker Flows" report. The concept and especially behavior changed leading to implementation of Internet recruiting solution in large companies themselves. More importantly, companies have to pay more attention to recruiting and retaining their talents to survive the new wave.

Tim O'Reilly on Web 2.0

I have been quite busy with my job and family works, so posting was a bit light recently. This is the first comeback with a light version of an excellent session by Tim O'Reilly at SAP TechEd this year.

The video is available here but is quite big, so I also include below a summary courtesy of SAPInfo.

"Invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not in the world it is started," Tim O'Reilly quoted at SAP Tech '07, being held in Las Vegas, Nevada from October 1 - 5. The founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media is convinced that, despite past pitfalls and bloated hype, the Web is the crucible (still) producing the greatest inventions of tomorrow. These inventions often carry the descriptor Web 2.0, a term he coined in 2004 and which has permeated technology copy around the world ever since. And Web 2.0 was the focus of his keynote.

O'Reilly commanded the stage nearly as well as he commanded the subject - and exuberantly ran off his six rules of Web 2.0 to an immersed audience: