The Next Organization

Building the Next Generation Company: Innovation, Talent, Excellence by John Chambers

While the ongoing world economic crisis has left many business leaders sweating (or worse), John Chambers is rolling up his sleeves in anticipation of an eventual recovery. After every economic challenge, he says, Cisco has come out with dramatic gains in market share. This time won’t be different, if Chambers’ bets pay off.

In the 1990s, he predicted that networks would transform the way the world works, becoming platforms for communications and other IT, and Chambers placed Cisco at the center of that transformation. Today, he envisions a Web 2.0 premised on collaboration and social networking that will similarly transfigure all business life. Since 2001, he’s been positioning Cisco to catch this massive market transition, and indeed, is “betting the company’s future on it.”

In “phase two of the Internet,” says Chambers, “Content will find me; I will not search for it.” Any device, anywhere, will be able to receive any kind of content. We will be dealing with licenses for things like music, rather than worrying about compatibility issues between our digital tools and what’s streaming through them. Web 2.0 will also bring “effective collaboration,” by which Chambers means network-enabled visual tools, which will make “working together for a common goal truly possible.” Expect much faster business processes and revved up productivity, says Chambers.

Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches. The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.

With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes. “If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”  

Profiling US mobile Internet users and projecting Vietnamese peers (Part 1)

In this post, I synthesize the research data related to US and sometimes worldwide mobile Internet, "wired" Internet and smartphone users, to depict a profile of US mobile Internet users. Using the underlying factors and data about mobile Internet and mobile phone market in Vietnam, the second part of the post will project characteristics of Vietnamese mobile Internet users.

Now, let's start with US mobile Internet user profile:

• Gender: more male than female
• Income: widely distributed (high income is not a differentiating factor)
• Lifestyle: more active people, less heavy internet users
• Content consumed: News and social network
• Phone: Still many "dummy" phone and increasingly smartphones; large and extra large screens; and mainly with iPhoneOS, Android and Symbian OS

Gender: more male than female

According to The Nielsen Company, worldwide mobile Internet users are slightly more likely male than female. The male bias of mobile Internet use is consistent across markets and is most pronounced in European markets. In Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well, males are more likely than females to browse the mobile Internet.

This gender bias, can be explained by:

• (Nielsen) Gender bias of traditional "wired" Internet users
• (My explanation) Higher ratio of public-transported commuting males explains the higher difference in European countries, where public transportation is very popular (my interpretation)
• (My explanation) More mobile Internet contents geared toward male than female, e.g. news, sports, tech, traditionally. Increasing popularity of social networking services like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, where there are more female than male, probably is the main driver of a 9% higher growth rate (between 2008 - 2009) of female vs. male mobile Internet users.

Income: high income is not a differentiating factor

Also, according to Nielsen (2008), the US mobile Internet audience is not, as some expect, overly concentrated in high-income households:

• 24% of all mobile Internet users have household incomes of $100,000 or more
• 26% of all mobile Internet users have a household income of under $50,000

This I think is caused mainly by low barrier of entry. US mobile providers' flat-rate mobile data programs with affordable price. These programs often also bundle voice, which make them more attractive even to medium-end phone users.

Lifestyle: more active people, less heavy internet users

Web 2.0 Summit 2007 - High Order Bit Presentation from Morgan Stanley

Web 2.0 Summit is often a very important event to discuss new developments and trends in the area. One of the most interesting sessions of the event this year is the presentation from Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley. The presentation addresses technology trends in general and is very interesting, except that it cites quite a few Cisco's info (which is a clever company, but still biased, though).

The slides and video however was not included in the official site. I found them so included here.

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:

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.

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.

Web 2.0 Business Models (Part 2 of 2)

My last post covered the first five types of service categories, namely:

1. Virtual world, virtual goods
2. Online tools
3. Market broker platforms
4. Social media sites
5. Social networking sites

In this post, I will analyze the business models for other categories of services and point out some of my observations concerning the economy of attention, the long-tail, light-weight business model, young people's opportunities and the issue of partial attention.

Again, the list is not exhaustive and service categorization is mainly for the purpose of business model analysis. I would like to invite readers to add and give me comments.

Most interesting stuffs I found last week - June 25, 2007

Every week now, I will post the most interesting thing I found the week before.

Here's the first one, a very entertaining way of presenting trends, though quite American-centric. Sources are indicated by the end of the slide show.

How the Net changes human behavior toward environment

Being an environmental activist is getting so easy now and anyone can with just a few minutes. How? Just think about how you use the net. The net has become the ideal medium for every environmental activist to give a hand to change people's perception and thus behaviors. You, too can be one.

For long, was aware of a few things I can do to my environment, from setting an example of not throwing trash to street to joining social activities to help clean up the environment. However, I realized that I could do more.