Information Technology Reference
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Time Dimension, Globalization and Innovation
Time is also shrinking. When I joined HP we had a wonderful system that allowed us
to get the response from our West Coast business units in three working days. Over
the break, I can explain it to you how it worked. It was unmatched and our customers
were absolutely flabbergasted. Today, if my respondent has not responded in 10
minutes, I am getting nervous. Time is shrinking. So, we are expected to be on the
ball much faster.
The world is at the same time becoming more global and more complex so we
need to be able to receive, digest, sequence an ever larger amount of information
before we can take a decision. You have to provide feedback faster and faster. That is
where that combination of mobile, clouds, big data and social is really going to help
us. What are enterprises looking for today? We have gone over the last 10 years and
for the ones amongst you who are in the business world, you probably realize that we
have gone through an ever increasing cost reductions scheme, and we reduced cost in
many companies to the barebones. Now we need to get to something else and people
are back into the mood of more innovation, but to be able to innovate, they want the
enterprise to be more agile. They want their enterprise to be more responsive, to react
faster to opportunities in new geographies, new areas where they can do business, or
something else; but the CFOs are out there to make absolutely sure that this happens
without extra costs. Now, to be able to do that, what they really need is understanding
their markets, understanding their customers much better. At the same time, all our
end-users who until 10 years ago were completely IT illiterate, now they facebook
and they tweet and they blog and they do all of those things. They are expecting and
they are getting a heck of a lot of things free, at the top of their fingertips. Why can't
they get the same from their IT department? So what they want is to be always
connected, they want to have the information at their fingertips, they want to increase
the IT flexibility, so they can get what they want, when they want it, and obviously all
of that needs to happen at a reduced cost.
That leads to innovation. Now, innovation is a really interesting topic. The real
question, however, is where can I innovate? I believe that there are four key places
where you can really start innovation if you are in an enterprise. You can innovate in
your business, build new business models, improve existing ones, and create
efficiencies working at the business or the process level. I will give you some
examples of people who have done that. You could work more and more at the
combination of products and services. Think about the arrival of smart TVs.
Yesterday, Samsung announced a “Smart Watch”. I have no clue what purpose it
serves but they announced it. Now you are going to be able to respond to your email
by talking to your watch rather than picking up your mobile phone, so you will do it
in three and a half seconds rather than five. Fine, okay, I can get that, but what is the
added value? I am not sure, but that is a different debate altogether.
These are new combinations. Enterprises move away from just working within the
boundaries of their companies and start looking at the whole ecosystem. If you are in
the manufacturing industry, you start dealing with your supply chain partners to really
create an integrated supply chain that has a much better understanding and can
manage things more effectively. You may want to interact with your customers on a
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