I came back from Impact2011 seminar in Chicago more excited than ever before at the prospects of COL becoming the foundation for learning and education for the 21st century. However, I must share this piece of news from the seminar as a pre-cursor to COL: IBM is either welcoming or promoting a Customer Driven Standards Council. What does this mean to me or to you? I think, it has really helped us to drive home the point of this B-quadrant for setting standards on a continuous basis.
The keynote speaker Neil homed in on the transformation for Growth to drive home the real meaning of Business Agility for the 21st century organizations. Dr. Bruce Silver followed those thoughts to highlight the eight key factors that make this business agility possible. For anyone who has been following the recent trends, all those eight key factors can be seen as necessary but more importantly, it is needed to understand how IT will enable the organizations of the future to transform. IT is slowly becoming something of a utility service like electricity with the advent of various forms ofaaS models that are sprouting up all over the IT landscape in recent times.
What was more interesting was the customer stories and how their business challenges were met by IBM. If you broadly categorize the stories, they fall under elimination of paper/manual processes, dealing with volumes and the needs of organizations to bring products or services faster to market. As such the transformation of businesses are not new as it is common to any businesses vying for growth – whether they belong to 18th century or 19th or 20th. The 100 years of IBM video when closely looked at will re-iterate this point over and over again. Remember WYSIWYG – ‘what you see is what you get’? Now the IBM has a new slogan WYSIWYE – ‘what you see is what you execute’.
However, one big thing that will make or break organizations is the decision to be part of the supply chain or not. It’s like organizations growing out of the earlier modes of operation ‘what you need is what I produce’ (WYNIWIP) to ‘what you want is what I produce’ (WYWIWIP). Since the production is not now controlled by one organization, but a conglomerate of several participating in the supply chain, the effects of consumer demands driving the businesses will become a double-edged sword – very soon.
Rest of the afternoon was split into two streams – one taking on the connectivity issues to the cloud tackled by IBM the IBM way and the other stream focussed on the tools that are now available to discover the processes and manage them in such a way the end-user experience of IT is amplified for further facilitation from IT.
The team of Eric and Bill did a splendid job in driving home all the salient features of IBM BPM. Overall, the way in which IT is disappearing from the business landscape or probably from the portfolio of C-level management to utility consumption or management brings me back to the COL concept that I have been driving home all these days: you come to the same point on the circle, but with a different view and perspective and still be leading the pack provided you have travelled the COL successfully – as it should be.
I think IBM did it and I think many more are doing it and I think the only thing that I need to underscore here is: commute the circle – as many times as you want or as fast as you want, but don’t skip the quadrants to complete the commute.
Each quadrant of COL is an essential collaborative tool to evolve through the continuous process of acquiring, benchmarking, connecting and discovering – fundamental assets to beef up the traits of observing, listening and thinking.