Glowrich on New Media

Leading the Big Change

Being a student (well, for another month or two) means you have to spend your money wisely. This gets easier when things are offered up for free. Sogeti’s ‘Leading the big change’ was a free event in Utrecht at June 17th with several seminars which when shouldn’t it be free probably would attract just as many people. Sogeti made sure it was a quality day.
First up were Menno van Doorn and Michiel Boreel, both from Sogeti’s New Technoloy Exploration group Vint, who introduced us to the challenges that lay ahead and would be addressed today. What became very clear is that the ‘2.0′ made it’s way into management vocabulary, everything is going to be Twopointowized.

The first real speaker was Jeffrey Sampler, researching at the University of Oxford, who went into explaining how IT does matter in changing the field of almost every industry. Expertise and Information half-life push most industries towards the upper-right corner of the expertise-halflife diagram. This means that industries are rapidly changing and need to update their expertise and information way quicker than they used to. Sampler suggests that looking in the rear-mirror is not a smart move when you’re moving forward at top speed.

Sampler was followed by Forrester Research vice-president Navi Radjou. Radjou said that management styles are changing and an easy way to see how, is to look at an orchestra which resembles the 20th century management style. The 21st century management style looks more like a jazz band with people listining to what’s happening, joining in, and improvise. According to Forrester Research the 5 succesfactors of Global Acting Organizations will be creativity, flexibility, efficiency, altruism and openness. Coming from Forrester he used lots of data. I’m quite sceptical of this data, interpretation is seemingly random and conclusions are both simplistic and overtly extreme. Most managers are probably loving all these statistics but my advise is to not take it all to seriously.

I attended the masterclass Yuri van Geest (Mobile Monday) presented with ‘mobile communities’ as topic. He raced through lots of developments in mobile communication and made a good point in explaning why authenticity is the new way we value things, after price/quality and availability. I thought of it as a Maslow Pyramid of product-value. Being exposed by online profiles like Facebook forces us to be authentic or we are called out on inconsistencies. Too bad he didn’t focus much and rushed through all sorts of examples.

The first seminar in the afternoon was by Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, who argued that IT is getting more and more of a commodity and not an area for competing. 150 Years back energy was a way to compete, whoever made the most efficient power generator had a competitive edge on its rivals. But when energy via electricity became a commodity that everyone could just tap into, businesses couldn’t compete on energy efficiency anymore and moved forward to their core business. This is happing too with IT, Carr says, when more and more datacentres are opened which take over functions that used to be the main job of IT-departments.
This development was charged both by computers getting more powerful in an exponential way for over 30 years and bandwith catching up the last 10 years. Now bandwith is increasing at such a rapid rate, computing doesn’t need to be local anymore. But more than IT getting decentralized this ‘cloud-computing‘ levels the playing field for IT-based businesses. Amazons S3-servers make it very easy for a small company to handle enormous amounts of computing power. Something which Carr didn’t go into, but should be included in my opinion, is that not only the infrastructure is commodified but the fundamental server software too. LAMP-technology (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) which fuels the majority of the webservers is free open-source software. As more and more business are internet oriented this also plays a very important role in the pace of innovation.
So infrastructure as well as the fundamental server software are available for very reasonable prices and don’t need big groups of experts to keep it running, something that hasn’t been the case for very long.

The second masterclass was given by Simon Phipps who has the beautiful profession of being an ‘Eclecticist’ and works at Sun Microsystem as the Chief Open Source Officer. He was unlucky to be in a room just beneath what seemed like a bowling alley which resulted in lots noise. He was very passionate about the Open Source movement and knowing that he found himself in a room full of managers he explained the benefits of Open Source Software (OSS) as to keep control over where you spend money on. Instead of paying money up front for software, businesses can now try out OSS from a whitelist and pay experts to finetune it to their wishes which gives way more control and clarity to what will be delivered.

The last seminar of the day was by Patrick Morley, Chief Operating Officer at Telegraaf Media Group (TMG). This seminar was a wake-up call for all those that thought that TMG was still in the business of selling newspapers. Today that is only a very small part of what they are doing and much effort is put into reaching a public via online media like Geen Stijl. Morley talked business and focussed on how media nowadays (try to) make money. Ethics and responsibilty were no part of this.

Looking at the people that attended this day I realized how much these sorts of days are needed. I don’t think that even 1 percent of the attending people blog or understand Facebook or Hyves much. Concluding I congratulate Sogeti in making an effort to let those people realize these changes are very much needed.

Managers, this is a Digital Native without much respect to hierachy calling you out on what your job is about: Managing people in a work environment. Don’t let this day go to waste but ‘Do’ instead of ‘Think about doing’.

edit: A dutch review can be read on Frankwatching.