“people that think technology doesn’t matter (my big beef with IGS… of course technology matters)”

IGS has approximately 180,000 employees worldwide. Some of these employees work in business consulting and business transformation and are less concerned with technology than they are with business strategy and business processes. There are also many IGS employees whose purpose in life is to write custom software for clients, migrate applications and hardware to more modern platforms, and design and manage complex data centers. Do you think these people think IT doesn’t matter?

Even the aforementioned executives in BCS are very aware of how IT can help companies achieve strategic goals and optimize business processes.

If anything, Global Services is indeed eager to shift its image from that of a pure IT services company to a business *and* IT services firm. Hence the “The Other IBM” marketing campaign.

But IT is itegral to everything we think about and do. Your comment about IGS saying technology doesn’t matter completely baffles me.

Assault on batteries

The budget airline Ryanair today took its no-frills approach to new heights by banning its staff from charging their mobile phones at work. In justifying a move likely to underline its Scrooge-like image, Europe’s largest discount airline said it did not believe using a mobile phone charger at work was acceptable.

oh well… back to lurk mode…

Simplicity, transparency and adaptability are the scarce resources in the enteprise. Any technology that fosters those properties is by definition disruptive. Technical and architect types frame the debate against the technology as ‘that won’t X’, for some X or another, but technology is not the bottleneck. With the exception of an adequate Grid stack, there’s cheap usable software technology like no other time before. It’s effectively on tap.

Really the core disruptions have to be in the business and operating models – how you get paid and how you deliver.

One of my favourite companies are Ryan Air. They based their models on South West Airlines and effectively turned the industry in Europe on its head (just like South West did in the US). Aer Lingus, the national Irish carrier, nearly went to the wall before management realized that moving up the cost ladder wasn’t viable and adjusted their operations accordingly. I don’t see the corrsponding models coming through for the IT industry, certainly not in the spaces you’re talking about. With two notable exceptions, Salesforce and Basecamp, all the Web2.0 plays are mass-consumer. Even Collabnet seems like an optimized way of doing the same old thing. The open source in a box plays are not sufficiently disruptive and they’re in danger of failing if they think the game is making OSS enterprise worthy. The game is to redefine what consitutes enterprise worthy and break the models.

Thanks for the insight… and yes the culture ostensibly is great and tolerates the diversity of a bazaar.

That being said, I’d note that there are many who feel like “prophets in the wilderness” and occasionally I do; or maybe it’s simply that not everyone knows how to play the game…

By the way, Blogger in its infinite wisdom, has disappeared my REST intervention post into the ether… If you want to see what James was pointing at… try this http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_koranteng_archive.html