The eWorld Radar

Trends – Social Entrepreneurship

The pointlessness of conspicuous consumption coupled with a sense of wanting the planet to be a slightly better place because one existed is leading to a large scale review of the pursuit of a career based on solely financial goals.

Typically this has led to private sector workers migrating to public or voluntary sector jobs.

However over the last century we have seen a growth in those in the entrepreneurial class opting to focus on social rather than financial goals. Florence Nightingale  being an early example.

The 2008 recession triggered an interest in social capitalism, which in essence suggests that better social policies lead to better economic output. Social entrepreneurship is not so much about fixing society to create better economic outcomes, but to fix business so as to create better social outcomes.

The web and in particular social media has provided a platform that is causing social entrepreneurship to flourish.  For example the ability to connect those with money to those that need the money at the volumes needed to help the intermediary cover their costs (and make enough money to grow their model) could only happen with a web-based model.

Keep in mind we are not talking about a facility that enables venture capitalists to lend to pre-IPO start ups. We are talking about allowing the average Joe in any Western economy to micro-finance the business of a start up in say rural Africa.

What is interesting here is that the model can be so effective that the economic goals whilst largely secondary can increasingly be almost primary without compromising the social output.

New technology and in particular Search engine optimisation and PPC allows the most impoverished of social entrepreneurs to enjoy the economics associated with a global business.

Social enterprise may seem like a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of margins. But that is where many ‘big ticket’ players today are heading because of the pressure of competing in a global market.

Smart entrepreneurs today may realise it is wise to ‘start at the bottom’. Those in emerging economies will have no other choice. But that constraint could well lead to a discipline that enables the emerging economy entrepreneurs to out compete their resource-rich western rivals.

So social entrepreneurism becomes less of a ‘conscience balm’ and more of a necessity for those looking to ‘stay in play’ in the global marketplace.

Ade McCormack

Tech – Buzzwords: High Performance Computing

This is a term that was originally associated with mainframe computers around the time of the arrival of the PC. Before that mainframes could be considered high, medium and low performance as they were the sole computing option.

Today HPC is more associated with clusters of servers that work together to act as one virtual super computer. And even in later years this has gone on to become known as grid computing.

HPC is significant because it can be used to study events that would otherwise be expensive to conduct in the real world (crashing a plane) or predicting the outcome of complex systems (the weather, stock prices).

Again it’s not a new concept, but hasn’t yet entered mainstream IT jargon.

As the price of technology drops and the need to model volatility increases, the demand for HPC will increase. Increasingly this will become the domain of Cloud service providers.

The death of talent?

It is claimed that the digital economy will eventually obviate the need for people. Why use a high maintenance sensitive carbon life form with undisclosed loyalties when you can use new technology for a fraction of the price and management overhead?

It’s a no-brainer. The race to deliver more for less is accelerating this.

But there comes a point when every organisation has basically automated everything and therefore the race to the bottom is over.

Therefore the only option is to start racing back up the value chain. And this is where people become important again. But this time the people are not compliant corporate cogs but highly creative artists; people who are a nightmare to manage but are in effect organic idea generators.

And once you start hooking these people up together using collaboration technologies you have an innovation engine that will differentiate your organisation from the rest.

So ironically in a digital economy people become more and not less important. But these people really are ‘talent’.

IT Demystified – Trends: M-Commerce

The concept of conducting financial transactions via one’s mobile phone is nothing new. The practicalities of offering it were held back for a long time because of poor security. Thus banks for example would let you carry out read operations (view/print) but not write (credit/debit account).

Today we can transact quite happily.

The next step now is the wide spread use of near field communications, whereby the mobile device holder can conduct transactions by either touching or waving the mobile device in close proximity to the payment terminal.  

This will be particularly valuable in the world of micro-payments. Newsagents don’t like taking credit cards to pay for newspapers so m-commerce gets around the issue.

The question is who will be the beneficiary of this emerging market. The banks and card companies regard this as their territory. But the mobile phone operators see this as a big opportunity. They can simply extend the use of their billing systems to include items purchased via the device.

Standards have generally held back progress, but with Google launching its Wallet offering in 2011, it looks like 2012 will see massive growth in this area.

Ade McCormack

What is HR for?

According to Harvard Business Review business and society are careering towards hyperspecialization. This is Adam Smith’s ‘division of labour’ taken to the extreme. I buy that model, but it needs wondrous task design and impeccable task management.

If it is successful then much of your organisation’s head count will disappear out of the door. Outsourcing to super niche individuals and task agencies will become standard practice.

The question then arises as to what the purpose of HR is when the organisation is now only a small cadre  of task managers, brand managers and information managers.

I suggest that HR prepares for this by reinventing itself as a genuine talent management centre because 21st century employees in an innovation economy will be akin to rock stars and top athletes. Those in HR who build their career on industrial-era recruitment, ‘sheep dip’ training and keeping a cap on compensation will, if they are lucky, find themselves on the ‘sell’ side in a low value economic region.

Ade McCormack

Are you working in a factory?

A couple of questions:

• Is there a physical assembly line at the centre of your organisation?
• Are your business processes aligned along predefined information flows?

If the answer to either of these is yes then you work in a factory. The difference being whether you hear whirring or key-clicks in the background.

You will have noticed the decrease in labour used in the whirring environment. Prepare for a similar decrease in the key-click environment.

Towards a 21st Century Business

Check out my promotional video. The guys at Performance Films have done a great job.

Ade McCormack

Towards an innovative Europe

My recent session at the The Institute of International and European Affairs, a leading Irish think tank, went well. Take a look at the video. I am curious to hear whether anyone shares my concerns about Europe's future:

Infrastructure is the new applications

Some organisations are so set in their ways that their offices and corridors are structurally identical to the company organogram. Their command and control structures are literally reinforced with bricks and mortar. And so too their IT infrastructure.

Such arthritic organisations are unlikely to flex with the market and thus their sustainability is in question. 

Today’s organisations need to make better decisions quicker by bringing people together in ways that cut across the traditional hierarchy. Whether it be a task force, advisory panel or research team, to dynamically bring people together to capitalise on time-sensitive opportunities/issues requires agility. So you need:

1. Fluidity in the manner in which people can collaborate
2. An infrastructure that supports dynamic collaboration.

You won’t get the first point unless you implement the second. Unfortunately there is no ‘app’ for this. So get ready to ‘pull up the floor boards’, as the sustainability of today’s businesses lies in the infrastructure.

Tech Market – The End Games

As the IT market comes to its closing stages, it is interesting to work out who will be the last men standing. But it is not clear where they will be standing. The battles appear to be playing out on a number of fronts:

• Infrastructure domination – Eg. IBM, Cisco, HP, EMC
• Corporate service domination – Eg. IBM, HP, Tata
• Consumer domination – Eg. Apple, Microsoft, Cisco
• Information / knowledge domination – Eg. EMC, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft.

Personally I don’t think there is a long term play in products, so Sap might like to reconsider acquiring or being acquired.

Here’s some guidelines if your organisation would like to enter these theatres:

• Infrastructure domination – Forget it. Or buy one of the potential last men standing (see above)
• Corporate service domination – Buy McKinsey or a similar boardroom-branded front-end
• Consumer domination – Forget it. Or recruit the marketing director of Nike, Walt Disney, Citigroup or McDonalds and give them the budget they are used to
• Information / knowledge domination – Buy anything that moves that has the word collaboration in the corporate bio. This game is far from over.

Let me know if I can be of further help.