(Via Businessweek) Forrester Research CEO George Colony deflates outsourcing, predicts Net links for billions of products, and sees GM's CIO as a pioneer. Here's George sharing his insightful perspective.
- The biggest growth area in technology right now is the physical-to-digital connection. The difference between 1994 and 2004 is that in that 10-year period, a piece of wire was created from every company to every customer - the World Wide Web. From 2004 to 2014, a piece of wire will be created from every company to every product they've ever made. Forrester predicts that we're going from 750 million devices connected to the Internet today to 14 billion by the end of this decade. RFID is a small sideshow in that whole trend. Wal-Mart is pushing ahead fast. Today the car, actually, has two tags in it- A toll tag, and also OnStar. With OnStar, GM has tagged 10 million or 15 million vehicles. When you have OnStar, GM knows every gauge in your car real-time. They know what CD you're playing, and they know what CD track you're playing. And, of course, your location and speed, how much gas is in your tank, et cetera. They aren't doing anything with it because they haven't figured out how to monetize it.
Trends in corporate IT - "Organic IT,"is the idea of cutting costs in the back end, using cheap back-end systems and servers, and then pushing the funds over onto the front end. Because a lot of companies haven't touched their Web site in three years -- it's just horrendous. This is a highly deflationary trend for Sun and HP. Sun and HP’s server business is having so much trouble due to this organic IT. George goes on to predict, “Fifty percent of US companies would not outsource” That's for security reasons, for regulatory reasons. And observes that it takes about 24 months from the point of decision for most companies to actually execute on offshore
And George thinks - Ralph Szygenda has done at General Motors as he has said:- forget the technology, there are only business processes at GM, saying, GM finance cars, does R&D, manufacture cars, ship cars,retail cars. Those are all the processes of GM. So he's not a typical CIO - he's organized his IT in process and not in technology. This is the "Process Revolution." Actually,it can be called "Ralph Revolution." These words of George are full of insights -must read for all concerned about future.
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