In October 2005, Fingar described his (then forthcoming) book as a "wake-up call" for the US. With the new global economy, the US will no longer be at the head of the pack in the new knowledge economy of knowledge workers. The continuing dearth of interest in the US among younger folks to go into the software/knowledge engineering field will quickly put the US economy behind the pack.
On the surface, this book isn't directly about Agility. And yet so much of it is precisely about why and how Agility will become even more critical within a few years of the book's publication date. Extreme Competition also emphasizes concepts and principles that Agility is chiefly concerned with, such as the importance of communication and collaboration, speed in reduced time-to-market (time-based competition), focusing on the customer-experience, and the importance of managing human interactions (and de-emphasizing workflow-automation).
This book tries to explain what the effects of Friedman's "flattened global economy" mean for our industry and how that all adds up to extreme competition and innovation engineering, with extreme globalization and extreme mass-supply chains making it possible for even the small shops to compete. And, the three billion new capitalists from the emerging markets in China, India and the former Soviet Union are ready to take advantage of them.
"So, what strikes fear in the hearts of business leaders these days? Globalization and Commoditization. We are not on the brink of a new world economic order, we've already crossed that threshold."
Fingar predicts that even what we today call innovation and "agility" won't be enough -- we'll need the "second derivative" of that, which is being able to quickly respond to change by continuously innovating and reinventing ourselves and our business processes.
Advertisement
(Think of "extreme refactoring" and "continuous integration" but of an entire enterprise's business processes and supporting technology infrastructure.)
We will need to focus on extreme collaboration and enabling human interaction in the customer experience as we involve the customer in our efforts. Tools and technologies to both involve/enable our customers and to enable our businesses will need to provide advanced and innovative human interaction management in order to allow us to globally and adaptively collaborate with agile responsiveness. In the era of the "always on, wired world", how can companies compete?
. . . Innovation is the new "holy grail" of business because with the whole world now a source of supply, your company must innovate to avoid becoming a commodity player that cannot make margins."
Fingar uses "connect and collaborate" as the catch phrase for how this new operational innovation will be accomplished. Being innovative isn't enough. To compete and dominate, you have to set the pace of innovation, and connect and collaborate with such operational efficacy that your competitors simply cannot keep up with the pace of your "continuous innovation."
"Then there is that matter of the scarcest resource, the most valuable resource -- time. If you want to succeed today, you must become a time-based competitor. ... Being a time-based competitor allows you to earn solid margins by being responsive to your customers. Customers love responsiveness and, in turn, will reward you with loyalty and increased business. Being a time-based competitor allows you to be first-to-market where you earn the greatest premiums, and allows you to set the pace of innovations in your industry."
Fingar also notes that the kinds of innovations needed will be more service-focused rather than product-focused, centered on how you operate, how you deliver services to your customer to create a "customer experience," and how you empower your customer with information to be "in control" of the whole process to demand what they want when, and at what price.
"It won't be just the satellite/fiber networks that drive the continued globalization of highly skilled white-collar workers, it will be the ability to create virtual work spaces where far flung teams can work together in real time. As globalization continues, the demand for a new generation of technology support for work accomplished by geographically dispersed teams becomes clear.
. . . And the answer isn't workflow... Such capabilities are needed to help a company put it's "house in order" with application integration. But they don't directly support the way people actually accomplish their work.
What's needed is dedicated support for dynamic human-to-human interactions that cannot be preordained or pre-programmed the way system-to-system interactions are. Further, it's the human-driven business processes that are the very heart of business process management and project management. A New Category of Business Technology.
. . . The Old IT applied automation to information; the New IT applies automation to relationships. The Old IT was about keeping records and transmitting data; the New IT is about "connecting and collaborating" to get work done--now that productivity doesn't require proximity.
. . . It's not enough to organize human activities around information; it must be organized around the work itself. In the Industrial Age, human activities were organized around the assembly line; and in the Information Age, human activities are organized around information (the raison d'être for functional management). In the emerging Process Age, where a company's business processes are key to effectiveness, it's now time to organize human activities around the work itself. That means fusing traditional collaboration and information tools and extending them with a complete theory of human work if we are to build systems that can support the way people actually work, versus treating them as cogs in an information machine.
What does all this portend for Agile development and enterprises? I think it means the following:
Extreme globalization will continue to drive the need for Extremely Distributed Development teams and team members.
Extreme collaboration will increase the trend for needing human-interaction management over workflow enforcement. Tools will need to be less prescriptive and predictive and more enabling and empowering (particularly of "rich" virtual communication where face-to-face is not possible).
Extreme time-based competition and focus on the customer-experience may likely bring "Lean" and Theory of Constraints (particularly "Lean") methods even more prominently into the limelight.
The collaboration and innovation process will itself need to be "Agile," and agile practices will need to extend from "delivering software" to "delivering innovation." Applying principles of Agile, Lean, Theory of Constraints (TOC), and even Six Sigma to the "innovation supply chain" will become increasingly important. We'll need to struggle to understand what refactoring, test-driven (trust-driven), continuous integration, pairing, and being adaptive/responsive to change mean in this new context.
About the Reviewer Brad Appleton is an enteprise SCM/ALM solution architect for a Fortune 100 technology company. Currently he helps projects and teams adopt and apply agile development & SCM practices. Brad also author's the Agile CM Environments blog, and is co-author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, the "Agile SCM" column in CMCrossroads.com's CM Journal, and is a former section editor for The C++ Report. Since 1987, Brad has extensive experience using, developing, and supporting SCM environments for teams of all shapes and sizes. He holds an M.S. in Software Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics.
Error, missing joomlaboard config file!
Comments (1)
Bruce Grayson: ...
While many companies are attempting to come to grips with changing outmoded processes and the corporate cultures behind them, other younger and smaller firms have begun the revolution already described. Shedding the time wasting activities will be key to gaining tempo in producing new products and ( important to me ) services. Customer experience will be the new differentiator and IT will be at the centre of that expereince.
For a "hot off the presses" view of what one of the experts in the BPM and IT communities thinks about how the new "flattened" global economy will impact our industry, take a look at Peter Fingar's recent book "
