Macro Principles - Friday, June 26, 2009 - Comments
Core Digital Infrastructure Technologies improve exponentially without stabilizing
The release of the Shift Index from the Deloitte Center for the Edge is an excellent occasion to come back on the foundations of the various Shifts that are currently redefining the way businesses have to operate.
The core digital infrastructure technologies (Computing, Storage, Networking) are showing an exponential increase of their cost/performance ratio, and there are no signs of stabilization. This exponential and continuous improvement in performance directly enables almost all the other shifts, most notably the accelerating pace of change. What is crucial however, is both the sheer scale of improvement and a pace which shows no sign of stabilizing in the near future, contrary to past groundbreaking infrastructures:
The exponentially advancing price/performance capability of computing, storage, and bandwidth is contributing to an adoption rate for the digital infrastructure that is two to five times faster than previous infrastructures, such as electricity and telephone networks.
The Foundation Index
The team has defined a Foundation Index that “quantifies the first wave of the Big Shift, which involves the fast-moving, relentless evolution of a new digital infrastructure and shifts in global public policy that have reduced barriers to entry and movement.”
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- Core Digital Infrastructure Technologies improve exponentially without stabilizing
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by Julien Le Nestour
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Core Digital Infrastructure Technologies improve exponentially without stabilizing
The cost of interactions between individuals has fallen to zero
“Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects
How can Prezi penetrate the enterprise market?
Selling at cost in exchange of a yearly fee: does it create “thick” value?
How Cloud Computing Technologies are shifting the basis of Competitive Advantage
In search of a cloud computing metaphor? Think Harrods, with some twists
Uservoice fails to seize the internal enterprise market (or “consuprise” take 3)
Macro Principles - Friday, June 26, 2009 - Comments
Core Digital Infrastructure Technologies improve exponentially without stabilizing
The release of the Shift Index from the Deloitte Center for the Edge is an excellent occasion to come back on the foundations of the various Shifts that are currently redefining the way businesses have to operate.
The core digital infrastructure technologies (Computing, Storage, Networking) are showing an exponential increase of their cost/performance ratio, and there are no signs of stabilization. This exponential and continuous improvement in performance directly enables almost all the other shifts, most notably the accelerating pace of change. What is crucial however, is both the sheer scale of improvement and a pace which shows no sign of stabilizing in the near future, contrary to past groundbreaking infrastructures:
The exponentially advancing price/performance capability of computing, storage, and bandwidth is contributing to an adoption rate for the digital infrastructure that is two to five times faster than previous infrastructures, such as electricity and telephone networks.1
The Foundation Index
The team has defined a Foundation Index that “quantifies the first wave of the Big Shift, which involves the fast-moving, relentless evolution of a new digital infrastructure and shifts in global public policy that have reduced barriers to entry and movement.”2
References
- The Shift Index, Deloitte Center for the Edge, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison [↩]
- The Shift Index, p. 20 [↩]
- Digital media explodes in supply
- Attention scarcity is deeply reshaping businesses
- Pace of change is accelerating: what if there is no equilibrium?
- The cost of interactions between individuals has fallen to zero
- Core Digital Infrastructure Technologies improve exponentially without stabilizing
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Corporate musings - Monday, June 8, 2009 - Comments
“Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects
The rising scarcity of attention makes the concept of “features” increasingly irrelevant. IT and Business Executives need to unlearn using this concept as an evaluation tool for IT applications. If vendors want to increase their market share, they also need to make sure “features” is not the focal point of their sales pitch.
Initially, we identified a fundamental “Macro” Principle: attention scarcity is deeply reshaping businesses. To be actionable, this fundamental principle was translated into a strategic one: the use of Return on Attention (ROA) as a key metric within organizations. I am now looking at the application of this strategic principle to Enterprise IT, one of the critical areas that need to apply ROA much more rigorously.
Return on Attention as a metric to evaluate IT Projects
This metric needs to be used across all activities, but it’s nowhere as important as in evaluating the performance of current and future IT applications.
An IT application is indeed mainly consuming attention for its users. Information Technologies are also the domain where the opportunities to drastically improve ROA are the most prevalent. Depending on the application, you can achieve the same activity while consuming very different amounts of your attention. The variance is huge. Still, an IT system is generally viewed as a set of features.
How do you decide if a product is good? How do you choose between two different but relatively similar offerings? Too often, the main criteria is the functionalities provided. A Learning Management System can integrate and manage so many courses, use x types of media; an infrastructure can provide mobile email functionalities or not; a blog platform can embed x types of media, implement trackbacks or not, etc.
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Start-Up musings - Thursday, June 4, 2009 - Comments
How can Prezi penetrate the enterprise market?
“Nice content – awesome presentation! What did you use to make it?!”
That’s what everyone who sees my BRITE presentation asks me. It’s a new service called Prezi. And it’s insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no questions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for software.
As Umair’s experience illustrates, Prezi is an amazing piece of technology. The Hungarian company has a great team, got a lot of press and recently set its sight on the US market. The service is obviously geared towards professionals: individuals or small companies, not consumers or large companies. I have embedded an example below (the embed feature is still in the works, so this is an example of no particular subject)
So how could Prezi best enter the Enterprise market? I don’t have the time to do a full strategy analysis, but here are the key points I would explore more deeply for such an expansion:
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