Effective Use of Technologies

The recent innovations in technologies and in business models have broken the barrier of physical boundaries. They have allowed us to go beyond the physical infrastructure to carry out all sorts of work and study, to purchase, sell, exchange information, trade, and carry on commerce across the globe. A simple task like holding a meeting previously required us to travel to offices within a city or across cities, countries, and at times, continents. Now with technologies like Cisco's WebEx, Microsoft's NetMeeting, Join.me, and Oracle's Beehive, we do not need to commute to offices or travel across countries or continents to hold meetings unless face-to-face meetings are absolutely necessary. In a global environment, workplaces have practically no boundaries, with employees located all over the world.

Technology like Join.me has helped us in collaborating on content while writing this book. We both usually used Join.me in our real-time collaboration for sharing and discussing the manuscript in progress irrespective of our geolocation, breaking the physical boundaries and increasing our efficiency. We made sure that our manuscript for the book that you are reading was reviewed jointly without our being in the same room. Our writing activity did not suffer despite our work-related travel to other countries in different time zones. The technology offered greater efficiency in our goal to write the book on schedule for the publisher. It is fair to say that we had minimal or no in-person meetings with all the project's stakeholders such as the creative, editorial, and printing teams located in different places. This all became possible with the effective use of technologies that we are using today.

Reduce Cost to Your Advantage

With the ever-increasing prices of real estate, the virtual office has become an attractive phenomenon to many businesspeople. Companies can be located at a particular place but the employees conduct their day-to-day office work from different locations such as a hotel, café, or home. New technologies such as Web 2.0, wiki, chat, forums, tags, and RSS (Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication) have enabled teams to maintain effective communication and content collaboration. These technologies have not only broken the barrier of physical infrastructure but have also provided business agility to launch any business with low cost and expand existing businesses globally with minimal cost of operation. We are living and working in the twenty-first century era in which Thomas L. Friedman, the author of The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, says that the playing field is being leveled. Globalization has removed all barriers, supported by technological innovation in the areas of information and communication technology (ICT) and transportation. This helped first with outsourced manufacturing and assembly in remote locations with low-cost labor supplies, primarily in India and China, to bring down the cost of assembly, manufacturing, or services in the areas of call centers, medical transcription, accounting, legal, publication media, and films. And, subsequently, business process outsourcing (BPO) or better-defined as knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) evolved in all areas of jobs and at various locations, providing the business agility and efficiency needed to run business operations smoothly.

The cloud computing infrastructure and the fast-emerging cloud operating environment (CloudOE) (Castiglioni and Crudele 2013) with its major ecosystem have enabled access to elastic computing and system application resources deployed across pervasive mobile devices, breaking the physical boundaries. The cloud computing infrastructure has not only enabled access to a system of record (SOR) such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and supply chain management (SCM), but has also offered a system of engagement (SOE) via social interaction on social media, access to geolocations via maps, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony, chat, and wiki for real-time collaboration in the context of business applications to make the right decisions without being limited by physical location.

Amazon and eBay Business Models: Breaking the Barrier of Physical Infrastructure

Amazon and eBay in the retail sector have led the e-commerce phenomenon and changed the bricks-and-mortar model of doing business by breaking the barrier of physical infrastructure. Online shopping is the best-known activity in e-commerce. It allows shoppers to buy via the Internet, and, in turn, it lets business owners sell products online at any time. The access to an e-commerce portal 24/7 from across the globe deployed on the cloud environment via all devices powered by social collaboration has not only broken the physical barrier but enriched the decision making process, making it highly effective and predictable.

Education: Going beyond Physical Boundaries

Education is yet another sector that can leverage these emerging technologies such as cloud and collaborative technologies and reach remote locations, breaking physical boundaries. In many ways, education is timeless. Its purpose has been to help learners expand their understanding of how things work, improve their capabilities and skills, and grow as successful individuals. However, education today is far different from what it was just a decade ago. Technology has been a major driver, but other resources are converging to reshape the way we think about, and deliver, learning:

• A heightened focus on educational outcomes and institutional accountability
• Learner-centric learning that recognizes that different people have different learning styles and different pathways to acquiring an education
• The need for lifelong continuous learning and the emerging importance of reaching nontraditional students and people with disabilities
• Globalization and the fact that our students graduate into a world that is more competitive, faster paced, and more information driven
• Economic pressures to cut costs and, for higher education and private schools, to increase revenues as well

These forces are re-architecting education, which today may blend traditional elements with online learning, both self-paced and in real time. Instruction may be delivered entirely in a live, virtual classroom. It may be based on “learning by doing” projects that prepare learners to navigate their personal and professional lives in an interconnected, always-on world. It may fall anywhere on the continuum from formal, structured classes and professional development to in-the-moment, informal problem-solving sessions and ad hoc meetings.

Many technology solutions such as Blackboard, Edmodo, Huddle, and Moodle deployed on cloud platforms enable collaborative education and are easily accessible and available even in remote locations where Internet access is available. OpenStudy (http://openstudy.com) is a unique learning platform and a sound effort in the right direction to break the boundaries of physical and geographical infrastructure, where students collaborate, ask questions, give help, and connect with other students studying the same things regardless of their locations, time zones, and institutions. This endeavors to make the world one large study group, regardless of school, location, or background.

Now major universities in the United States have joined the initiative to provide free, open online courses, breaking all physical boundaries and enabling students/learners across the globe to learn with mere Internet access.

Massive Open Online Courses: Breaking Physical Boundaries in Education

Although there has been access to free online courses on the Internet for years, the quality and quantity of courses have changed. Access to free courses has allowed students to obtain a level of education that many could only dream of in the past. This has changed the face of education. In the New York Times article “Instruction for Masses Knocked Down Campus Walls” (March 4, 2012), author Tamar Lewin stated, “In the past few months, hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree.”

Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) are the latest trend, not everyone agrees that schools should offer them. Joshua Kim's Inside Higher Ed article “Why Every University Does Not Need a MOOC” (March 6, 2012) noted that offering free material may not make sense for the individual university.

Since a MOOC is voluntary and there is no penalty for dropping the program or lagging behind, there may be issues with course completion. Although a student may have received an excellent education, there will not be a corresponding diploma.

For those who desire a free education and have the motivation, the top 10 sites for information about MOOCs are:

1. Udemy free courses. Udemy is an example of a site that allows anyone to build or take online courses. Udemy's site exclaims, “Our goal is to disrupt and democratize education by enabling anyone to learn from the world's experts.” The New York Times reported that Udemy “recently announced a new Faculty Project, in which award-winning professors from universities like Dartmouth, the University of Virginia and Northwestern offer free online courses. Its co-founder, Gagen Biyani, said the site has more than 100,000 students enrolled in its courses, including several, outside the Faculty Project, that charge fees.” [https://www.udemy.com/]
2. ITunes U free courses. Apple's free app “gives students access to all the materials for courses in a single place. Right in the app, they can play video or audio lectures. Read books and view presentations.” [www.apple.com/education/ipad/itunes-u/]
3. Stanford University free courses. From quantum mechanics to the future of the Internet, Stanford offers a variety of free courses. Stanford's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence was highly successful. According to Pontydysgu (www.pontydysgu.org), “160,000 students from 190 countries signed up to Stanford's ‘Introduction to AI’ course, with 23,000 reportedly completing.” [http://see.stanford.edu/]
4. University of California at Berkeley free courses. From general biology to human emotion, Berkeley offers a variety of courses. Check out Berkeley webcasts and Berkeley RSS feeds. [http://webcast.berkeley.edu/]
5. MIT free courses. Check out MIT's RSS MOOC feed. [http://ocw.mit.edu/help/rss/]
6. Duke University free courses. Duke offers a variety of courses on ITunes U. [http://itunes.duke.edu/]
7. Harvard University free courses. From computer science to Shakespeare, students may now get a free Harvard education. “Take a class for professional development, enrichment, and degree credit. Courses run in the fall, spring, or intensive January session. No application is required.” [www.harvard.edu/faqs/free-courses]
8. UCLA free courses. Check out free courses such as the writing program that offers more than 220 online writing courses each year. [https://www.uclaextension.edu/pages/search.aspx?c=free+courses]
9. Yale University free courses. At Open Yale, the school offers “free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.” [http://oyc.yale.edu/]
10. Carnegie Mellon University free courses. Carnegie Mellon boasts “No instructors, no credits, no charge.” [http://oli.cmu.edu/]

Khan Academy: Making a Great Impact in Education

With emerging technologies, the face of education is changing rapidly and the world should benefit immensely, breaking all physical boundaries. Anyone in the world with Internet access can learn from the best and brightest for free.

In 2004, Sal Khan, a former hedge fund analyst living in Boston, Massachusetts, began tutoring his cousins in need of a deeper understanding of mathematics. Khan began with short and focused instructional videos teaching unit conversion using a virtual blackboard and talking through the logic of solving these problems, and expanded to a library of over 5,000 instructional videos, including 100 self-paced practice exercises and metrics to analyze the learner's progress, available for anyone in the world to consume and learn. He formed the Khan Academy to share his video lessons on YouTube via the Internet and to help students better understand various math and science topics explained in ways that were different from how he was taught in the classroom and through textbooks.

Khan refers to himself as a teacher of the Khan Academy since he creates all of the instructional videos. The Khan Academy has become extremely popular; students and parents have found Khan's resources exceedingly beneficial and a supplement for their foundational understanding of math and science.

Health Care Services Leveraging Outsourced Services

These technologies have enabled the health care sector as well, and many in this industry are turning to outsourced health care management solutions as a strategic alternative to manage their office functions, as well as selected administrative, financial, and IT services. Health care providers will need to find new business models to support operational and clinical quality, reimbursement, and stakeholder management. Services such as case and policy administration, member enrollment, profile management, claims management, benefits administration, billings and collections, and provider relations can be rendered remotely from distant locations, breaking barriers of physical boundaries and time zones, lowering the costs, and enhancing agility and efficiency. Emerging new process models can help organizations control costs and focus on growth while improving operational efficiencies and optimizing existing resources.

Health care delivery organizations can meet the objectives of reducing operational costs, minimizing administrative overheads, and maximizing profitability by strategically outsourcing their business processes to specialized service providers at offshore locations. There are various front desk services such as patient registration, scheduling and appointment management, eligibility verification, referral management, appointment confirmation, follow-up appointment reminders, and scheduling that are efficiently carried out by professionally trained staff at offshore locations, breaking physical boundaries by business process outsourcing (BPO) service providers. Back-office services such as medical billing, accounts receivable (A/R) management, denial management, patient statements, trending, and reporting have become a proven business model for optimizing operational efficiency.

Assembly: Outsourced by Apple in China

Manufacturing broke geographical barriers a long time ago with outsourcing to offshore locations, causing a lot of uproar that U.S. jobs were being taken by India and China. As the previously cited New York Times article pointed out, when President Obama asked Steve Jobs, Jobs answered bluntly: “Those jobs are not coming back.” Foxconn is contracted by Apple to assemble iPhones in a southern Chinese city, Shenzhen, and employs 230,000 workers. The Foxconn campus has banks, supermarkets, bookstores, fire brigades, a police station, a hospital, and many other facilities. It is sometimes referred to as “iPod City.” By locating the same iPhone factory in the United States, Apple would add more than $25 billion in labor costs a year, which would completely wipe out its 2010 profit of $14 billion.

As these emerging technologies are creating a revolution, businesses need to focus on research and innovation and create more companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Tesla.

Manufacturing Outsourcing: Levi Strauss & Co.

We all know that today Levi Strauss & Co. products are sold under the Levi's, Dockers, Denizen, and Signature brands. The products are sold in approximately 55,000 retail locations in more than 110 countries, including approximately 1,900 dedicated retail stores. Levi Strauss & Co. was founded in San Francisco by Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss in 1853.

In an endeavor to survive and remain in the business, the company changed its business model to embrace manufacturing outsourcing. It shut down many of its sewing factories in the United States and outsourced to offshore countries, breaking physical boundaries, and brought back a focus on innovation to meet customer demand and responsiveness with agility.

Travel and Hospitality Sectors: Breaking Physical Boundaries

With the convergence of these technologies (cloud, social, mobile, video, and big data) continuing to diversify, the travel and hospitality industry is no exception and has offered greater customer engagement for airline ticket booking packaged with hotels, car rentals, and package tours all at the click of a button on any device from any geolocation. In addition, today's customers demand a personalized experience with real-time information and assistance via voice, online, e-mail, text, and chat media.

Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Kayak, CheapoAir, Bestfares, MakeMyTrip.com, Cleartrip, and Carlson Wagonlit Travel are a few of the many travel and hospitality portals that offer elegant services via an interactive portal with a rich web experience for all travel and hospitality needs, breaking physical boundaries. We no longer need to visit any physical offices to accomplish these jobs—we can do so with the use of smart devices from anywhere at any time.

MakeMyTrip.com is an example in the travel and hospitality industry to establish rapid growth over a decade, crossing the limit of geographical boundaries and leveraging these major technologies. The company was founded in the year 2000 with the aim of empowering Indian travelers with instant booking and comprehensive travel and hospitality packages in one web environment. It aimed to offer a range of best-value products and services based on leading technologies for interactive customer engagement supported by round-the-clock support staff. With greater customer engagement based on cloud deployment, the company expanded its reach to global customers, breaking all geographical boundaries, and today it is extremely successful among Asian diasporas globally, including those in the United States, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Software Development Leverages Global Resources

It is not an exaggeration to say that we do not need a software development team in one room at one office location at any given point in time. In fact, all major software development work is carried out with distributed resources all across the globe, breaking physical geographical boundaries and optimizing cost. Maximizing IT development resources is a common problem facing many large companies, especially those with information-intensive business models such as financial services, telecommunications, high technology, and manufacturing. Priorities and workloads fluctuate continually—from team to team, department to department, and project to project.

Convergence of these technologies has also helped software development across the board in several ways. Cloud infrastructure has helped global IT teams to provision the right development resources to the team on a virtual consolidated infrastructure and has eliminated diverse setups at numerous places that entailed lots of duplicate effort to make sure each lab had the proper versions and updates for each server and storage array.

AEC Industry Removes Barriers

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry can maximize project collaboration, make business more agile, and reduce operational costs by leveraging these emerging technologies and deploying services based on cloud infrastructure. As we all know, construction professionals are constantly challenged to deliver successful projects due to tight budgets, short time lines, geographically dispersed teams, and difficulty in accessing information.

Architects and construction engineers would be able to access their blueprints, computer aided design (CAD) files, and contracts hosted and managed by content storage offered by cloud service providers. Box, a leading online storage services provider, recently announced its services named Box OneCloud apps to better serve customers in architecture, engineering, and construction. These services can be accessed remotely from anywhere, at any time, and on any devices, removing any geographical barriers and providing greater business agility and efficiency. Site engineers and architects conduct site inspection and many other jobs such as quantity surveying, validation, and correction with the help of smart devices on-site, accessing all contents accessible from their cloud services.

With these technologies (cloud, social, and mobile), architects would be able to create the architectural drawings remotely located at any location, supported by structural engineers providing structural drawings, again from remote locations, and executed by site engineers to carry out the construction work with real-time active collaboration with the architects and structural engineers.

Many large construction projects are executed with the use of sophisticated software services offered by Intergraph, Autodesk, and Bentley in cloud deployment models to create business agility in the AEC sector.

As we further examine all these technology forces in the next chapter, we dig deep on the power of collaborative management providing greater capabilities to manage tasks more efficiently with powerful collaborative tools. We have endeavored to provide some guidance on leading tools that may help in transforming your business with new modes of collaborative management and execution with various stakeholders in business with the single mission of creating business agility and providing greater efficiency.

Converging Technology: Inside the Force 5 Tornado for the Perfect Storm

The convergence of cloud, social, mobile, video, and big data provides synergy for determining what the vision, mission, and strategy of the next generation of digital business is using collaboratively internally to align functional resources and externally to leverage trading partner capabilities with compatible core competencies. In this manner we can use the digital business value chain to develop a market-leading ecosystem where the power of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Accordingly, CIO Insights are provided by Dean Lane, founder of Office of the CIO (www.oocio.com) and author of The Chief Information Officer's Body of Knowledge (John Wiley & Sons, 2011). His insights focus on how CIOs may leverage their understanding of these converging technologies for CIO success to deliver the business value of IT for digital businesses.

Transformation, Synergy, and Innovation through the Cloud¹

Technology has become an extremely important part of many people's lives. It is having an impact and successful effect on their goals in both their professional and personal lives. Gradually, they are having more alternatives and more flexibility in the technology they use every day, and as that technology spills over into their professional lives, the line between personal and professional is blurring. People want to be able to choose what technology they use or operate, and they increasingly want to use that same technology in all aspects of their lives, not just either at home or at work.

Actually, according to an analysis by Unisys conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC), 95 percent of information technology personnel use at least one self-purchased system at work. The analysis also found that information technology personnel “report using a combination of four client devices and several third-party plans, such as online sites, in the course of their day.” The Unisys-IDC analysis also revealed a somewhat worrisome difference between what information technology personnel are actually using at work and what their organizations believe they are using. For example, “69% of [information technology] workers say they access non-work-related online (Cloud) sites, while only 44% of their organizations evaluate this to be the scenario” (Unisys 2012).

For IT, it's about understanding usage and creating a balance of goals and enterprise requirements. Cloud technology, without a concern, creates risks to the business such as to security and compliance. However, there are also many benefits to the cloud that organizations can implement with the right design and technique. People and employees like their cloud technology because it makes it much easier for them to be connected with others, it is convenient for exchanging information, and it all functions together. Significantly, for organizations, the amount of data that can be accessed, analyzed, reviewed, and used to benefit the company represents tremendous benefits. Those benefits that are there for the taking by organizations require a partnership between the information technology department and other functional business units. To get the right balance—to decrease the risks and increase the benefits—in some circumstances could mean using certain consumer technology in the workplace and in others it could mean providing enterprise alternatives that will keep both clients and professionals excited.