By Martin Conboy

Dr. Thomas Frey, a futurist and Executive Director at the DaVinci Institute and Google’s top rated futurist speaker, has a theory around the secret language of the future. His theory is about how the future gets created. He claims that we could influence the future by using social media and other unusual techniques for both understanding and gaining control of our own futures.

Frey puts forward a proposition that in the future, workgroups would come together in much the same way that Hollywood comes together to make a movie and then break up after the project is over. “The future gets created in the minds of everyone around us. Virtually everyone has a hand in it, but not all contributions are equal. As you might imagine, a small group of people armed with powerful ideas can make a disproportionately large impact.”

“But creating the future needs to involve much more than just ideas. The ideas create a starting point but need to be put into a visual context, massaged, enhanced, and somehow made to spring to life.”
Frey speaks about ‘Business Colonies’. Business colonies are an evolving, new kind of organisational structure designed around matching talent with pending work projects. The colonies will revolve around some combination of resident people based in a physical facility and a non-resident virtual workforce. Some will forego the cost of the physical facility completely, opting instead to form around an entirely virtual communications structure.

In an increasingly mobile world-where work is outsourced and international partnerships form quickly and easily-workers need to be able to collaborate with colleagues, share information, and access programs just as easily from a distant continent as from the cubicle next door.

Most will be organised around a topical area best suited for the talent base of the core team. As an example, a team of photonics engineers will attract projects best suited for that kind of talent. Likewise, a working group of programmers specialising in computer gaming applications will serve as a magnet for new gaming projects. Its not a leap of faith to think of specialist BPO skills like animation, web development, F&A organized around skills located in a distinct geographical location that will attract projects and on going work.

In some instances, large corporations will launch their own business colonies as a way to expand capability without adding to their headcount. Staffed with a few project managers, the company will use the colony as a proving ground for experimental assignments best performed outside of the cultural bounds of existing workflow.

The future of work will be different, in fact it already is, People are leveraging technology to work in new ways and want the flexibility to work when they want, where they want and with whom they want. There will always be more talent and more ideas outside your organization and this new work ‘hubs’ are springing up in cities all over the world. Individuals can participate in a globally connected local community via online platforms like Yamma. They can collaborate and network and contribute ideas with others who have similar interests, passions or hobbies. In the future work will go to where the skills are and notion of humans going to CBD hubs will seem old fashioned and quaint.

By Bernard Sia

As an IT Outsourcer, I cringe at the thought of having to support 30 different variations of mobile operating systems; it does not matter whether the phone is service provider locked or jail-broken with viruses and all.

Who is to be blamed when the proverbial mess hits the fan?

Naturally the easy way out for an outsourcer is to draw a solid line that says, I am sorry, that is not within our contract. But seriously, as an innovative company; you would want to stand head and shoulders above your competitors and say; YES, we are able to support that phone. Not only that, we can secure critical business information, anywhere; anytime!

Personally, I find the whole security issue overblown. Since the dawn of civilization people have been lurking the halls of temples and rat on priests feasting on animal offerings, and no amount of inner sanctums could keep a lid on towns folk whispering.

Fortunately today; we have a host of technologies that allows us to trace how information flows, from who, to whom, on top of versioning every change that occurs.

Unfortunately, technology cannot change the human psyche. Whenever there’s an opportunity, opportunism arises.

Over in Malaysia, BYOD devices have taken over the boardroom; and senior management have made iPads and Berry’s the communications medium of choice. Don’t be surprised if you walk into the elevator of PETRONAS Twin Towers and you see tenants carrying an iPad, a Blackberry, his own personal mobile; with potentially an ultrabook tucked inside the suitcase.

So the right question to ask is not about the perils of BYOD, but how do you manage risks arising from Human Behaviour.

My take on it:-

a)    Make it a corporate policy
Ensure that all staffs sign on a document specifying their roles and responsibilities with corporate information.

b)    Make it known that big brother is watching

“WARNING”  this email is Information Rights Managed (IRM) and Data leakage Protected (DLP), and the sensitivity setting is “CORPORATE USE ONLY”. As mentioned, a number of IRM technologies allow you to monitor unauthorized information leakage and trigger a warning should the mail be forwarded beyond the corporate domain.

But seriously, if your staffs are bent on selling corporate information; there’s nothing that can stop the employee from taking a picture off the monitor; or even scribbling it down on a piece of paper.

c)     Be a great company, with a purpose, manned by good people

That trumps any security tool out there in the market.

Happy New Year!

By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

The use of computer-based collaboration tools is helping to expand the scope of BPO and the range of processes that can be outsourced. With the exponential growth in the use of these tools, there are predictions that over the next few years remote working and web conferencing systems will change the landscape of traditional working environments.

According to Anne Rouse in her book, Managing E-Collaboration Risks in Business Process Outsourcing (2009, Deakin University), a major development in recent years has been the growth of “virtual organisations” (or “extended enterprises”), where a network of service supplier and vendor firms cooperates to create customer value. The value these networks created by vendors and purchasers hold the promise of substantial business benefits associated with specialisation and scale. These include reduced costs, greater business flexibility, and higher service quality.

A business process involves a number of interrelated activities performed with the aim of generating value. As outsourcing and BPO is shifting towards building relationships aimed at adding strategic value to those relationships, client and BPO vendor organisation need to work closer together to identify mutual benefits and opportunities, share knowledge and resources, and coordinate activities more effectively and efficiently.

Collaboration will play a key role in the near future as BPO providers and client organisations work together to fulfil their objectives of globalisation by working together across time zones, distances, and organisational and business boundaries to improve utilisation of resources. MarketsandMarkets believes that increasing enterprise productivity along with cost control measures is playing a key role in shaping the future of collaboration applications within enterprises across the globe.

These tools and appliances already play an important role in businesses around the world but it is a market with an exponential growth capability. According to Gartner the team collaboration and web conferencing software market was worth $US 774M in 2007. It predicts tis market to be worth $US 19.7 billion by the year 2015. The main forces driving the market are conferencing and collaboration to enhance productivity of businesses as well as employees.

Computer-based collaboration has been on the boards for quite some time. The challenge in developing such systems is, as Cameron Ackbury, director of Sales APAC and Japan, Mindjet points out, “human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualised and this needs to be reflected in the collaborative platform deployed within the organisation.” In other words these system need to be able to cater for social as well as cultural structures.

Computer based collaboration tools aim to facilitate, internally within an organisation as well as part of a network of supplier and client organisations:

• Accessing and combining of distributed assets and resources.
• • Sharing of knowledge, skills and best practice
• Reduction in travel, project management and administrative costs
• Speeding up product-development cycle time
• Improving agility, flexibility and speed of strategic relevant action across locations and organisational boundaries
• Synchronising activities across teams leading to efficient coordination within an entire supply chain or market channel

However, to be able to make collaboration happen and succeed requires a different management style to a strict traditional top-down approach. Ackbury comments, “People need to be educated and encouraged to work with their colleagues and co-workers, as well as management to share ideas and knowledge.”

Though collaboration offers numerous benefits, greater attention needs to be paid to the governance mechanisms put in place to manage a BPO relationship and corresponding contract. There are a number of potential issues and risks, which include:

• Losing control over strategic information
• Sharing of competitive data
• Who owns the IP of processes and methodologies jointly designed?

For a business process outsourcing (BPO) model to deliver sustainable value, it is essential that all parties involved work together closely to ensure that processes and technology are designed jointly, goals are aligned, activities are strongly coordinated and the benefits gleaned from innovation are jointly shared.