Slumdog Millionaire

Overview

In a scenario where enterprises turn their back towards technological breakthroughs but accept and adapt to the reality of globalization and worldwide internet presence, the future of Enterprise IT strongly relies on collaboration within the enterprise as well as between the enterprise and influential players, such as potential outsourcing and offshoring parties, or end users and customers.

The emergence of BRIC economies, particularly India's, highly developed in IT competences, knowledge and experience, will be supported by such a scenario, as Western enterprises will continuously seek for outsourcing/offshoring collaboration with Indian IT companies.

Crowdsourcing will be an alternative solution more and more popular, as Web mashups and open source software become more and more powerful for business use.

Implications

Western Economies will stay skeptical to new technologies no matter how revolutionary they may be, due to difficulties of change, given the size of their organizations, but also due to risks and concerns about costs and investment. Therefore, they prefer evolutionary development based on current standards and technologies. Such approach will have an impact on revolutionary technological progress, not only ignoring it, but slowing it down.

Collaborative workplaces will be developed, more social software being implemented within the organization, with the emphasis on remote work and mobility for their employees, empowered by wireless capabilities and mobile internet presence. Furthermore, enterprises will tend to adopt an open approach to innovation. Certain techniques, like mass collaboration, crowdsourcing, open source and open API development, will be applied to trigger the creation of new technologies. Customers and end users will be invited to collaborate with the enterprise and compete with each other via the Internet, in order to benefit from user innovation and crowd wisdom. The involvement of customers will also trigger new marketing strategies that involve customer blogging and social networking, allowing them to interact with enterprise employees and rewarding them for their contributions.

More and more outsourcing and off-shoring will be done to India and to similar IT-driven emerging economies. Due to this situation, BRIC-like economies will experience great economic growth and eventually reach the level of Western economies. When such a situation happens, based on their superior IT knowledge and experience, the BRIC countries may start pursuing a competitive path against Western enterprises and push towards a revolutionary change in the Enterprise IT technology. Even though the current Western approach is against technological change, at the moment India and other emerged economies reach the Western ones and become competitive at an enterprise level, they will embrace technological change. This will happen not only because of their knowledge and experience on IT, but also because of their familiarity with competition and will to be ahead of competition. This will eventually happen due to the lack of agility Western enterprises will have compared to the future BRIC ones.

Time Frame

The first 2 Years (2009-2010)

Driven by financial crisis, in the first two years enterprises will focus on reducing costs and continue the trend to outsource and offshore to India and other emerging IT-driven economies, not only due to low costs, but also due to high quality and value, maximizing the return on investment. They will further implement Web 2.0 tools accepting the switch towards a network economy and hence moving towards collaborative virtual spaces, but will reject most other technological breakthroughs that require high short-term budgets, and prefer to work on improving current technologies. The Internet will continue its social evolution and more and more enterprises will be interested in crowdsourcing, until the phenomenon reaches saturation.

The next 5 Years (2011-2015)

The following 5 years will be marked by the World's enthusiasm with respect to the end of the economic recession. This period will also coincide with the acceptance of a new economy order, the network economy, and the reach of maturity by the Social Internet. Enterprises will realize that certain rules of competition and search for competitive advantage have changed and they will extensively rely on the Internet and on social collaboration for their businesses. This will eventually backfire, as enterprises, still adapting to a new economy, overestimate the returns on investment. A new Dot-Com bubble burst will become imminent, but with less severe consequences than its predecessor.

Meanwhile, the BRIC economies become significantly stronger, as more and more Western enterprises, based on good results, experience and maturity, will increasingly keep outsourcing and offshore many parts of their business IT units. Besides the traditional BRIC economies that benefit from this trend, other will emerge too, particularly Indonesia, which will become a strong competitor of India, especially because of its lower price range. |Using experience as a competitive advantage, India will start targeting the market interested in higher quality, but keeping its low cost practice.

The last 10 Years (2016-2025)

The new Dot-Com bubble burst affecting enterprises and India reaching Western economies far sooner than predicted will mark the beginning of the final ten years of this analysis. India will be far less affected by the bubble burst, in fact demand for IT solutions will increase during that period in the struggle to turn investment into success. India, as well as other IT-oriented national economies, will highly benefit and some will become opportunistic themselves. India in particular will surprise Western enterprises with their new strategy to directly compete with the West at a business enterprise level with in-house IT support.

Using its well-developed IT competences and agility, India will lead the emerging economies and make the first steps towards technological breakthrough, having China, Indonesia and others following the trend shortly after. The Western enterprises will hesitate and fail to adapt and to embrace change successfully. The difference in education between the Western youth and the one of emerging economies represents further reason for this happening, the former regarding the Internet as an indispensable part of social life, while the latter as a platform for innovative technology to support businesses.

After surpassing Western competition, Indian enterprises will begin a trend of acquisitions. The major IT corporations will become Indian or Chinese, including Google, Oracle and Microsoft, but the same will happen with the giants in banking and automotive industry, because Eastern economies will understand best how to align IT with business and to innovate in an already matured the network economy. Indonesia will still play the role of outsourcing partner rather than business competitor, but will reorient itself towards supporting Indian and Chinese enterprises. By 2025 Western enterprises will revive and with strong support from their governments will become main competitors again. The steps towards a strong East-West competition based on high-tech breakthrough innovations in Enterprise IT will be set to begin.