March 2010

Last week I was once again hustling through a brutal travel week (10,000 miles in the air and two packed red-eyes) when I came across something really interesting. It was ~ 9 AM and I'd just gotten off AA flight 4389 from Toronto. I was a bit bleary eyed from a 4 AM call with a Finnish customer and was just trying to schlep my way to the Admiral's club for a cup of coffee when I stumbled across Accenture's Interactive Network display at the juncture of terminal H and K.

So what? You might ask, it's just a big screen and we already know our future is minority report -right? Yes - those of us in the echo chamber might know that, but what really struck me was watching my fellow travelers and how they interacted with the display. I sat and watched for about 10 minutes (while forgetting about the sorely needed cuppa joe) and just watched people as they started to walk past, then pause, then go up to the screen and start playing with it. On average folks would stay for a few minutes and read some of the latest news feeds, then hurry on to their next stop. But what I really found intriguing was how they interacted with the system:

What if there was an easy way to increase employee productivity by 10% using the technology that’s already in place? What would that do to the bottom line? Even a 1% gain would be significant for most large organizations. In this day and age when CIOs are competing for budget and every dollar of technology investment must be justified, CIOs should not overlook training as a means to boost employee productivity and the ROI of existing technology investments.

Unfortunately it seems that too few people really know how to use the applications they have available in an effective way. Take for example the proliferation of spreadsheets in the workplace. Tools like Microsoft Excel have amazing features that support some powerful analysis and reporting. Yet many people fail to utilize basic productivity features built into such applications. We probably all observe people misusing tools and completing work the hard way simply because they don’t know any better. And Excel is just one tool that many of us use day-in-day-out. Outlook has some amazing features to boost productivity but few people know how to take advantage of them.

Even where some level of training in core ERP applications is provided to new employees, we know that very little is actually absorbed in early training. And much of IT training is focused on what buttons to press in what sequence to get a job done; very little seems to focus on how to use all the technology together as part of a productive business process.

Bharti Airtel is one of the fast-growing mobile players in India, and it has been looking to expand overseas for some time. It identified Africa as a target, and last year it tried (and failed) to merge with MTN of South Africa. This would have created the second largest mobile player in the world. But Bharti is nothing if not persistent.On Tuesday this week Bharti confirmed that it had acquired the African assets of Zain the Kuwaiti mobile company. As a result Bharti becomes the fifth largest mobile operator in the world.

So what? This deal means that Bharti is now a partcipant in what we have described as "the new scramble for Africa" alongside France Telecom, Vodafone and Etisalat. Because Africa is one of the last continent to embrace mobile communications, the potential benefit for Bharti and others is that those mobile operators who get in early can get carried along by the rapid growth phase and can build substantial businesses quickly. So this deal catapults Bharti into the mobile premier league.

But what is even more interesting is that Bharti is not just another mobile player -it has a unique business model as outlined in our report New Business Models Emerge For Telcos. Bharti describes itself as a services business, so it concentrates on providing service to customers and outsources all it's IT (to IBM) and networks (to Nokia and Ericsson) in return for a slice of the call revenues. So Bharti does not own its networks and IT stacks. It's reasonable to assume that it will replicate this approach in Africa, and, if it is successful, this will put pressure on the other mobile players to consider copying their unique business model.

Smoke and fire is all around you, the sound of the alarm makes you dizzy and people are running in panic to escape the inferno while you have to find your way to safety. This is not a scene in the latest video game but actually training for e.g. field engineers in an exact virtual copy of a real world environment such as oil platforms or manufacturing plants.

In a recent discussion with VRcontext, a company based in Brussels and specialized since 10 years in asset virtualization, I was fascinated by the possibilities to create virtual copies of real world large, extremely complex assets simply from scanning existing CAD plans or on-site laser scans. It’s not just the 3D virtualization but the integration of the virtual world with Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), ERP, LIMS, P&ID and other systems that allows users to track, identify and locate every single piece of equipment in the real and virtual world.

These solutions are used today for safety training simulations as well as to increase operational efficiency e.g. in asset maintenance processes. There are still areas for further improvements, like the integration of RFID tags or sensor readings. However, as the technology further matures I can see future use cases all over the place – from the virtualization of any kind of location that is difficult or dangerous to enter to simple office buildings for a ‘company campus tour’ or a ‘virtual meeting’. And it doesn’t require super-computing power – it all runs on low-spec, ‘standard’ PCs and the models are only taking few GBytes storage.

So if you are bored of running around in Second Life or World Of Warcraft, if you ever have the chance, exchange your virtual sword for a wrench and visit the ‘real’ virtual world of a fascinating oil rig or refinery.

Please leave a comment or contact me directly.

Kind regards,