Service industry productivity is the current challenge for Europe
December 5, 2008
The term “post-industrial society” was first coined by Daniel Bell in 1973. He predicted things like the global diffusion of capital, the imbalance of international trade, and the decline of the manufacturing sector on the behalf of service industry. This leads to slow growth economies since services usually show less productivity growth than manufacturing. This is the Baumol Effect which states that in labor-intensive sectors that rely heavily on human interaction or activities, such as nursing,education, or the performing arts, there is little or no growth in productivity over time.
Productivity in IT Divisions
October 12, 2008
I thought some years ago that Enterprise information system growth was more or less linear, according to a size factor. But getting experience, I soon discovered that inserting a new application in an existing information system comes to the same thing of creating a kind of turbulence which will take several months before to be stabilized.
Indeed, when counted in a stabilization process, applications may undergo several changes which do not change their initial function points count. Also when enterprises acquire or reengineer some of their information system parts, they use to implement COTS which are difficult to assess in function points. It results that measuring information system size is allways difficult and, even done, it will be a poor predictor for change which is rather related to business optimisation pace.
At a UK IT conference, a senior IBM analyst provided some clues on what IT services will become in the future which were in short :
- 70% of 2005 CIO budget was labour
- Operations labour will be 73% of CIO labour budgets by 2008
- Application development will decline at –10% CGR to 2008
- If this trend continues, there will be not development budget left by …2012!
The first one recalled me a discussion I had with a senior consultant in France who defended the view that the best IT performance indicator was staff number. By this time I was not really convinced since I expected that IT value might curb staff importance in the discussion.
In the 80’s and the 90’s, information systems viewed the world as enterprise centric. All business facts and events the enterprise ought to manage, were entered into the system by employees or captured by technical equipements like sensors.
By these times, enterprises were compared to complex living systems made of people and machines. They need at the same times programs and psychology, that was in short the H A Simon point of view when he work out the decision process. Information systems should support all aspects of the enterprise brain, especially they should cater for a virtual machine which help to understanding events, to taking the right decision, to leading the required operations. This cannot be achieved without dealing with the question of reality representation. Beside technology, this is the main question addressed by researchers and developers.
Chess middle game
November 7, 2006
3 years ago, Google was threatened by the Microsoft initiative who tried to mobilize players of IT industry against Google monopoly regarding internet search engine.
New technology was expected to be able to carry out multi-media searches. Europe, wanting to be in the race, launched the Quaero project.
Today, technologies of multi-media searches have proven to be complex to implement, and are not compatible with a use in public search engine business model.
Google reacted, and, realistically put on the tagging, as an intermediate technology, with YouTube purchasing. In the same time, Google affuted its attack capabilities with JotSpot purchasing which joins Google sheet and Google Doc series. These could lead to an office automation Web 2.0 solution for corporations, competing directly with the one of Microsoft.
Microsoft also took account of the deceleration of technological renewal.
writely and may other friends
August 25, 2006
Google has just reopened the website of writely. It complements Google spreadsheet already in beta test.
We may legitimately wonder about a soon Web 2.0. presentation tool availability. If any, I am sure that Google will be keen to break its wallet.
Anyway, what will be the Net surfers feelings regarding privacy if their personal data (mail, budget,…) are kept by a third party ? I won’t argue further on this, since we may pass lunchtime.
But, within a company, this drawback disappearing, more appealling pros remain.
