"Flatten" your thinking!

Do yourself a favor by reading a recently published best selling book. In The Word Is Flat:  A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman describes ten flattening forces that have complementarily converged to create a "new global playing field for multiple forms of collaboration."  The ten IT-driven flattening forces are:

1. the fall of the Berlin Wall,
2. the Netscape IPO,
3. work flow software,
4. open sourcing,
5. outsourcing,
6. offshoring,
7. supply-chaining,
8. insourcing,
9. in-forming, and
10. the "steroids" of emerging "digital, mobile, personal, and virtual technologies." 

But even the complementary convergence of the ten IT-driven flatteners was not enough to bring what Friedman historically labels "Globalization 3.0" to the "tipping point" that is now enabling "breathtaking increases in global productivity."  Friedman proclaims:

Introducing technology alone is never enough.  The big spurts in productivity come when a new technology is combined with new ways of doing business.

The "new ways of doing business" in higher education are the IT-enabled common course redesign strategy and the flex program and service redesign strategy that I've frequently referenced in this blog and described in Improving Institutional Performance:  The necessary role of IT-enabled innovation.  Higher education with its highly vertical value chain would do well, in my opinion, to consider the advantages that Friedman attributes to outsourcing and insourcing, paying special attention to his example of why and how so many small-to-medium-size businesses are insourcing expertise from UPS to improve their performance and to focus on their core products or services.

IT-enabled innovations make IT more valuable, and new and better IT makes new innovations more possible.  But there is always a time lag between new technologies and the new innovations they enable.  The full impact of Globalization 3.0 depends over time on replacing traditional vertical command-and-control service and management models / processes with new one that are less about command and control and more about connecting and collaborating horizontally. So Globalization 3.0 is a work in progress hurtling us toward the "triple convergence" described by Friedman as follows:

It is this triple convergence—of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration—that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early twenty-first century.  Giving so many people access to all these tools of collaboration, along with the ability through search engines and the Web to access billions of pages of raw information, ensures that the next generation of innovations will come from all over Planet Flat.  The scale of the global community that is soon going to be able to participate in all sorts of discovery and innovation is something the world has simply never seen before.

Comments

[Ray Tapajna]

No matter how much technology merges, the old computer saying still applys- "garbage in and garbage out" The output is just as good or bad as the input. Friedman in his book The World is Flat has only created a larger garbage truck.
As water seeks its own level, so does the workday even in the highest levels of sophistication. There will always be someone who will work for less and someone who will copy cat products without doing the hard parts from research and development to the finished product. In the USA is is becoming nonsensical to do the R&D especially if paid by the taxpayers and then have the production phase go outside the USA. In the end you have taxpayers paying to move their jobs some place else.
Friedman is a good example of one who does the talk without ever doing the walk and he ignores the fact that the workers who are the core of any economy have no voice in the process of Globalization. If Friedman's Flat World does evolve it will implode and his final book will be the Imploded World.
We now have a $200 device as the core of our classrooms. It is the PC computer which is now a throw-away item. How can this produce anything else but throw-away societies. It will always be garbage in and garbage out.
For more information, see http://tapsearch.com/tapartnews http://tapsearch.com/flatworld/id1.html
and "communcations by rank" - "if you are not part of any network, you do not exist".
http://www.experiencedesignernetwork.com/archives/000636/html