Module 2 Pgs. 77-136

During this assignment of reading pages 77-136, there were three main aspects and “world flatteners” as they’re called, that I was supposed to learn about and put my thoughts to. The first world flattener of this 2^nd module was workflow software. Picture this, in the old days as warehouse would get a phone call from someone placing an order. The person who answered the phone would then have to walk to shipping to deliver the order. From there, the shipping department walks to the billing department with all the necessary paperwork, for them to create an invoice. Now things are quite a bit different. A warehouse receives an order, through one of many facets of business. Could be a phone call, email, or and online order. Someone receives that order and puts it into the computer. That order goes to shipping and billing and prints out the invoice, all simultaneously.

Workflow software enables more people in more places to design, display, manage and collaborate on business data previously handled manually. The workflow software was also a type of interpreter for all the different computers back in the 90’s. With this software it didn’t matter if you had a Novell, or an IBM computer. Early on these computers all spoke their own languages and could not mix from one manufacturer to another. That turned out to be a huge problem. Even inside the same company Accounting couldn’t talk to shipping etc. Workflow software bridged that gap.

Another flattener that helped software and technology take leaps and bounds was something called Open Source Software. When Netscape started up, they asked you to pay for their software, but if you couldn’t afford to, they still wanted you to use it. There was a reason for that. They knew that if everyone was using their browser it would stimulate massive growth. Open Source Software is a lot like that. Open source software pioneers felt that by making available online the source code, then letting anyone who has something to contribute, improve it and let millions of others download it for free for their own personal use, it would also stimulate growth and perfect the product.

A perfect example as to why this free downloading works better than buying a version from a certain company came when IBM was developing their own server. They had to compete with the Apache servers. Well Apache was an open source server from the beginning and because of that, it had been refined and improved thousands of times. IBM realized there was no way their engineers could come up with anything nearly as efficient as Apache servers, so they scrapped their whole project and adopted Apache.

There was another example of open source software in this portion of the book. A company named Goldcorp Inc. created a competition for geologists. They gave the scientists all the data they had about the Red Lake gold mine and asked geologists around the world to find the next 6 million ounces of gold. The winner would win $105,000. Goldcorp Inc. drilled 4 of the winner’s top 5 locations and hit gold on all 4 sites. So by allowing others, who may be smarter than you, to collaborate with you, you come out with a better product.

The last flattener was outsourcing. I didn’t realize that outsourcing and Y2K went hand in hand. In the late 90’s everyone started freaking out about the Y2K bug that was going to destroy mankind and technology as we knew it. Well apparently, the US had millions of computers that needed this computer remediation and it just so happened that India was the only country with the amount of Engineers it would take to do all the tedious, time consuming work. So, we allowed them to do it, for much less than if we were to do it ourselves. From then on, India put themselves as the front runner for outsourcing. They have highly trained engineers that work for 1/10^th the price.

We are to the point now where companies are seeing a need to remove their accounts payable department and use a company like Infosys, located in India for a fraction of the price. I can’t say I blame them.