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 to 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.

Collaborative workplaces will be developed, more social software being implemented within the organization, with the emphasis on remote work and mobility empowered by wireless capabilities. Enterprises will adopt an open approach to innovation. Certain techniques, like crowdsourcing, will be applied to trigger the creation of new technologies by inviting customers to collaborate through the Internet. The involvement of customers will also trigger new marketing strategies that involve customer blogging and social networking.

More and more outsourcing and off-shoring will be done to India and to similar IT-driven emerging economies. Due to this situation, BRIC economies will continuously 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 revolutionary change in the Enterprise IT technology.