Impacts of Extreme Globalization and Extreme Competition

I promised to say something about how I think all this stuff about globalization, innovation and extreme competition will impact CM and Agility. But first, a refresher on the books that I blogged about throughout most of March and April:

• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, by Thomas Friedman
• End of the Line : The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation, by Barry C. Lynn
• Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, by Clyde Prestowitz
• Extreme Competition: Innovation And the Great 21st Century Business Reformation, by Peter Fingar (also the paper The Coming IT Flip-Flop, Rajesh Jain's "Tech Talk" on Extreme Competition, and Human Interaction Management)
• The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization, by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown (also see the Edge Perspective's blog)
• Whole New Mind, by Dan Pink (also see Dan Pink's blog)
• The Design of Things to Come : How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products, by Craig M. Vogel, Jonathan Cagan and Peter Boatwright (also see Fanning the Creative Spirit and Innovation at the Speed of Laughter)

My blog entries on the subject thus far have been as follows:

• The World is 5-Dimensional: Globalization and Teleportation
• End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation
• Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East
• Extreme Competition: Innovation And the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
• The Coming IT Flip-Flop
• The Only Sustainable Edge
• Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
• The Design of Things to Come : Pragmatic Innovation
• More Extreme Competition: Business Drivers, Realities and Strategies

So here are my jumbled thoughts on what I think it all portends for Agility and CM ...

• Extreme Globalization will continue to drive the need for Extremely Distributed Development teams and team members.
  
  
• Extreme Collaboration will increase the trend for needing human-interaction management over workflow enforcement. Tools will need to be less prescriptive and predictive and more enabling and empowering (particularly of "rich" virtual communication where face-to-face is not possible).
  
  
• The Internet as the new personal computing platform will meld deployment CM with development CM and with ITIL. It will also make managing dynamic dependencies of components and services an absolute nightmare, especially for Service-Oriented Architecture. But it will be a necessary nightmare to face.
  
  
• All of the above, plus regulatory compliance and accounting (such as Sarbanes-Oxley) will combine to make issues of security and fine-grained access control of electronically stored assets and business-intelligence (and processes) an even bigger concern than it already is, which tools will need to do a better job of addressing.
  
  
• The collaboration and innovation process will itself need to be "Agile", and agile practices will need to extend from "delivering software" to "delivering innovation." Applying principles of Agile, Lean, Theory of Constraints (TOC), and even SixSigma to the "innovation supply chain" will become increasingly important. We'll need to struggle to understand what refactoring, test-driven (trust-driven), continuous integration, pairing, and being adaptive/responsive to change mean in this new context.
  
  
• All of the above will also make automating extreme traceability an even bigger concern. But a more agile-style of development that is task-based and event-driven, will help to automate extreme traceability as pragmatically as possible. Extreme "big brother" environments that know and log everything we are doing, in the appropriate context (with the appropriate privacy/security levels) will be an increasing trend in properties of the IDEs and ALM tools we use.
  
  
• All of the above will also make for "extreme configuration identification." We'll have so many things to try to track, it will be almost intractable to try and identify and track them (and their dependencies) in the usual ways. Search engines will help us out here with "tagging and searching" rather than "capturing, filing and sorting", with multiple views and scopes and transparency/trust levels.
  
  
• Extreme time-based competition and focus on the customer-experience will bring "Lean" and TOC (particularly "Lean") methods even more prominently into the limelight. Creating and managing baselines will be more challenging as signficant CM events (such as baselines) blur closer and closer together (what I term the 'collaboration-dilation' effect) and transform discrete events into continuous flow. The logging and tagging+searching capabilities previously mentioned will need to help us with this.
  
  
• Extreme Visualization for how to conceptualize these things in our heads and share those concepts with others, will be another important focus of the next generation of "extreme" ALM tools and services to assist us.
  

What else? I know I'm missing something else that I thought of earlier but am drawing a blank now. There's gotta be more than this!