The Hindu Business Line : When `smart mobs' communicate...

... it's the next social revolution, because smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other. Learn all about the network dimension to human communication.

THE next social revolution is Smart Mobs, says Howard Rheingold, in a new publication from Basic Books (www.basicbooks.com) . "Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act in concert even if they don't know each other," he explains in the introduction.Mobile communications and pervasive computing are changing the way "people meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell, govern, and create"; a new digital divide is in the making to "separate those who know how to use the new media to band together from those who don't."

To connect, text messaging has played no small role. Being `packet-switched' rather than `circuit-switched', text messaging has both technical and economic advantages, points out Rheingold.

"The transport medium efficiently allocates network resources on a bottom-up basis (the packets find their way like autos) rather than an inefficient, centrally-planned basis where each conversion requires a devoted circuit (like railroads)." A simple analogy, that is.

In a chapter titled `Technologies of cooperation', the author narrates his discussion with David Reed, whose law relating social and computer networks is "the most recent in a series of fundamental discoveries about the driving forces of computers and networks". Reed had the first `eureka' when he thought about why eBay was so successful. It didn't sell any merchandise, but only provided a market for customers to buy and sell from each other.

"Human communication adds a dimension to the computer network," Reed says, when discussing GFN or `group-forming network'. According to Reed's Law, "The value of the network grows proportionately not to the square of the users, but exponentially." Which means you raise two to the power of the number of nodes instead of squaring the number of nodes, explains Rheingold.

With grid computing comes ad-hocracy, states the author. "What is less clear is whether some single winner or cartel of big players will dominate the scene to the point where ad-hocracies are squeezed out or marginalised or whether industrial-scale and strictly amateur p2p efforts will coexist.

There is an enticing chapter on `the era of sentient things', speaking of shards of silicon embedded in dashboards, pens, street corners, bus stops, money and so on. These technologies are sentient not because the chips can reason but because they can sense, receive, store and transmit information, says Rheingold. "Some of these cheap chips sense where they are. The cost of a global positioning system chip capable of tracking its location via satellite to an accuracy of ten to fifteen metres is around $15 and dropping." The author visualises shirt labels that can disclose "what airplanes, trucks, and ships carried it... and the URL of a webcam in the factory where the shirt was manufactured."

On January 20, 2001, President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob, recounts Rheingold in a chapter on `the power of the mobile many'. The text message read, "Go 2EDSA, Wear blck." Edsa was the venue Epifanio de los Santas Avenue, and Manila residents, "mobilised and coordinated by waves of text messages" came in tens of thousands within an hour. "Over four days, more than a million citizens showed up, mostly dressed in black. Estrada fell. The legend of `Generation Txt' was born."

Smart ones, I guess, know what to read nxt!

The seller's side to outsourcing

CAN vendors make money from the new relationship opportunities? For answer to this, you need to read Outsourcing-Insourcing, by Per Jenster, Henrik Stener Pedersen, Patricia Plackett and David Hussey, from Wiley (www.wiley.com) . You may ask, "Aren't there enough books on outsourcing?" Yes, but much of the work has looked at the buying organisation's angle, say the authors, plunging into the seller's perspective. For this, they draw upon a three-year research at Copenhagen Business School.

The book begins by tracing outsourcing's origins to bartering in ancient times. "There was an opportunity cost when every family tried to be self-sufficient in all respects. As long as people had to spend a disproportionate amount of time on the things they were not good at, they could not spend that time on tasks for which they had comparative advantages." In the 1980s, the main manifestation of outsourcing was the `make or buy' decision, inform the authors. Ever since, there has been "a progression in complexity of outsourcing activities," explain the authors.

The 1999 crisis at the UK Passport Agency is discussed as a case study in chapter 2, which is on the shift to outsourcing. "At the peak of the problem in June 1999 there was a backlog of 5,65,000 unprocessed passports, representing over a month's work. Photographs appeared in the national press of queues outside the London passport office as an increasing number of would-be travellers became concerned about getting their passports in time. The final costs of the delays included the purchase of umbrellas to hand to those forced to queue for hours in the rain and the provision of luncheon vouchers for them," report the authors.

The first challenge for suppliers is the need for additional competencies, as illustrated in the IBM Denmark case included in the book. The solution lies in education, recruitment, alliances, acquisitions, and outsourcing. The second challenge is to manage the entry phase, that is, "the period from initial discussions with the buyer about a real project to the award of the contract". Third comes the challenge of running the contract; and to make this smoother, the authors suggest a series of dos and don'ts. There are challenges for the buyers too.

On how to price your service, there are inputs in a chapter titled `pricing solutions and managing risks'. The authors suggest `value-based pricing' as the preferred approach because it can yield the highest profits; moreover, "it forces the firm to think of the solution from the perspective of the client".

An understanding of customers' core competencies helps sellers in making the pie larger, advise the authors. "Sellers should be able to complement the buyers' core competencies in such a way as to create a strategic fit between the core competencies of the two organisations." Buyers too can make the pie larger by adopting `lateral leadership' skills - "for working effectively in outward inter-firm relationships as opposed to the downward relationships within a company".

Useful read, if you can bear with the academic bias in the treatment.

(Books courtesy: Landmark www.landmarkonthenet.com)

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