In this chapter (Page 213):
This chapter focuses on how many many people get to produce goods on an international basis. The following example gives an insight into what the 21st century could look like in terms of the creation of links between people all around the world.
Imagine a textile engineer somewhere in the north of Italy. Going out with some friends, he finds out that some kind of t-shirt that would not get dirty when throwing wine at it would be quite useful to him. He goes back home and starts thinking about his project. After a few months doing research on the topic in his spare time, he gets in contact with a like-minded engineer somewhere in California. They start communicating and exchanging more extensively and set up a wiki in order to collaborate more effectively. After a while, they add two other French people they have been in contact with to the wiki. After one year, the technical solution sounds good. But the point is, who has not come across a pretty good technical solution of which design was inadequate to say the least? So the four of them try and find designers (one in Italy and the other on France) to work on their t-shirt. The two designers are able to coordinate their work through the wiki while the engineers finish setting the specifications of the shirt. Then they have a 3D graphic artist drawing them some models from all the data they collectively produced. Last but not least, they get in contact with a (Chinese, Indian, Thai...) textile producer who says he can do it, but will need help for some technical material needed. The required material is produced in the US and shipped to (China, India, Thailand...) to get assembled to the rest of the parts of the shirt and the result sent back to customers all around the world. In the meanwhile, the initiative has developed into a community wiki where prospects can design their own shirts (suggesting colors, sizes and improvements along the path). The eventual T-shirt is the result of the collaboration of the efforts of individuals from various parts of the globe, not connected by anything else other than a wiki, modern communication technology and their longing for innovation.
Although this is for now nothing more than a prospective view, the potential of collaborative tools is such that it could allow people unevenly dispersed all around the world to collaborate and produce a coordinated and impressive result from a collaborative effort that would not have found a space to express itself otherwise. The connection of IT tools that lets people create a virtual working space (such as a wiki) available from anywhere in the world opens new opportunities to gifted individuals trying to find partners for their projects on a global scale. We may be on the eve of an era in which individual-to-individual (or even multi-individual?) contracts would flourish with independant people from diverse locations starting to work together on punctual projects.
In terms of global enterprise architecture, the wiki model offers a framework for the emergence of companies broken into teams not necessarily linked by a territorial denominator. We already see this in the domain of software programming, with Open-Source projects being contributed to from various parts of the world. The next step would be for companies to start exploiting the power of social networks inside their divisions in order to let like-minded people connect and start working on projects from wherever they are in the world. If one of your marketing specialists finds out after a trip in Sweden that an unexploited opportunity for business exists there, why not let him set up a wiki with your agent working over there and some engineers in India to dig the prospect and go further? There is no longer material reasons for which companies should try and keep their teams in the same place. I am currently working from London with a team based principally in Paris, but also Iasi (Romania) and Hanoi (Vietnam). We use Skype, XWiki and Gmail to communicate and work together, and everything is just fine.
Another interesting point lies in the fact that providing teams with the tools for their independance also gives them the feeling of trust of confidence from their company that will support their initiatives. If your people feel that their company gives them the responsibility and latitude to innovate and create through the use of high-tech tools, they are more likely to come up with interesting ideas than if they feel patronized. This would mean a greater openness in business processes, with auto-organization phenomenons likely to take place and emerge from the interactions of a great number of people provided with the tools that let them participate into one large initiative (such as this wiki).
In realm of collaborating on the design and manufacture of real objects the new venture ponoko is enabling people to collaborate on 3-D designs, and then has them fabricates and shipped anywhere in the world from a network of fabrication centers. Have a plastic part that broke? Or need a unique physical widget? this is how you could do it.
I don't know if I have written all this in the right place, but I felt it was a shame to leave this page blank any longer. Please tell me if it overlaps with other chapters. In fact, I am sure it does, but this is the wiki way, isn't it?
contributed by domguillermo@hotmail.com}on {date: 2007-02-05 03:33:36 GMT
Page Last Updated: Jun 13 9:15am by mlpilling