Summary
The dynamic of centralizing business assets, including personnel and intellectual property, is so ingrained in the business mind-set that questioning the practice's legitimacy or business costs would border on heresy.
The fact is, modern business runs on intellectual property, and intellectual property is created when people interact.
Paradigm stagnation is the ailment that businesses of all sizes face today.
Business process virtualization (BPV) is the application of intelligent network-enabled automation to leverage what you already have—people, capital, and intellectual property—to achieve quantum improvements in productivity, profitability, and competitiveness.
The free-market economy and competitive forces are driving BPV.
Technology by itself is a loser's game.
The application of powerful computer platforms, combined with enabling software and high-capacity networks, provides the fabric with which to weave virtual business infrastructure.
An emphasis on what people do loses sight of the fact that it is how people do their jobs that matters.
BPV includes the application of business intelligence, gleaned from the company's operations, to optimize business decisions.
Information technology (IT) professionals need to divest themselves of the expense/overhead mind-set and accept the role of primary business enabler.
As companies move into the age of virtualized business, the focus should not be on whether the activities of the past were dysfunctional, but rather on what the appropriate role for boards of directors should be in the emerging era.
In the current market, the HR function of fulfilling key roles within a firm has started moving toward virtualization via executive recruiting firms.
Employees, for the most part, won't be permanent staff members. They will be self-managing free agents with skills to sell.
BPV can be achieved one step at a time, and each step can yield significant benefits.
Where Alan Greenspan saw only irrational exuberance and poor business models, we see the enabling technologies for the next big expansion, and complete transformation, of the American economy.
The point of technology within any company is to improve the way in which business is done so that productivity and revenue can increase, costs can decrease, and the quality of working people's lives can be improved.