Month: April 2008

What makes a smart organization

Of recent, I have been thinking deeply about what makes an organization to be smart. Or deeper still, what defines a smart organization. I am thinking about real life attributes not some fancy buzz words from smart pants consultants.

If someone should ask me, I would say a smart organization is one that reacts quickly to market changes, whose components (resources, employees) are used in the most cost effective manner delivering above average return on investment. So a lot must be expected from each organizational unit. Assets must be deployed in the most cost effective manner and results must be squeezed out. These are just rambling thoughts but one day, I will come around to codify it.

Why should we have smart organizations? My own answer is so simply stupid: It makes employees happy! From my little life experiences, the workers are the first to get stressed up when things don’t go smoothly. Like some people I know will say, they willl “Fi eje se!” (use blood to run it!). If things can run faster, better, more efficiently with less input and more time to either party away (Friday night is sacrosanct) and do better things, I should be less stressed up.

Let me swap my phone OS!

Going back the computer memory lane, I can state categorically that the success that the PC had in changing the world (the PC really changed the world) is mostly due to the flexibility and interchangeability of its different components. That kudos belongs to the IBM guys who, surmounting all obstacles, brought out the IBM PC and its standards all within 1 calendar year.

I love Apple products, and they definitely started before the PC but their closed approach to the PC thingy is frustrating and stifles progress including theirs.

Where is my rambling taking me to? Not too far. The mobile phones of these days are much more powerful than PCs of not too far ago. In fact, I believe that sometimes in the near future, there would be a convergence where mobiles would be the PCs. Don’t laugh at me; computers before the PCs were as big as trucks!

However, the mobile guys are following the same route of Apple. They are semi-open and have APIs for guys like me (did I say me?) can write our applications on them. These phones run OSes from Microsoft, Symbian, etc but these OSes are so coupled/glued to the hardware that is it almost impossible to replace it with something else. In the PC world, I can have Linux, UNIX, Windows (and its flavors) running on just any PC happily as long as I can get the drivers. I can even get them to dual-boot! Why can’t I have same on my phones?

I had a Nokia E70. A beautiful phone albeit so slow you would end up smashing it up. I just thought why can’t I dump the Nokia idiotic OS and put in say a Linux?

Google is doing Android, an open platform which would solve some bits of these madness but what I dream about is when there can be 100% interchangeability of phones and the OS running them.