>> December 2009: Update

THE BIG SHIFT

Corporate returns are under pressure from far more than the recession. The patterns we’ve uncovered at the Deloitte Center for the Edge span decades and deeply affect even the highest performing companies, with the single greatest driver of these challenges, and indeed future opportunities, being our underlying digital infrastructure that continues its exponential advancement, disrupting one business model after another, increasingly shifting power to the customer and challenging the very purpose of the 20th century firm. Yet firms, from our point of view, are now more important than ever. They must be reframed as do our learning institutions.

This year we unveiled the “Shift Index,” a new economic indicator that suggests the current recession is masking long-term competitive challenges for U.S. businesses.

SEE ALSO:

The Big Shift: Why It Matters (PDF)
John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

Among our key findings: U.S. companies’ return-on-assets (ROA) have progressively dropped 75 percent from their 1965 level despite rising labor productivity. Even the highest performing companies are struggling to maintain their ROA rates and increasingly losing market leadership positions.

Now, we've released an industry-specific version (PDF) of the Shift Index, which applies these performance-challenge data to nine key sectors: Automotive, Consumer Products, Retail, Financial Services, Insurance, Health Care, Technology, Media, and Telecommunications.

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CLOUD COMPUTING

We also spent the past year combining extensive research and industry insights to explore the topics of cloud computing and next-generation Web services.

This resulting publication explores the topic from different perspectives: business drivers, architectural models, and transformation strategies:

1. Demystifying clouds: Explores the characteristics of next-generation architectures – cloud and service grid – that have the potential to support substantive changes in global enterprise constructs and operations.
   
   
2. Moving information technology platforms to the cloud: Provides insights into IT platform architecture transformation from existing to next-generation architectures that will help companies:
   • Simplify the architectures
   • Better align them with businesses they enable
   • Provide the means to externalize and manage policies across all architecture layers
     
     
3. Motivation to leverage cloud and service grid technologies: Discusses the pain points that might be eliminated by migration to next-generation architectures.

Video: The Entrepreneur and the Cloud: Silicon Valley Rejuvenated, Singapore Coming of Age, Silicon Valley Leadership Forum, Stanford, California, September 24, 2009 [download slides (PDF)].

Presentation: The Big Shift: Clouds, “Pull” and the Changing Nature of Business Innovation (PDF) – Gartner’s Application, Architecture Development and Integration Summit, Las Vegas, Nevada, December 8, 2009.

Paper: Web Services 2.0: Policy Driven Service Oriented Architectures (PDF) with Thomas B Winans,
May 2008.

Presentation: Global View of Infocomm in 2015 (PDF)
March 2005.

A Humbling experience: induction into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

LEARNING

Paper: Learning for a World of Constant Change: Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber & Homo Ludens revisited Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown University of Southern California (paper presented by JSB at the 7th Glion Colloquium, June 2009)

Interview: Deep Listening (PDF) Simon Chadwick talks to John Seely Brown about why researchers should step out of their comfort zones.

Presentation: Re-Imagining Dewey for the 21st Century: Learning in/for the Digital Age

Classic Paper: Stolen Knowledge John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, 1996

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