お仕事日誌＆一日一麺

土曜午後の「情報化経営のトップマネジメント」という講義で、Economist がクラウドコンピューティングの特集を組んでいることを知りました。

僕は知らなかったのですが、Economist はビル・ゲイツが唯一読んでいる雑誌と言うほど must-read な雑誌なんだそうで（土曜の講義の担当は元マイクロソフト、現インスパイヤの成毛眞さんなので、ビルゲイツの話がよく出てくる）。

先日の「企業の境界線とクラウドコンピューティング」あたりの問題意識に参考になる記事が何かないかなーと、ざっとみたのですが、このあたりが参考になりそうかな、という雰囲気のものがあったので以下でクリップ。

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A survey of corporate IT: The long nimbus | The Economist

Corporate IT has always promised to make companies more agile. In the 1990s many companies re-engineered their business processes when they started using a form of software called enterprise-resource planning (ERP), which does things such as managing a firm’s finances and employees. But once these massive software packages were in place, it was exceedingly difficult to change them. Implementing SAP, the market leader in ERP, is like pouring concrete into your company, goes an old joke among IT types.

This helps to explain why in many firms IT departments and business units have traditionally been at loggerheads. In recent years tensions have worsened. Companies must grapple with ever-changing markets and regulations, yet IT budgets are being cut. Many firms now have a huge backlog of IT projects.

Hence the interest in cloud computing. It turns capital expenditure into operational expenditure, which makes things much easier and cheaper. Instead of having to shell out a lot of money for, say, a server to test an application and, even with luck, wait a few weeks for it to be up and running, managers just have to whip out a credit card, open an account at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and fire up a virtual machine for a few dollars.

企業のITは変化への対応力を高めるために ERP を採用したが、ソフトウェアパッケージとしてはでかすぎて、コンクリートを注ぎ込むように企業を硬直化させてしまった。さらに予算は削減されるのに、市場も環境も変化しつづけているので、多くの企業で IT プロジェクトの膨大なバックログを抱えているのが現状である。

そういうところに、資産計上ではなく費用計上が可能な、それも手軽に安く使えるクラウドコンピューティングがやってきた。サーバを立ち上げるのに何週間も、それも高額な費用を請求されて、待たされることもない。

What effect will all this have on the nature of the firm? If IT systems really allow companies to become more modular and flexible, this should foster further specialisation. It will become even easier to outsource business processes, or at least those parts of them where firms do not enjoy a competitive advantage. Companies will increasingly focus on their “core” and shed the “context”, in the words of Geoffrey Moore, managing director of TCG Advisors, a consultancy.

This also means that companies will rely more on services provided by others. They will increasingly form “process networks”, a term for loosely connected groupings of specialised firms coined by John Hagel, a business strategist at Deloitte & Touche, an auditing firm. His prime example is Li & Fung, a company based in Hong Kong that has assembled a global process network of nearly 10,000 business partners in the clothing industry from which it puts together customised supply chains for clothes designers.

Both trends could mean that in future huge clouds—which might be called “industry operating systems”—will provide basic services for a particular sector, for instance finance or logistics. On top of these systems will sit many specialised and interconnected firms, just like applications on a computing platform. Yet this is only half the story. The cloud changes not only the plumbing and structure of firms and industries, known as the “transactional layer”, but also their “interactional layer”, a term coined by Andy Mulholland, chief technologist of Capgemini, a consultancy. He defines this as the environment where all the interactions between people take place, both within an organisation and with its business partners.

IT システムが企業のモジュール化を進めて柔軟性を高められるのであれば、専門化が進むだろう（foster further specialisation）。また同時に、他社が提供するサービスに頼ることになるだろう（companies will rely more on services provided by others）。

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まだ全文をちゃんと読んでいませんが、モジュール化と専門化をITシステムで進めましょう、ということが前提にあるようで。ITで見える化＆モジュール化し、コアに資源を集中して、ノンコアは専門性の高いクラウドにアウトソースしましょう、ということかと。

そういうのって言うは易しだけど、ERP や SOA の反省点を解決しないと先にすすめないんだよなー。もうすこしゆっくり読んでみればなにかヒントがあるのかも知れないけど、その可能性もあまり高くなさそう。