Beautiful Security

Connecting People, Process, and Technology: The Potential for Business Process Management

Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before.

—Bill Gates

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent book in 2005 called The World Is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) in which he explored the outsourcing revolution, from call centers in India and tax form processing in China to radiography analysis in Australia. I live Friedman’s flat world today; in fact, I am sitting on a plane to Hyderabad to visit part of my development team as I write this text. My current team is based in the United States (Redmond), Europe (London and Munich), India (Hyderabad), and China (Beijing). There’s a lot of media attention today on the rise of skilled labor in China and India providing goods and services to the Western world, but when you look back at history, the phenomenon is really nothing new. Friedman’s book reveals that there has been a shift in world economic power about every 500 years throughout history, and that shift has always been catalyzed by an increase in trading.

And furthermore, what has stimulated ...