Does Asia Need Information On Demand?

Many people talk about how Asia is further behind the rest of the world on the technology curve.  As a result, some have questioned whether or not they are ready to start thinking about investing in more flexible information architectures that would enable them to integrate data from across their organization and make all enterprise information more readily available.  My recent trip across Asia led me to some interesting insights.

Earlier this month, over a period of 12 days, I met with people in Malaysia, Tokyo, Beijing, Bangkok and Singapore.  I talked about the concepts of Information On Demand to over 650 people, and was able to have separate conversations about this topic with over 100 of those people.  And as a fun fact, I travelled back and forth across 4 different time zones, logged over 67 hours of plane travel, with 3 overnight flights, and ate local cuisine in every country, which my stomach somehow survived until after I ate the airplane food on my way back to the United States.  And I can't tell you how much money I lost changing currencies every country I went to...they really need the equivalent of the Euro in Asia!

Anyway, back to the serious stuff.  One thing I found to be universal was the fact that companies everywhere have gotten into the habit of building out and deploying independent applications across their organization.  Asia is no different here.  In every country I visited, I heard about organizations that have developed or purchased different applications for their different lines of business.  And they are all using different data stores to manage their information, and have different data models to describe their business.

The difference in Asia is that they are just starting to realize this problem, but it has not yet become accute.  They are just now starting to think about how to look across their organizations, but are more concerned with historical reporting and analysis than real-time views across their enterprise information.  As a result, they are more focused on buidling out data warehouses to consolidate information after the fact.

However, there are a few forward thinking organizations that are starting to recognize that they can get more value out of their information by providing real-time access across the organization.  There are a few innovative companies that are learning that by using information spread across their organization more effectively, they can transform their business processes and create competitive differentiators.

I believe that Asia is indeed ready for Information On Demand.  They have the problems that Information On Demand can address. And investing in Information On Demand capabilities now would be a lot easier for them, since their IT environments have not reached the levels of complexity seen in the companies where this has already become a significant problem.  But many organizations don't know how to best address their information silos or begin putting in place more flexible information architectures.  More education is needed on how to deploy these capabilities, and the benefits/value of taking this approach.  Otherwise, they will just be postponing the inevitable, and will have more complex environments that will be more costly to deal with.

Asia, start focusing on information as a service now!  You will be much better prepared for the future and will be able to focus on innovating your business instead of dealing with information problems.

Comments

[panasianbiz.com]

I think that many Asian countries are recognizing the necessity of increasing their technological competitiveness in the global market and are beginning to address their deficiencies in this very important area.