下一波科技革命瞄准官僚主义

    过去20年里，没有任何东西能像信息技术一样，如此彻底、如此频繁地催生商业变革。第一波ＩＴ革命中，IT技术的进步促使很多公司改进了运营模式。第二波IT革命中，网络的力量日益彰显，促使整个企业界都要彻底重新思考自己的商业模式。未来几年里，姗姗来迟的第三波IT革命终将大范围催生管理模式的革命。

    第一波：新的运营模式

    作者迈克尔•汉默和詹姆斯•杰姆培在1993年的畅销书《企业再造》（Re-engineering the Corporation）中曾经指出，企业的采购、生产及分销产品和服务的流程应该进行一番彻底的改造。虽然简化工作流程的理念早已不新鲜了（早在90年前，弗雷德里克•温斯洛•泰勒就在大声疾呼“科学化管理”），但是直到现在，IT技术才使企业具备了打破职能团队各自为战的局面、简化繁琐流程、显著削短反应时间的能力。

    这本书出版后，全球各大企业投入了数以千亿美元计的资金用于简化、整合供应链。到今天，全球范围内已经很难找出一家没有向SAP、甲骨文（Oracle）和Salesforce等企业购买过ERP（企业资源规划）和CRM（客户关系管理）“解决方案”的大公司。

    上世纪90年代初期时，所谓的“企业再造”在一个新入行的CIO眼中可能只是个一次性投资的工程，但现在它已经成了永无止境的军备竞赛。每项新技术（大数据、云计算、移动）的问世都会引发一场赛跑。当然，竞争的代价也不便宜。据IT咨询公司高德纳（Gartner）预测，2013年全球企业花在企业软件上的资金高达3000亿美元。这个数额虽然听起来高得吓人，但实际不到总体IT支出的8%。虽然IT很少百分之百实现它所许诺的蓝图，但没有一家企业敢对它说不。押IT这一宝，不加注就要落后。

    Over the past 20 years, nothing has transformed business as thoroughly or as frequently as information technology. In the first wave, advances in IT prompted many companies to revamp their operating models. In Wave 2, the growing power of the Web provoked a fundamental rethink of business models. And over the next few years, Wave 3 will yield a broad-based and long overdue revolution in management models.

    Wave 1: New Operating Models

    In their 1993 bestseller, Re-engineering the Corporation, Michael Hammer and James Champy argued for a comprehensive retooling of the operating processes that organizations use to source, produce, and distribute their products and services. While the idea of simplifying workflows was hardly new (90 years earlier, it had been at the heart of Frederick Winslow Taylor's crusade for "scientific management"), what was new was the capacity of information technology to bust through functional silos, simplify byzantine processes, and dramatically reduce response times.

    In the wake of Hammer and Champy's book, businesses around the world spent hundreds of billions of dollars integrating and streamlining their supply chains. Today, it would be hard to find a large organization that hasn't paid a small fortune to vendors like SAP (SAP), Oracle (ORCL), and Salesforce (CRM) for their ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) "solutions."

    Re-engineering, which might have looked like a one-time project to a neophyte CIO in the early 1990s, has become a never-ending arms race. Each new technology -- big data, cloud computing, mobile -- launches a new sprint. It isn't cheap to stay in the race. IT consultancy Gartner estimated that in 2013, companies around the world ponied up nearly $300 billion for enterprise software; an amount that, though staggering, was less than 8% of total IT spending. While IT seldom delivers all it promises, no organization can opt out. It's ante up or fall behind.