Module 5

To explain Friedman’s term of Triple convergence, I must first explain each tier of the convergence. The first tier, known as Convergence I, is the combination of all the flatteners from Globalization 2.0 and 3.0.  Each of the technological advancements of Globalization 2.0 and 3.0, explained in earlier chapters, were significant in the process of flattening the world when brought together as a whole, but when separated the significance of these advancements declines. Paul Romer, a Stafford University economist, gives an analogy of a pencil and paper. Both were great inventions, but without one another’s existence their importance dramatically decreases. Because of the connection between these global flatteners, as one concept or product is improved upon the others are bound to follow.

Convergence II or “horizontalization” Is the process of understanding the purpose and importance behind these global flatteners while making the use of the advancements habitual. A company could buy the fanciest computer in the world that could do tasks from creating workflows to taking your dog on a walk, but if nobody in the company knows how to use this computer it becomes useless. Even if the company decides to train an employee to use the computer it may still have no use if they have not yet created a new business plan to utilize the new technology.  This is essentially what Convergence II is comprised of.

Now Convergence III has more to do with international economics and politics.  Without Convergence three our global platform would be missing a large sum of about three billion people.  Before the 1990’s, Individuals from China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Central Asia would have never been allowed to compete and collaborate with other nations. By 2000 events affecting each of these groups of people, including the fall of the Berlin wall, expanded our global economy to six billion people.  When all three of these tiers of convergence came together they became the Triple Convergence

The question of who is being exploited and who is doing the exploiting in the case of Indiana and India is a tough question to answer, but in the end I believe that the people of Indiana were being exploited by their own government.  At the same time India’s government was exploiting its own residents.  I do not believe that Indiana or India were exploiting each other.

Indiana’s government was in need of an upgrade to their computer system and decided to contract out this task. When the biddings were all said and done Tata America International, a subsidiary of India’s Consultancy Service, was able to bid about a third lower than its competitors.  The state of Indiana decided to go with this India based company before thinking clearly about the resulting consequences that would come from contracting out a task this large to a company not comprising of its own people. If this was a decision made by any other business or company not under the umbrella of the federal government, it would not have been that great a concern. But when the government neglects to contract out a task to its own people who they were sworn to serve, a much larger issue is at hand. The state government’s top priority should not be money but that of its own people, who are the reason they, as government workers, have a job in the first place.

Now from India’s perspective they were only bidding on a task that was in their area of expertise. They were right in taking the business perspective and not worrying about who they were doing the job for as long as they could get a bang for their buck per say. Friedman explains that due to the Socialist economic policy of Indian government, they could not provide their own engineers with work locally. Leaving those that cannot afford to leave India to look for an alternative career field to keep food on the table.  

Intellectual property is an Invention, piece of literature, or work resulting from an individual’s own creativity. Due to new technological simplicity and ease of access, inventions, ideas and literary works are shared all over the world. Without proper knowledge of copyright and patenting laws one can easily become subject to copyright law suits or become a victim of plagiarism. This can become a hassle, but at the same time patenting laws protect innovators and motivate them to come up with new ideas. Without the protection of intellectual property, innovators would become a dying breed.

Module 4

I work for a company that sells multiple Microsoft business solutions, one of which is a sales and marketing automation software by the name of Microsoft CRM. This software not only keeps track of all the marketing information it also keeps track of current partner relationships. To learn more about this marketing software I interviewed the National CRM Director of our company, Tim Andersen, who is coincidentally my Father.

A brilliant engineer could create the most innovative and efficient product in the world, but without marketing, this product would make no money whatsoever. Businesses spread the word of their new product through strategic marketing. Now imagine a large company trying to keep track of all of their campaigns and potential clients with multiple organized folders filled with paper containing the information. Not only would this be a very large and cluttered office space, it would be very inefficient and time consuming going through each and every folder. If the marketing director needed to go on a business trip, he would need all the folders containing the information about clients and campaigns with him. How impractical would it be to pack up a moving truck every time the director needed to travel?

Now let’s say the director was a smart guy and uploaded all of these files into his computer. Now he could just bring his computer and this would be a semi-practical solution, but not very many companies have only one person in their company working exclusively on marketing. Most companies have a marketing team, which contains many members. These team members can’t just pass around the director’s computer, like a ceremonial pipe every time they need information.  This is where marketing software comes in. Marketing software gives companies the ability to effectively manage their lead generation and track the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

When speaking with my Father, he best explained the duties of his job by giving me an overview of what it takes to sell Microsoft CRM to a company and then implement and develop the marketing software to best fit the needs of a particular company. Because no company’s marketing software is the same, Tim and his team need to not only install the software and train the company on how to use it, but also customize the software to sustain almost any marketing function the company is in need of.

The first step of this process is called the Discovery. In this step they evaluate the businesses current systems and processes while figuring out where the inefficiencies are. This is done by interviewing all appropriate employees that will be using the system. The second step is estimating time and cost for implementing new systems and processes based off the discovery. Then they submit these estimates for approval to the client. The third step is when they begin and execute the approved project plan. In this step the developers write code to customize CRM for the business and write any extra code needed to fill in the inefficiencies found during the discovery process. After this step the customer is ready to go and contacts my Father for further needed customizations.  

Module 3

Offshoring is when a company moves a whole factory to a location overseas. This may sound like outsourcing, but outsourcing is more limited to in-house functions. When a company outsources they are only contracting out the in-house tasks to another company overseas. This work is then reintegrated back into the company from which it came. Offshoring keeps all the work inside the company and relocates or builds a new factory in another country. These overseas factories can create the same product using the same resources with cheaper cost in labor, employee benefits, and not to mention lower taxes.

Running a company that utilizes offshoring can have some new traveling and shipping costs that come in result to having large distances between multiple factories. When a CEO has to travel from Salt Lake City to a factory in China instead of a one that is in state, the plane ticket dramatically increases. In almost any industrial company a large amount of goods are shipped between their multiple factories. When these companies decide to expand overseas the cost of shipping is considerably larger.

A supply chain is collaboration between manufacturers, retailers, and of course customers. The supply chain starts with a manufacturer. The manufacturer sells their product to a retailer who then sells the product to customers. The supply chain can consist of as many manufacturer and retailers as needed. Any retailer, like Wal-Mart, that doesn’t produce most of the products being sold, run their business off of a supply chain.  In most cases the proficiency and success of the retail business is based off how well they execute their supply chain.

According to Friedman, no retail company has been more efficient at improving its supply chain than Wal-Mart.  Wal-Mart climbed its way to the top by being smarter and faster about bringing in new technology to increase the efficiency of their supply chain. They figured out the faster you get information from stores about what customers are buying, the faster you can get that information to your manufacturers. This allows manufacturers to recalibrate the production of their products with the supply and demand information given by Wal-Mart. With more visibility into each and every process in a supply chain, Wal-Mart is able to catch mistakes or reroute a product depending on its demand. Using an RFID tag they can track almost every little thing packages and pallets go through or are encountering.  Friedman explains, “If a grocery item has to be stored at a certain temperature, the RFID tag will tell Wal-Mart when the temperature is too high or too low.”  The crazy part is this tag, containing a multi-functional microchip, only cost 20 cents.

Due to the internet, an incredibly large amount of shopping is done online.  Almost all large and even small companies have taken advantage of this new marketing source. Unless a customer knows the exact URL of the company’s website they have no way of finding it, and that is with the condition that they even knew which company sold the product they needed. With Google all of this is alleviated. A customer can go onto Google and type in the product and not only get one website that carries their needed product but a massive list of all the companies selling this product. This allows businesses to reach out to a much larger range of audience. From the creation of Google, another form of competition came about called SEO, which is search engine optimization. Depending on a website’s SEO, it could either be last on the list or at the top of the list. Before Google the only way you would know that Target sells a particular book would be if you went to the store or someone told you the store sold it, and if you wanted any information about the store you would have to flip through a phone book.

Module 2

Workflow software automates many functions and tasks in a process. I work for a company by the name of JourneyTEAM. In this company we sell and customize Microsoft business solutions. We have many functioning workflows throughout our business. While working at this company I was able to create a website that contains multiple contact forms. One of our main sources of new client leads comes from these website forms. When these forms are submitted, three things happen. First, an email is sent to all the members of the sales team. Second, the fields from the forms are integrated into our marketing software. In this software is a database of all our new and existing customers with information pertaining to each one. The form fields on the contact pages of our website have a matching field in the marketing program. Now the individual who filled out the form is in our system and we can now see the resulting progress and relationship with the new customer. Third, the customer’s browser sends them to a verification page stating whether their form was successfully submitted or is in need of more information.

Without this workflow, valuable time and interaction with the customer would be lost. Not only is time saved by having a workflow that automatically feeds data into our programs and multiple emails, it is also saved by having a simple and efficient way of referring back to clients for the remaining extent of the partnership. Time that was spent entering data into our marketing software can now be spent communicating and collaborating with the new client and other existing clients. This workflow doesn’t only help by saving time it also ensures that customer information is not lost or held up in the mix of other coworker’s tasks.

Open source software is software developed by a community of programmers, testers, and simply users. The Programmer first creates a program and posts the code in the public domain for anybody to download and view. All though open source software is free it comes with a couple ethics of courtesy. To name one, when a user downloads the software and makes improvements, the upgrades may be posted for use, but the software must remain free. According to Friedman withholding code is considered gauche. Friedman goes on to explain the primary goal of the free software movement is to get as many people as possible writing, improving and distributing software for free.

Microsoft and other companies like Adobe that create commercial software have taken a blow from the open source community. Instead of buying five-hundred dollar software, people can now download free open source software that comes considerably close to replicating the same functions. This free software also serves as a kick start, as companies can then develop customized solutions for open source software that can streamline and make improvements which can then be sold for company profit. Many people ask why someone would spend all this time programming for no financial benefit, but when programming is something the creators love all the free coding is worth it, and half the time the software is created due to a programmers need.

When a company decides to outsource, they are contracting out labor and goods overseas. The main reasons companies turn to outsourcing is for cheaper labor and an increased 24/7 workforce. During the Y2K scare, skilled workers were required to fix the internal clocks that could only read six digits instead of eight. This task was so large that not only one nation could swallow the responsibility and work that was at hand. Outsourcing to India’s skilled technicians was the most reasonable answer to solve this dilemma. Earlier in the book, Friedman states the importance of outsourcing in the medicinal field. Doctors in the United States diagnose so many patients that they cannot spend their entire time looking at the resulting accumulated x-rays. This is where outsourcing comes to play. Digital images are sent to doctors in India who take a look at x-rays and send back their diagnosis. This was a brilliant idea. Even though waiting in a doctor’s office can be ridiculously long now results have a chance of returning in a timelier manner.

Module 1

Friedman symbolizes the world’s technological growth as a flattening world separating each era of growth into a level of globalization, starting from Globalization 1.0 up to 3.0. Each of these globalizations starts a new path in the ever expanding field of technology, while continually leveling out the playing field, thus flattening the world.

 

The first era of globalization started in 1492 and lasted until 1800. The individual given credit for starting Globalization 1.0 was a man by the name of Christopher Columbus. His idea to "flatten the world" was ironically a new theory of the world’s geometric shape not being flat but round. His plan of finding a quicker route to India led him to a whole new continent, while proving his theory that the world was indeed a sphere. According to Friedman this shrunk the world from a size large to size medium. Now going from one continent to the other could be a much shorter and less costly travel. This Opened up a whole new trade market between the Old World and the New World.

 

Globalization 2.0 began in 1800, shrinking the world from a size medium to a small. As explained by Friedman the key agent of change in 2.0 was the global integration of multinational companies. In this era was the birth of a global economy.  Because of European joint stock companies and the Industrial Revolution, expansion overseas for global markets and labor was cheaper and more practical. Global integration was made possible through railroads, steam engines, and in the latter half this era the lowering costs of communication. Thanks to telephones, satellites, computers, fiber optic cables, and the creation of the World Wide Web, communication costs were lowered allowing businesses to thrive in a multinational level. This era ended in the year 2000.

 

The third era, Globalization 3.0, began in 2000 and is still an ongoing expansion of technology throughout the world. This era is shrinking the world from a size small to tiny. The biggest driving force of this era is the enabling of individuals to collaborate and compete globally. While Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were powered mainly by Americans and Europeans, 3.0 is being powered by every race in any location around the world. Before this era no one outside of the government and the academy had access to email. Now almost everyone has an email account or in some cases various email accounts.

 

To Friedman the fall of the Berlin Wall was not only a physical barrier in East Germany; it was also a barrier in the process of globalization. He explains that it was not only blocking our way but it was blocking our sight. The fall of the Berlin wall allowed more people to access each other’s knowledge bases and become accustom to other nation’s common standards of running their countries. Friedman says that having common standards creates a more level playing field. Globalization didn’t only thrive after the Berlin Wall fell it was also a big reason why it fell. Once too much information got into East Germany, The power of the totalitarian government no longer had complete control over the people.

 

Having computers connect all around the world was a great idea only it wasn’t completely developed before Netscape came along. When the World Wide Web was created, its purpose was to help scientist collaborate and tap into each other’s knowledge pools. But with the new idea, brought forth by Globalization 3.0, of creating a global system that average Joes could use, the World Wide Web expanded into so much more.  Netscape created a browsing interface to view all the information the computers in the World Wide Web brought forth. Because of Netscape, the internet was now far simpler and more compelling to an audience varying from small children to a large business. In Friedman’s words “once the browser brought the internet alive and made Web pages sing and dance and display, everyone wanted everything digitized as much as possible.” Although Netscape was sold for $10 billion to AOL, due to Windows internet explorer, Netscape is still remembered as the solution that brought the internet to life.

 

Technology exponentially grows as the years go on. The first era lasted over three-hundred years; the second lasting two-thirds of time and the third has only been going on for twelve years. Not to mention the third era has seen a much larger scope of growth in its small span of existence. This is almost all due to global integration and the creation of the World Wide Web.