Endless Summer Vacation Alert. Updates will resume as soon as the current great surfing conditions drift south.

Weekly Business Buzz List Hot topics this week in the business community. Which is number one? You decide. Got a candidate? Drop me a line. é Customer Service It's amazing how many of the recession-era ideas that have been emerging from the big management consulting groups can be boiled down to this simple, old-fashioned concept. The catchy phrases may sound new - "customer value growth!" - but the strategy is basically the same one that always makes sense when times are tough: keep your current customers happy. é Board helpers No one would put up with their inefficiencies if they were at the bottom of the org chart instead of at the top. But, until recently, companies were inclined to cut their corporate boards a lot of slack. Now of course everybody's hoping that corporate boards will step in and help to clean things up. But there's one problem: the average corporate board is still a laughably inefficient organization. A number of entrepreneurs see this as an opportunity. é Market Dynamics Holland's 17th-century tulip mania is frequently cited as a cautionary tale about the dynamics of wild speculations. But that country's continued dominance of the worldwide flower market contains some instructive lessons about how markets create and sustain their advantages. It turns out there's a lot more to creating a market than just low prices. ê Web services Microsoft (.NET) and Sun (java) are trying their hardest to introduce this concept to the business world, but so far it hasn't stuck. A prediction: Web services won't catch on until a few broad, easy-to-grasp examples are out there working and making money for someone.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, August 4

The purpose of his test was to measure the response time at each site. Katz was surprised by the results: 19% never replied, and although the top five responded in under an hour, the rest of the responses trickled back over the next seven days.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, July 28

If company directors were perpetually playing catch up, flipping through crucial documents on the flight to the quarterly meeting, that was the price paid for having very important, very busy executives on your board.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, July 21

Ajit Kambil can also tell a good story about tulips and Holland, but his tales have a much different spin. Kambil, an associate partner and senior research fellow at Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change in Cambridge, is a student of markets, and his flower stories have a "where are they now" quality. Because despite that catastrophic collapse of the tulip market, Holland remains the world center for flowers, tulips included. And this in a country that has comparatively high labor costs, expensive farmland, and less-than-ideal weather.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, July 14

Douglas Ready, the president of Lexington's International Consortium for Executive Development Research, the group that conducted the study, is a trifle embarrassed by the word "storytelling." He prefers "leader-led development" or "executive dialogue," but he really can't argue with the headline the editors put over his report in the issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review that will be published tomorrow: "How Storytelling Builds Next-Generation Leaders."

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, July 7

The students in the Boston University School of Management's MS.MBA program had just one week this summer to make sense of a category that even trend-conscious technology geeks have trouble explaining.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, June 30

The trendwatchers at the Tweeter Center obviously heard the buzz: In tough economic climate, pricing strategy is hot.

 A WALK IN THE WEB: The fake world

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, June 23

"When our consultants start talking to a firm about outsourcing information technology, sometimes that company's IT department tries to protect it's turf," he said, shaking his head. "That's fruitless."

 A WALK IN THE WEB: Best foot forward: Soccer

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, June 16

According to Evans, senior vice president of the Boston Consulting Group and the coleader of the firm's work on "the new economics of information," the hierarchical nature of the CIA and FBI was ill suited to pick up the "weak and noisy signals" received before the attacks.

This week's Best of the Web is about BBQ.ABOUT.COM. It's a website devoted to the people obsessed with grilling and BBQ recipes.

 A WALK IN THE WEB: All about babies

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence, June 9

Last week, for example, you could choose between a start-up "bootcamp" at Hale & Dorr, the Boston law firm, and a "Start-Up Clinic" at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge. This week, some local entrepreneurial eminences will be back at the forum speaking on the topic, "Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned."

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

Chase runs into many other business and management thinkers in those fertile fields where psychological researchers study how and why people act the way they do - people like Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, who uses "behavioral economics" to explore many of the seemingly irrational factors that drive financial decision making.

 Read more

 A WALK IN THE WEB: Hacked to bits

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

When I mentioned this to Kevin Lane Keller, professor of marketing at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, he suggested I conduct some primary field research.

 Read more

 A WALK IN THE WEB: Back together again

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

I didn't expect to be talking baseball and fashion with Richard Hunter, an expert in how information technology is influencing society. He is well known for painting particularly scary scenarios around issues like cyberterrorism and identity theft and also focuses on the effects new technologies are having on business.

But when I sat down with him last week while he was in Boston for the day and asked him about the business side of his research, he began talking sports.

This week's Best of the Web is about Tripadvisor.com. It's a website where real people can rate hotels across the country and all over the world.

 Web Watch: Luke, I am your browser

Posted: May 16, 2002

Wired News interviews Associate Prof. Candida Brush about her new study aimed at dispelling the "biz-woman mystique." Mass High Tech checks it out, too.

A Duke student got an idea from a guest lecturer and turned it into something that won $50K in an entrepreneurship competition called the 2002 Duke Start-up Challenge a few months later. The all undergraduate Sun Dance Genetics team also hit it big.

And if you want to successfully navigate the next waves of technology, says HBS professor Debora L. Spar, it's critical to gain a perspective on the rise of innovation, markets, and rules.

Business Intelligence Morning After Feedback...

Someone from the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association e-mailed me to say the group was having a thing Wednesday night at the Ritz Carlton featuring Ken Kimmel, Vice President of Marketing for Dunkin’ Donuts and Kenny Lawrence, Director of Creative Services and Marketing for Viacom Boston. Check their Web site for more info.

Another correspondent sent a link to an article on trust-based marketing from ClickZ, the e-mail marketing hub.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

It was an extremely attentive, if skeptical, audience of marketing professionals who gathered at the Boston Park Plaza hotel Tuesday afternoon to learn how to deal with a rising force in the marketplace: customer power.

The session, sponsored by the American Marketing Association, was designed to address that vague, unsettled feeling among many companies that their customers have turned the tables on them.

Business Intelligence Spillover

The site to check if you want to see the trust-based approach in action is Auto Choice Advisor, the GM site that will give you some unbiased information on cars, even non-GM cars. Patricia Seybold is also a good source on Customers. She's got a relatively new book on the topic.

Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke and MIT Sloan School of Management's Eric von Hippel suggest that you stop listening closely to your customers—and instead give them tools for creating their own products.

Finally Jupiter Media Metrix is suggesting that companies use the Web to weed out bad customers.

BTW BusinessWeek calls this whole thing the Customer Economy.

This week's Best of the Web is  Online Games. Looks like it's a dogfight between Microsoft's The Zone, and Pogo.com.

Check out the newest addition to this site - a resources page.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

This isn't surprising. Sheffi, who is the director of MIT's Center for Transportation and Logistics, is well known in his field for bringing mathematical rigor to the supply chain, the crucial bucket brigade that runs through the center of a huge swath of the global economy (from "your supplier's suppliers to your customers' customers" is the way Sheffi describes it)

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

The ideas, from inventors around the country, have arrived in all sorts of containers, large and small. Rough prototypes peek from the open boxes, surrounded by snow drifts of styrofoam peanuts.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

Michael Joroff, a senior lecturer at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, spends just one-third of his working time in a small office on the MIT campus that he shares with a colleague. The rest of the time he's either working in his home office in a converted barn in Concord or logging in from remote locations around the world.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

It was while scanning the "Tips" section of "Laying Off Employees" on the Web that I realized I had found a Cliffs Notes version of Harvard Business School.

There was something about the way this online lesson efficiently outlined the steps for preparing for this "stressful conversation" that seemed to pull together, in shorthand fashion, the confident assurance one would expect a Harvard MBA to bring to the situation.

"In a calm, dignified tone," it advises, "reiterate the reasons for the layoff that you explained earlier to your group (or explain them for the first time if the layoff is occurring immediately). If the employee asks, `Why me?' emphasize that all layoff decisions were based on company strategy and work roles, not individual performance."

Sounds both authoritative and effective, doesn't it?

That's the idea behind Harvard ManageMentor, the "performance support tool for managers in a hurry" published by Harvard Business Online, a division of Harvard Business School Publishing.

ManageMentor is a sort of "Harvard Business School to go," designed to offer just-in-time information for managers facing challenging situations. And it's about more than laying people off. Thirty-three management topics get the Cliffs Notes treatment in the latest version of the system, which was released late last week.

"Making a Presentation," "Running a Meeting," "Assessing Performance," "Giving and Receiving Feedback" -- topics that give managers sweaty palms are the purview of this series. But what's particularly interesting is not the subject matter, but the presentation. Instead of selling individual segments to consumers, Harvard Business Online markets the entire system to corporations, which install it on the company intranets for easy access by managers and employees using their office computers.

"These are timeless issues that every manager has to deal with," said Jon Winder, senior vice president of enterprise solutions at Harvard Business School Publishing. "Our idea was to boil the content down to something that would reward an investment of just five or 10 minutes."

And clicking around "Laying Off Employees" is like getting an instant refresher course: just the high points, nothing longer than a few paragraphs, all conveyed in a lean combination of tips, step-by-step guides, "core concepts," tools, self-evaluation questionnaires, and links to relevant articles.

Bouncing around the topic, it was easy to imagine a frantic manager on the verge of a layoff announcement taking a few minutes to run through it as a way of girding for the ugly job ahead.

The ManageMentor product, which consists of 33 modules, is not cheap, with a price that varies according to the size of the purchaser: from $3,000 a year (for companies with less than 50 employees) to $60,000 annually for companies with more than 10,000 employees. Yet since it was launched in 1998, more than 500 corporate sites have purchased the system, a testament to the increasing importance of corporate intranet-based professional development.

Donna Conlin, manager of executive development at Framingham-based Bose Corp., has been working with ManageMentor since 2000.

"We use it in two ways," she said. "First, as follow-up to our training that people can do on their own. We also use it to allow people to access information they need, when they need it, wherever they are."

Among the most popular modules at Bose: "Managing Your Career," "Giving and Receiving Feedback," "Setting Goals," and "Negotiating."

Liberty Mutual Insurance, in Boston, is another local ManageMentor customer. Among the most accessed modules, according to Rich Benner, Liberty Mutual's manager of Curriculum Development and Instructional Technology, are "Managing Difficult Interactions," "Retaining Valued Employees" and "Leading and Motivating."

Benner believes that these skeletal business topics are more than just radical summaries. They are an entirely new medium for professional instruction.

"They really have their own niche," he said. "They aren't like a workshop, where you have to sit in a classroom for eight hours; they aren't like CDs, which you have to order and wait for. The information is there when you need it: it's self-service.

"If you've got a problem now," he continued, "you can go to the intranet, get what you want, and make something happen."

Bose's Conlin agreed that the ManageMentor program has found a promising educational niche, although she put it more succinctly.

"It really fills the bill for users who are like, `I need a refresher, quick!"' she said.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

The Center for Business Innovation in Cambridge's Kendall Square is combination corporate playground and think tank for Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, the Paris-based global information technology consulting firm.

The interior design, a cross between "Pee-wee's Playhouse" and "The Jetsons" (angular walls of mustard yellow, sage green, and powder blue intersecting with sheets of glass and whiteboard) screams that something futuristic is going on.

"We generally think three to five years into the future," a staffer told me as we stood on a swoosh of royal blue carpet in Cap Gemini's lobby.

But here's the problem: New technical ideas that are just over the horizon have gotten harder to sell.

John Parkinson, Cap Gemini's new chief technologist, who was in Cambridge for the afternoon, knows this too well. He doesn't really have an office - he lives outside Chicago - but floats among 20 of the firm's 200-plus offices.

A hung-over tech economy is the most obvious reason why new technical ideas are a hard sell, but Parkinson, who was camped out in a glass-enclosed conference room, easily ticked off four more factors: "buyer fatigue" from customers who had bought expensive software products and have yet to see related revenue results; a "commodification" of services that are now offered by major information technology consultants everywhere; a growing corps of ex-consultants at client companies who are cutting budgets for traditional consulting services; and an industry retreat from custom software in favor of off-the-shelf packages from major software companies.

Parkinson didn't appear to be too depressed about all this. In a physician-heal-thyself scenario, he says he has a new strategy for dealing with this innovation ennui, in which Cap Gemini shares the financial risk of new projects with clients.

"We should be willing to underwrite the value assertion that comes with the work," Parkinson said. Translation: Put your money where your mouth is.

Parkinson cited as an example the concept of "customer relationship management" systems designed to help companies learn more about their customers. These systems often involve a multimillion-dollar investment in software and technical engineering - just the sort of project many companies are reluctant to undertake these days.

"Let's say we advise a client to invest $10 million in a CRM strategy," Parkinson said. "And we claim that it will be worth $500 million a year in incremental revenue, and $100 million in reduced costs. And it will also result in a 20 percent increase in the company's stock price. I'm advocating that we offer to charge $2 million to do the work. If it all works, you pay us $18 million; if it delivers on just two of the items, give us $10 million. If none of it works, we'll give you the $2 million back."

Parkinson hopes this combination of risk sharing and performance guarantee will get clients to be more adventurous about taking on technology projects in tough times.

"It sounds logical, in these economic times," said Carl Frappaolo, executive vice president and cofounder of Delphi Group, the Boston tech consultancy. "It addresses that `prove it to me' response clients often have to consultants."

Ironically, Frappaolo recalled first seeing the shared risk idea during the dot-com boom, when consultants wanted clients to share the possible upside of projects.

"The idea then was, `you're going to make so much money from this project that we want a piece of it.' Now we're working the other side of the equation," he said.

Parkinson can point to one Cap Gemini project where the idea has already worked: a procurement system the company designed for the British Ministry of Defense to facilitate transactions with the Ministry's 32,000 suppliers. Cap Gemini structured the deal so the company was paid for each transaction. "The more the system is used, the more we get paid," Parkinson said. "So the pressure's on us to build the best possible system."

The risk partnership is not solely a defensive move. Parkinson hopes that in an era when IT services have become more or less a commodity, Cap Gemini's willingness to guarantee results will allow it to charge clients a premium.

There will still be plenty of "fixed-price" bids in the future, Parkinson said, but for those projects that involve skeptical partners, or new markets, Parkinson wants the company to make deals that are "significantly `gainshare' weighted."

In other words, "We'll put our money where our mouth is," Parkinson said.

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

Shuman's resume, in his words, "screams progressive activist," including directorships of a variety of left-leaning policy groups. But a few years ago, the 46-year-old Shuman says, he got tired of "throwing rocks at businesses." Now he spends most of his time on the other side of the fence, talking to Chamber of Commerce groups, business-related conferences, and strategizing his entry into the chicken business.

Shuman is still a man with a cause, however; that cause is "local." And just like the good old days, he's in a David and Goliath struggle. Most business schools, like Babson, are still firmly in the grip of a global business model that celebrates economies of scale and free trade: Nike, Wal-Mart, Pepsi, etc.

Shuman is trying to sell a different vision.

"My main sermon is that locally owned development is a viable alternative to a global economy," he said. "I'm not really swimming against globalization per se, just the idea that bigger and global is always better, cheaper."

Last week, Shuman was in Wellesley to deliver his message to the Babson College community. He was a keynote speaker at the college's annual International Symposium on Spirituality and Business. Yet as he previewed his remarks over breakfast, it was clear he was not expecting "local" to be an easy sell, even to a potentially friendly crowd.

"Most communities believe that the ideal is to get a Toyota factory in your backyard and export your goods as widely as possible," he said. "That's taking advantage of the global economy."

Shuman argues against this approach by emphasizing the "economic multiplier" effect, which refers to the benefits that accrue to a community when a dollar is respent many times in the same place: You buy a dollar of your local plumber's time. He buys a sandwhich from the local cafe owner, who buys some chairs at the local furniture store. The greater the circulation of dollars, the higher the community's income, wealth and employment.

When dollars fly out of the community to outside businesses, the local economy suffers and sputters, Shuman says.

Still it's not an easy sell. So Shuman, who lives in Washington and maintains a busy lecture schedule, is always looking for models.

One of his favorites is the Green Bay Packers, a nonprofit company with thousands of shares mostly held by the local fans. He also celebrates community-supported agriculture, alternative energy companies, manufacturers who use recycled materials, and local savings banks.

But apparently talking about these local models is not enough. Shuman, ever the activist, wants to create one. So this spring he and a few colleagues are planning to launch a model chicken business on the eastern shore of Maryland.

Why? Eastern Maryland is one of the largest chicken-growing areas in the country, but Shuman says the industry is plagued by low pay, poor union relations, bad working conditions, and environmental insensitivity, dumping billions of pounds of chicken manure into the Chesapeake Bay every year.

If the state attempts to raise local standards, "the chicken companies threaten to move to Arkansas," Shuman said.

So Shuman is planning a locally owned, environmentally responsible chicken company.

"In the end, nothing is more persuasive than working models of these alternative business structures, and creating new exemplary models," he said.

Unfortunately when your passion is local, you don't make your models with Powerpoint slides and Excel spreadsheets. You make them with bailing wire and truckloads of manure, a fact that is probably just starting to dawn on Shuman.

Asked about his upcoming lecture schedule toward the end of breakfast, he paused briefly.

"Over the next six months," he said with just a trace of disbelief, "I think most of my life is going to be chicken."

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

The course should be called "Innovation," but because it's MIT the official title is more technical: "Generation of New Product and Service Concepts."

It's a core topic at MIT, whatever you call it, and it's a safe bet that many of the 35 students enrolled this semester are surprised by professor Eric von Hippel's message: if you want to develop major new products, do not study average users.

Instead, von Hippel urges students to focus on "lead users," people who push the limits of a product and can help companies discover ways to make improvements that will ultimately appeal to everyday users.

"Lead users have a high incentive to make improvements," von Hippel said in an interview last week. "They are ahead of the target market."

Asked for an example, von Hippel cited a case on sailboards developed by his doctoral student Sonali Shah. Originally designed for calm waters, sailboards were quickly adopted by Hawaiian windsurfers who began taking the boards into heavy surf and using them to perform somersaults. This required them to develop footstraps and other innovations. The manufacturers who discovered this practice were able to launch entirely new sailboards for the windsurfing market.

Von Hippel also cited the company that wanted to develop a nutritional product for weekend athletes. They asked nutrition scientists who worked with Navy Seals and Olympic athletes about the performance-enhancing food innovations they were using. Automobile brake manufacturers looking for advances, he notes, studied racecars and aerospace vehicles, which both have "extreme" braking needs. Von Hippel was on a roll.

"You want to see what kinds of things leading-edge users, whether individuals or companies, are developing on their own," said von Hippel. "The inventions are out there. The problem becomes search."

And how do you find these lead users?

The method von Hippel has developed involves networking with people who are "as expert as you can find" and doing two things: talking to them about their needs and their solutions; and asking them who knows more than they do.

"There's always someone who's more expert, and people in the field will help you get to them," von Hippel said. "Also, as you move along, you will be changing the questions to incorporate what you have learned."

The result is that your questions get better as you climb the food chain to the most advanced "lead users."

Von Hippel, who writes and consults about innovation (his Web site, www.leaduser.com, describes some of his outside projects) believes the "lead user" idea liberates companies from the pressure to constantly create innovation.

"Tapping into lead users gives firms a systematic way of generating breakthroughs," he said. "They no longer have to invent the solution on their own. They can incorporate out-of-the-box innovations which have been developed by lead users, and already proven under extreme field conditions."

Eventually, companies will incorporate these cutting-edge users more tightly into their development processes, von Hippel said. Already, recent advances in integrated chip design, for example, allow an individual user to design the chip he wants and submit that design to a chip company to be manufactured.

"As we get toward markets of one," von Hippel said, "manufacturers can no longer afford to figure out what each user wants. Their best approach in that case is to empower the user."

Von Hippel has been developing "toolkits" to enable just that: to give users more control over the development of their own custom solutions and innovations.

"It's kind of an evolving story," von Hipple said. "In the past, the approach was `find a need and fill it.' Finding lead users is an advance on that. But the future is even more radical: `empower the user."'

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

The result: Slywotzky's latest project, which was released on Friday, isn't really a book, or even an e-book ("E-books are a flop," he said.) It's "a parable" titled "The Art of Profitability" that's available free on the Internet in a "channel" that includes multiple feedback options for readers.

Slywotzky is no techno-utopian flake. A vice president at Mercer Management Consulting in Lexington, he's in charge of developing the firm's business concepts. Two of his previous books, "Value Migration" and "Profit Zone," were mainstream business book successes, each selling upward of 100,000 copies in hardcover.

So what did Slywotzky learn about his customers that has caused him to ditch the traditional route in favor of an Internet venture? First, Slywotzky focused on the two primary customers for the kind of business books he writes: business students, whom Mercer Management recruits, and executives at companies that are Mercer clients or potential clients.

What he discovered, Slywotzky reported when I visited him in his Lexington office, was that traditional business books, the ones so prominently displayed in airport bookstores, are not doing an effective job of reaching these two target audiences.

"The typical business reader goes through 10 or 15 of these books a year," he said. "He just skims the book and moves on to the next one, without ever really getting engaged."

Most business books don't work for the author either.

"Somewhere between 1,000 and 1,300 business books are published every year," Slywotzky said. "The typical business book sells between 10,000 and 15,000 copies. There's not a lot of money in it. The time it takes to publish a book also prevents you from getting ideas out there quickly."

So Slywotzky hatched an idea to create a Zen-like parable on the subject of "how profit happens" and put it on the Web for free. The result is a Socratic dialogue between an aspiring businessman and a character named Zhou (a composite of two professors whom Slywotzky studied under: one at Harvard Law, the other at Harvard Business School. Yes, he attended both). Each of the book's 23 chapters is devoted to a separate "profit model." If you print it out, the project runs about 150 pages.

Mercer's manager of Internet marketing, Ellen Zanino, has built a "channel" for the project on the Mercer Web site that includes download options and feedback forms to encourage readers to engage in dialogue with Slywotzky about his ideas. Although the book is free, readers are required to register, increasing the connectivity between the author and readers. Slywotzky is working on incorporating some of the suggestions he's received during the project's beta period on the Web.

"The point was not to sell books, but to get the ideas out there in accessible fashion," Slywotzky said. "The aim is a good working relationship with these customers."

Most of the consulting firms that compete with Mercer - Bain, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey - are also using the Internet to distribute their business ideas. Adobe's Portable Document Format is quickly becoming the default format for business articles, briefs, and white papers.

Boston advertising firm Partners+Simons has pushed the idea the furthest. Their library of nine online white papers is stylishly designed and prominently featured in Amazon's "e-Books & Documents" section. Last fall, one of their titles, "The Liberation of the Logo," which sells for $4.95, reached number three on the Amazon eBook best-seller list.

Mercer's Zanino is not surprised that online intellectual projects are multiplying. Business students are supremely comfortable online, she reports, and even senior executives are surprisingly fluent.

"Our studies of the market tell us that executives are much more comfortable with online content now," she said. "It's so fast and convenient that they've learned to use it."

A mass audience for a product such as "The Art of Profitability" is still a long way off, but for the two customer groups that Slywotzky is targeting, the Internet may already be the most efficient way to reach them. And Slywotzky thinks it's only going to get more efficient, as the business community mixes it up with this new medium.

"I expect that the amount of feedback we'll get on `The Art of Profitability' will taper off," he said. "But the amount of feedback we get on this application is going to increase."

Sunday Globe - Business Intelligence

The data arrive as late as 11 p.m. and have to be current by the start of the next trading day. But no one's losing sleep at NewRiver, at least not on this project. That's because the company's night shift, more than 150 strong, is located in New Delhi, where the sun is just starting to peek over the horizon as the last NewRiver employee heads home.

In the global version of 24/7, data-centric companies are using the earth's rotation to create around-the-clock operations. "If we didn't split the project between time zones, there's no way we could get it all done," says Craig Le Clair, NewRiver's executive vice president of brokerage services.

NewRiver's approach seems destined to catch on with a new generation of global firms. Amar Gupta, codirector of the Productivity from Information Technology program at MIT's Sloan School of Management, says he has seen it "from both sides, from the US and India." Acceptance of the idea, he says, has already turned "180 degrees."

"Years ago people in India and the United States thought the time difference was a negative," he says. "They thought it would hinder their ability to work with US firms. Now that's switched around - for many projects the time difference is a plus."

According to Gupta, Motorola Inc. is one of the companies that has pushed the concept furthest. Motorola has a chain of centers around the world that allows it to work on projects bucket-brigade style, "literally 24 hours a day."

At Motorola, a project can move with the sun from the United States to Europe to India to Australia and back to the United States. Three eight-hour shifts are possible in a 24-hour period.

"The challenge is developing the collaborative techniques so that you don't spend four hours explaining to the next person what you did in the previous eight," Gupta says.

Gupta believes the trend toward globe-trotting projects that never shut down will accelerate, because the approach saves time and labor costs.

"The cost of programming and data-entry labor in India, for a large multinational firm, is about a fourth of what it is in the US," Gupta says. `For companies that deal with very small Indian firms, the cost can be one-fifteenth."

Gupta foresees software programming projects that will use sophisticated workflow techniques to keep the work moving around the clock and around the globe, dramatically reducing development time and labor costs.

In the meantime, the first generation of global collaborations is primarily data-oriented, because such projects can easily be broken up. At NewRiver for example, the financial data stream into two parallel databases: one in Andover, one in New Delhi (about 10 and a half hours ahead). Every morning at 6:30 EST, the two databases automatically "handshake," synching up in preparation for the opening of the financial markets.

NewRiver chief technology officer Anil Gupta (no relation to MIT's Gupta) believes that his company's two-continent project is only the beginning.

"Once you are on the Internet, it doesn't matter whether you are in Andover or New Delhi," he said. "It's insane for companies not to make that work for them."

Posted: Tuesday, February 26, 2002