A modern car can have as many as 200 on-board sensors, measuring everything
from tyre pressure to windscreen temperature. A high-end Lexus contains 67
microprocessors, and even the world’s cheapest car, the Tata Nano, has a dozen.
Voice-driven satellite navigation is routinely used by millions of people.
Radar-equipped cruise control allows vehicles to adjust their speed
automatically in traffic. Some cars can even park themselves.
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Once a purely mechanical device, the car is going digital. “Connected cars”,
which sport links to navigation satellites and communications networks—and,
before long, directly to other vehicles—could transform driving, preventing
motorists from getting lost, stuck in traffic or involved in accidents. And
connectivity can improve entertainment and productivity for both driver and
passengers—an attractive proposition given that Americans, for example, spend 45
hours a month in their cars on average. There is also scope for new business
models built around connected cars, from dynamic insurance and road pricing to
car pooling and location-based advertising. “We can stop looking at a car as one
system,” says Rahul Mangharam, an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania,
“and look at it as a node in a network.”
Stian Danenbarger on 15 Sep 08So far, most investments in EI have been driven by a focus on an increase in efficiency and topdown change of business processes in relatively static value chains. Typical deployment of EI has been based on the idea of an enterprise-wide "big bang" transition to a new "best way of working", pre-conceived largely by a corporate elite of engineers and analysts. The resulting system and the related procedures were supposed to enforce this way of working and make sure that the enterprise would reap the benefits (of efficiency) for some time to come, by discouraging subsequent unofficial forms of smaller-scale and/or bottom-up change. This approach was very much enterprise centric and typically weak in accommodating subsequent change. It is however no longer adequate, because enterprises increasingly need to rely on bottom-up initiative, emergence and flexibility, in order to remain competitive. Due to fierce global competition, enterprises can no longer survive with a focus on efficiency and producing more of the same (for a lower price). Instead, enterprises need to concentrate on value innovation and producing more of not the same (with higher margins). To this end enterprises operate increasingly in dynamic value networks.Therefore EI should be geared towards leveraging creativity, collaboration and change in more dynamic networks to release its full potential as an instrument for value creation. A new objective for EI should be: To stimulate value creation based on innovation and co-creation in a context of networked enterprises that is very much defined bottom-up, by creative, committed workers.
