Fiat alive & kicking thanks in part to tech policy

An IBM survey has found that CEOs feel that their companies are slow in responding to organizational challenges, including new ways to take advantage of technology.

So what are CEOs doing about it? According to CIO: "Sixty-nine percent say they are making extensive changes to their company's business models. Many of these changes will capitalize on virtual technologies and real-time feedback."

That's a good start. But it's only a start. As I see it, addressing these issues is also a matter of making better use of methodologies and tools that are out there for collaboration and innovation. It's about making IT and business teams work better together, in a more agile way.

Indeed, virtualization can and should be a big part of that process. Fiat's CEO Sergio Marchionne hit the headlines for leading the company through an "astonishing recovery", with the car firm making a record trading profit of €3.2bn (£2.5bn, 66 percent up on 2006) while eliminating its net industrial debt.

How did Marchionne do it? According to The Economist: "He demands complete openness, fast communication, accountability; he abhors corporate politics and hierarchy." He flattened out the company's structure and got individual teams working together.

The second thing he did was to boost development speed by making teams more agile. In designing its Bravo and 500 models, Fiat relied entirely on computer simulations. "With virtual engineering, we can test and validate hundreds of solutions and configurations -- much more than we could with [physical] prototypes," said Fiat's head of engineering, Harold Wester. Fiat cut the time from final design to production from 26 months to 18, gaining a critical competitive advantage.

Fiat's recipe for innovation was equal parts collaboration, agility and virtualization. So what ingredients -- tools and methodologies, that is -- should CIOs be thinking about if they aren't already?

Let's start with collaboration. At one end, there's Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. At Conchango, we've been helping clients take advantage of its integration of workspaces, forums, blogs, RSS and wikis since its beta phase.

It enables core document management, major and minor versioning, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type-based policies, auditing, and role-based-access controls at a range of levels. Add to that enhanced authoring, business document processing, web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing and you've got a dynamic collaboration toolkit.

We're also seeing Google's first true foray into enterprise collaboration. Can Google Apps Team Edition become robust enough to steal market share from the major players? For a certain type of team, it might, once Google has addressed issues around security and control.

A browser-based collaboration solution like Google Apps leads us nicely into the next ingredient: virtualization.

Most organizations start out looking to virtualization for server consolidation and containment, disaster recovery and business continuity, and enterprise-hosted desktops; many then branch out until virtualization becomes a standard part of the production datacenter infrastructure. And once the idea takes hold in the datacenter, it spreads round the company until, as at Fiat, it takes on a whole new life through all kinds of applications.