Executives gather to talk technology
It was a jolt to hear someone quoting Karl Marx at a techno conference in Poland last week.
But that's probably what Andersen Consulting's Howard Pennington intended. The firm's Budapest-based partner is billed as a "change agent," working since 1993 with telecom companies, banks and railways in Hungary and the Czech Republic during the great shift from state socialism to market capitalism.
In Warsaw, he was a lead speaker at an Economist conference about a change that has convulsed the globe: the internet and cost savings it creates for consumers as well as for business and government.
The Karl Marx bit came at the end of a somewhat downbeat presentation of pie charts and video clips to illustrate the top-to-bottom changes required, including how managers relate to each other, to the outside world and to their employees.
Convergence in computer, communications and content technologies is turning conventional business environments upside down. Electric transport is replacing physical, transportation, internet communication can now substitute for real estate, and internet engines are the new electronic labor.
"Commerce in intellectual property eclipses commerce in physical property," Pennington said. And then he closed with the clip of a British professor type who talked about Karl Marx having the last laugh, after having vilified the evil capitalists who had a lock on the "means of production" and therefore capital.
Now, in the internet-wired economy, the professor said with ironic delight, "people do own the 'means of production' people have those skills in their brains. And they can walk out at any time. It is changing the face of capitalism, of management. The world is not insecure for people who have intellectual capital in their heads."
So, with Poland and her neighbors conscious of having to make clean sweeps of their socialist past, does that give them a competitive advantage over the West in letting go of entrenched practices? Could be, if the "wired" business leaders here seize the moment. Lou Celi, of EIU Electronic, said the "skills are top-notch and there is some technological leapfrogging going on. But government regulations are a problem and of course there are funding problems."
Business leaders have to educate government officials about what is happening at a pace so fast it's not written down yet. "They have to focus on deregulation, on the communication infrastructure," Pennington said. "There is a lot of growth needed to take advantage of this new economy. Businesses need to press government to move fast on this. And I don't see that happening."
A U.S. Chamber official from Moscow asked which of the region's front-tier transition governments had taken the lead in this area. She said the Russian government currently is proposing a five-year plan to restrict e-commerce. That drew a ripple from the crowd a five-year plan, yet again?
But none of the speakers wanted to answer her; maybe they didn't want to offend their regional clients.
The moderator punted "Who's here from the Polish government? That will tell us something." No one, it turned out. At a similar e-commerce meeting in Budapest last year, 10 Hungarian officials participated.
The massive technological changes inherent in the systemic shift in Poland have caused a feeding frenzy by high-tech global giants. For example, billions of dollars will be spent to upgrade the country's military now that it is a member of NATO. European and U.S. blue-chip companies are falling over themselves vying for those contracts, which may start being assigned later this year.
Unisys, for instance, is one of those proposing "a new command-and-control system for Poland's Army," said the defense contractor's Marketing Manager Ewa Augustyniak. The Polish military definitely will be one area where the "leapfrog" effect will be sudden, thanks to NATO mandates.
Unisys has worked with banks, the police and Polish hospitals since well before health care reform was launched. It helped a Warsaw oncology clinic, for instance, install systems that helped doctors "make the patient flow in the hospital more effective," Augustyniak said.
When the reforms took effect a year ago, however, the clinic's chiefs found they had a leg up over many medical peers because the traffic-flow data also allowed them to "know all about their costs, including the length of hospital stays and the cost of medicine," she said.
Not all the conference participants were tech experts, however. Citibank sent a dozen folks. But, given the rumors about Citibank's lingering appetite for a megabank in Poland, maybe they weren't even thinking about e- commerce.
