There is good evidence that in the near future, the growth of the available pool of skilled and desirable talent in the United States will decelerate, potentially casting a huge shadow over companies’ ability to grow and compete. We are facing demographic shifts, changing attitudes toward careers, the globalization of business, and the fact that highly skilled foreign talent are returning to their home countries instead of remaining in the U.S. Smart companies are therefore making concerted efforts to cherry-pick knowledge workers.

But poaching someone else’s employees or throwing money and perks around to motivate your internal staff is not a good long-term strategy for overcoming the knowledge-worker supply gap; these are reactionary, short-sighted tactics. Indeed, there are more than a few very well documented studies that indicate that while compensation can help address the situation, it doesn’t necessarily retain the workers you are most interested in keeping. Sure, it may be a pacifier in the short run, but it isn’t the glue that creates the kind of stickiness you need over the long haul to grow your business, and it doesn’t give you the flexibility and nimbleness you will need to satisfy your market’s changing demands. Worse still, it may be sending the wrong signal and setting dangerous precedents that are unsustainable over the long term.

In fact, it turns out that one of the most compelling mandates for many companies, post–Great Recession, is how to grow without increasing mass – actually decoupling company revenue and profitability growth from headcount growth. This is all the more challenging given that the employees you keep often need to be the most skilled workers available. And by “skills,” I don’t mean simply those with valuable traditional work core competencies, but also those who are the organization’s “connectors,” the ones who may be somewhat invisible but contribute the intangibles, including the organization’s network function, making the ecosystem work because they know the right people and how to connect them.

It’s imperative that companies make that connection as we continue to undergo The Big Shift in the economy. Particularly in the areas of technology and globalization, organizations must have the right talent to respond to the constant disruption and changes in the market. And the right talent for all of this is the passionate knowledge worker.

How does an organization accomplish this feat in the face of the very real war for talent? The best answer is that forward-looking companies will gather and connect passionate external workers around the world and engage them as part of a virtual network, which very well may be attached to their organization. They will do this by taking advantage of the powerful advances we have seen in social software and cloud computing.

At the broadest level, we have cloud computing, which has the potential to enable all kinds of brand-new business models and connect individuals in interesting new ways. Social software is among the tools that exist within the cloud model and is especially well-suited for those organizations interested in changing their talent models in revolutionary ways.

Okay, you may say – we have a couple of pages on the usual social-network sites, and many of our best people are there also. And, yes, at this point, any organization worth its salt is participating to some degree on social-media platforms. But the real opportunity is to harvest the data that individuals post and to start using the medium as an orchestrator of emerging ecosystems.

By watching closely for patterns that arise, we not only develop invaluable insights that lead to actionable intelligence, but we also gain a contextual understanding of the motivations of passionate knowledge workers. The holy grail of social software in the cloud is not the cost savings, which are indeed large, but how to manage talent in an ecosystem to both attract and retain passionate knowledge workers who are actively engaged in your network.

Meet the Passionate Knowledge Worker

There are knowledge workers, and then there are passionate knowledge workers. The latter – as I like to call them, “questers” – are individuals who are actively pursuing their own journey, both in their careers and in their personal lives. They look at a world filled with disruption and unexpected challenges and experience them as learning opportunities and stepping stones on their path toward never-ending improvement. They seek out these opportunities in a desire to make a difference, to leave the world a better place than they found it, and to engage with those who share their passion so that they can get better, faster, at what they do.

Passionate knowledge workers experience deep frustration today with the institutional barriers that have been put in their way as they seek to more effectively achieve their full potential. They want and need platforms that can help them connect with others and drive performance to new levels. In fact, they develop best by participating in talent networks – the largely invisible matrix structures made up of knowledge flows that run both within firms and across them. These networks are often very informal and occasionally ad hoc, existing for only a short while. Passionate knowledge workers are articulate about their frustrations and needs, but are often so consumed by their current initiatives that they rarely find a collective voice to express their broader interests or find a place in a formal institution where they want to hang their hat for long.

These passionate knowledge workers don’t usually work for large organizations, which are rarely set up to encourage or even allow talented workers to tinker with their work practices or collaborate with other workers across the organization’s enterprise. Passionate knowledge workers are often put off by their structure and rigidity, sometimes to the point of adopting a less than energetic view of their work.

In fact, a recent Deloitte survey found that 47% of passionate knowledge workers are self-employed, and 21% are employed by small companies. Those work environments provide a culture that gives them the maximum amount of flexibility to learn at their own pace, sometimes speeding up very rapidly, at other times slowing back down to deal with other life and work issues. As for the rare passionate knowledge workers in large organizations, they are likely employed in organizations that have gone out of their way to create organizational cultures that mimic those of the small firms and allow their passionate knowledge workers to easily move, interact, and change their focus and learning trajectory.

[Most SNS members] are familiar with my colleagues John Hagel and John Seely Brown at the Deloitte Center for the Edge. They have made a great case for moving from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows in their book The Power of Pull, as well as in their numerous articles. This same principal is what many of these independent and small-firm passionate knowledge workers have embraced, without thought for what the term may be. From their demonstrated success, it has become clear that social software represents an enormous opportunity, along with cloud-based platforms, to orchestrate the flow of collaboration in and around an ecosystem of knowledge-based workers within and across organizations of all sizes.

Indeed, the organizations that want to attract these independent workers who seek a high degree of control – both over the assignments they work on and their long- and short-term achievements – must also become talent-driven firms in a virtual world. Not only do they have to reconceive their operations, organizational structure, and business strategy through the lens of the war for talent, but they must also use the cloud and social software to bring them into their network, creating the kinds of incentives – not necessarily financial – that stimulate their intellect and feed their desire to get involved in the solution of complex problems.

It’s truly the first time that these workers have had easy and inexpensive access to such powerful technology resources (as offered through the cloud) and such far-reaching platforms (via social software) to foster, harness, and amplify their passions.

Connecting Through the Cloud

While cloud computing may only be entering its tweens, it has already provided consumers, knowledge workers, and organizations flexible access to information. For the organization, it also provides flexible access to the resources needed to address unexpected challenges, such as rapid response to competitive pressures.

In short, the cloud provides access to a broad array of skills and new ideas and a convenient, cost-effective platform for creating a competitive environment where the best possible resources are assembled from the broadest possible network of available talent.

These competitions might solve problems in a more timely way, with greater degrees of effectiveness than might otherwise have long-term repercussions if limited to internal competitiveness. Plus, in the correctly orchestrated ecosystem, the solution is not the end of a job well done; it’s actually the beginning of lifting the game of all the participants in the ecosystem for the next challenge.

Social software, of course, has taken its place in our lives as a platform not only for communicating with friends and family, but also for spreading and receiving information. We know this to be the place where we can engage with the market or with individual participants and organizations, provide customer support and feedback, source innovation, and gain myriad broad-based benefits. These are the table stakes; the payout is in the orchestration for maximizing the benefit to all of the participants.

I have seen this phenomenon with my daughter, a deputy district attorney. She posts on Facebook probably half a dozen times a day. Some of these may be personal posts, like requests for lunch suggestions – but she will also use Facebook to get advice from colleagues about work issues. She may let her “friends” know that she is out on a 10am recess at court, where she just presented a motion that the judge denied, and ask how she can turn it around. Before she returns with her double decaf latte, she will get 10 pops from fellow attorneys advising her to cite a case from Texas or Connecticut, or reminding her that she could invoke this, that, or the other. She will walk back into court 30 minutes later armed with all sorts of new information.

As another example, someone who tweets 400 times in one month on the topic of Napa Valley cabernet sauvignons is clearly a passionate oenophile who probably has deep knowledge of wines. If you are thinking of investing in a winery or opening a restaurant, you are probably going to want to connect with that person and have him or her in your network.

This is the power of social software that often and most readily comes to mind – the idea that one can tap into one’s network for information and insights on demand. But if you took a slightly more strategic look at what my daughter or the oenophile are doing, from a human resources perspective, they are also building and posting their online, real-time resumes throughout the day, every day.

From a human-resources perspective, if you are able to harvest that data, you can discover where the passionate knowledge workers are by category and type of issue and challenge, and use that for competitive advantage in the war for talent.

Stories like my daughter’s and the oenophile’s are not new to us in the tech world. Nor is the idea that knowledge workers from outside the company can bring real value. Numerous examples exist of crowdsourcing to complete complex tasks and be more competitive, but in almost all instances these tend to be transactional-based experiences, not a sustained orchestration of an ecosystem of passionate knowledge workers. Rare is the firm that is organized and optimized to “swarm” feed in the flow of knowledge and be fed in a virtual environment designed to enrich all the participants indefinitely.

In fact, using social-software and cloud technologies in a strategically designed ecosystem can not only amplify the “passionate,” but it can also elevate the entire organization, and the individual talent within it, to a new level. If passionate knowledge workers are more engaged by the ability to consume knowledge and work on complex problems, creating an ecosystem around these technologies amplifies this engagement by several magnitudes over extended periods of time, perhaps as permanent participants within the ecosystem. This is especially true for those who are also passionate about technology, and who may be developing technology platforms, communications infrastructures, media content, and other intellectual property.

Of course, an interesting challenge for the orchestrator of this ecosystem model for talent will be long-term, active participation. Unlike traditional workers in established organizations, passionate knowledge workers are comfortable with the unknown and thrive on being independent. To ensure the long-term participation of the right individuals will require the orchestrator to constantly fine-tune the ecosystem for maximum performance. A vote with “virtual” feet will be the constant scorecard of how well the ecosystem is sating the priorities of these peripatetic workers.

Looking at this from a value stack perspective: in the technology world, most tech companies have moved into the service business in a big way, with their products now the extension of the services they provide rather than the other way around. A typical value stack for a technology company would therefore include an IP services and products portfolio, talent attraction and retention, brand strength, partnerships, and operational performance, among others. By leveraging an external talent pool, a company enabled by a continuum of the cloud and social-software relationships gains incremental value in that value stack. This is the ecosystem at work.

Naturally, this has implications for the pricing of services shifting further away from “price per hour” to “value delivered,” and conversely for the remuneration of the participants (internal and external) from hours delivered to value delivered.

The WoW Factor

This strategy is one that hits close to home.

Just as I believe it is imperative for many of our clients to pursue these emerging strategies, so will it be for professional services firms, such as my own organization, Deloitte.

To that end, I am encouraging my partners to consider whether there are strategies we can employ to leverage off of orchestrated ecosystems to help attract and retain the human capital resources we seek for growth.

How do I envision this? For starters, we could take a lesson from our studies on online gaming, particularly the fascinating game World of Warcraft, also known as WoW.

WoW is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) popular with the 23- to 39-year-old bracket – not just teenagers. The average player – and there are over 11 million of them – invests about 23 hours a week engaged in the game. The degree of complexity and challenge increases dramatically as players advance to higher levels; the number of experience points also increase as players advance. Yet the number of hours required to advance actually decreases, because experienced players become adept at leveraging available resources in and around WoW – wikis, databases, discussion forums, and instructional videos – to learn faster. Four times faster, it turns out. They recognize that one can only go so far in the game as an individual. Success requires creating guilds and teams to meet a specific quest.

The players share experiences, tell stories, celebrate and analyze in-game achievements, and explore innovative approaches to challenges. In fact, it’s the experiential nature of these quests that deeply embeds the exponential value of collaboration into their mindset, and, it turns out, into other aspects of their daily lives.

In this case, the social-software tools are more than a connective tissue; they are an invaluable and fundamental component through which players identify the right skills needed for a team for a specific quest. They even help in the face of failure by enabling players to figure out a different team composition that will enable them to succeed. WoW players are part of a network of creation in which there are increasing returns to learning – not least because they have access to social-software tools.

How does this relate to my vision of what a professional services firm such as Deloitte – or any other business – could do with ecosystems consciously and deliberately designed around the needs of passionate knowledge workers? I envision guilds forming around broad capabilities or service lines. Using social software and the cloud, we can leverage a variety of networking tools, including those mentioned above, plus video conferencing, avatars, and webinars, to engage members of the network in guilds that include both internal and external passionate knowledge workers. As we collaborate and learn from one another, we gain an understanding of their strengths and the uniquely valuable contributions they can provide. Ultimately, they become a resource we can then call on to collaborate on projects on an as-needed basis.

While realizing these benefits, an organization obviously needs to maintain its confidentiality and privacy obligations to clients, as well as keep in mind the impacts to its own IP. As we collaborate on projects with one another, we develop trust that spreads internally across our organization and externally across the market, enriching the overall firm, the value of the individual participants, and the value our clients receive when working with us.

Though commonplace today, it’s not enough to simply use these tools to attract knowledge workers. They also help us identify the right team for a specific need – those with the best skills for a particular project, and those who are most motivated to tackle it.

These tools also facilitate collaboration that enables these workers to do their job faster. They give them a platform for problem-solving as quickly as possible. This is in part due to the fact that the ecosystem and its tools facilitate the formation of the right team, whose members have the creativity and experience that solving the problem requires. It could just as easily be that it facilitates crowdsourcing.

The point is that one gains flexibility and speed in reconfiguring teams as needed, which is even more invaluable when considering the need to factor in work/life balance, a key component of retaining one’s best knowledge workers.

The High-Performance Ecosystem

When companies come to the conclusion that they can’t go it alone to grow or innovate, they have to tap into a high-performance ecosystem. Typically, these ecosystems have been pursued at an organizational level.

One of the best examples is the Chinese apparel company Li & Fung – a major player in the global garment business which oversees the facilitation and coordination of a global network of more than 10,000 business partners to configure its supply networks for customers.

Unlike typical Western supply theory, in which one decreases one’s supply chain from, say, 1,000 to 500 to 50 to five, basically to control economies of scale, many Asian companies are doing just the opposite and are wildly successful. Companies that sign up to be a partner in Li & Fung’s network typically find that Li & Fung will commit to taking a significant portion of the supplier’s capacity, but rarely all of the capacity. The reason? Li & Fung wants its suppliers to be out working with other organizations, too, so it can learn new strategies or technologies and bring them back to the network.

This is powerful. It pulls new ideas and concepts into both the supplier and the greater organization, enriching both. Imagine translating that to individual passionate workers. The good news is that much has been done to “pull” these models along in “neighboring” business practices. We can apply these principles to the passionate knowledge workers ecosystems and orchestrate them in much the same way.

Of course, an appropriately designed ecosystem is needed to effectively manage this network of passionate knowledge workers. And by “ecosystem,” I mean a collection of three or more independent organizations or individuals interacting with one another to pursue shared goals. Ecosystems are dynamic. They are evolving. And often they are nested within other ecosystems that connect at the edges, yet share the same values.

I will shamelessly borrow here from a soon-to-be-released white paper from the Deloitte Center for the Edge, regarding ecosystems. I recommend that you read it in its entirety, but for the purpose of this letter, I’ve extracted the definitions of ecosystems by typeto make a few points:

         Centralized ecosystems have a clear organizer, who may not control the way participants work individually, but strongly moderates activity to achieve the ecosystem’s objectives. Participants generally do not interact with each other, only with the organizer. Information gathering and distribution is done in a clear “hub-and-spoke” structure. An iconic example is Procter & Gamble’s “Connect and Develop” program which supplements internal R&D efforts by extensively seeking external partners to drive innovation.

         Facilitated ecosystems have mesh-like interactions, with numerous routes of interconnectivity among participants. While behavior is primarily participant-driven, a weak or “ghost” orchestrator gently guides behavior or access. American Express’s Open Forum for small business owners is an example of a Facilitated ecosystem. This is an online forum for AXP Open cardholders where small business owners can interact, ask questions, offer advice, and tout their wares or services.

         Sequenced ecosystems are best exemplified by a typical supply chain. These include a series of events or integration points being facilitated by a central organizer or participants. Any basic supply chain is a good example of a Sequenced ecosystem.

         Self-organized ecosystems are purely participant-driven, with numerous routes of interconnectivity between participants who all come together in pursuit of a common objective. A group of friends with a passion for surfing who help, challenge, and critique each other in pursuit of the mastery of their sport is an example of a Self-organized ecosystem.

Which ecosystem is employed by an organization is a function of the needs of the organization and the historical culture of collaboration, or lack thereof. So far, ecosystems have been used to attract, maintain, and enhance multiple companies to perform for the greater good of the whole as part of a holistic business strategy.

But what I’m talking about here is the orchestration of a network of individuals: if you want to deploy the best and brightest talent to move an organization forward, you need to create the talent ecosystem appropriate for your organization. And social software and the cloud are the foundational components of that ecosystem that help you attract and retain longstanding, productive relationships with external talent.

We have seen this done in pieces by different organizations. The SAP Developer Network is a good example of one approach. It created a merit system whereby the more individuals emerge and solve interesting software problems, the more they are recognized and their personal brand grows, leading them to be sought in the marketplace by employers to pursue interesting projects. From there, it becomes a virtual cycle of constant growth in value-in and value-out.

A crowdsourcing approach was taken by Netflix in October 2006, when it issued a challenge to develop a better recommendation algorithm that would improve the accuracy of its existing software, called Cinematch, to predict the movies its customers would enjoy.

After more than three years, a seven-person team comprising statisticians, machine-learning experts, and computer engineers from the U.S., Austria, Canada, and Israel was named the winner. The team, “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos,” won $1 million, and Netflix increased the relevancy of its recommendations by over 10%, making it a more valuable service for its customers.

These are both interesting ways to obtain new resources for problem-solving. And yet, even they don’t go far enough. What I am proposing is a greater stickiness for these passionate workers.

The Netflix example was a transaction, a single contest that took three years for a winner to be declared. In fact, it’s possible that if this had been a harnessed ecosystem with established relationships, the solution may have been found in much less time. And even though the SAP Developer Network puts out different challenges for people to work on, and leverages the knowledge of experienced contractors, it is shy of creating an ecosystem that leverages that talent on an ongoing basis. It is not creating a cloud and social-software–based ecosystem that establishes an ongoing relationship and inspires passionate knowledge workers to build a community.

It is admittedly a challenging task that will be faced by those in operations who have been in the continuous improvement game for decades. Creating and feeding the learning organization takes innovation, commitment, and a willingness to embrace a very different set of interactions. Yet the same principals of continuous improvement will apply here. They will just have much broader implications.

We will draw on more diverse skillsets, and the value – or lack thereof – to all participants will be readily apparent. If done well, participating passionate knowledge workers will believe they are growing better and faster than they could by going it alone or in some other network, even as the orchestrator delivers tangible value to the stakeholders.

Risk Choices for Orchestrating External Talent

There are important decisions about risk management that need to be thoughtfully made around the orchestration of talent. (Notice, I say “orchestration” and not “management.” These relationships are based on trust and mutual respect, not traditional employer / employee relationships.) And the risks to be considered are a function of the kind of ecosystem an organization chooses.

Many of these risks are outlined in the previously mentioned ecosystem white paper that will soon be published by the Deloitte Center for the Edge. They include disclosure of IP, culture clash, viral unfavorable opinions, and over-engineering the challenge of shifting the talent model to an externally focused world.

Take IP, for example. A company organized around a facilitated ecosystem may be very receptive to the idea that IP that is given away isn’t nearly as valuable as the pace at which product innovation, improved service, and improved client experience can move forward. Other ecosystems are more concerned around capturing and protecting the IP. In that case, the company would set up and monitor the talent component of its ecosystem appropriately, by implementing non-disclosure agreements to enable open and free-form sharing.

Some would argue that a potential risk would be the most basic responsibility of orchestrating random individuals. But, like ecosystems that manage collections of companies or teams, the most vaunted “partner” relationship ecosystems aren’t haphazardly thrown together when one is dealing with individuals. Membership has its “rewards,” but the price of admission is running a gauntlet to prove you are worthy of membership. And membership can prove fleeting; resting on your laurels isn’t an option. However, in our Ecosytem of Talent, once in, this is likely less of a problem given our definition of the “passionate knowledge worker.”

But other, fuzzier risks may also need to be addressed, not the least being the change-management landmines we have all grown aware of: inertia and resistance to change, perceptions and realities of power shifts, fear of the unknown… The list can be long, as we well know.

This also leads to the inevitable changes to the overall business model itself. Experience has shown that new ways of doing things formed on the edges of an organization are often dragged back into the core, where they are either crushed or forced into “conformity” within the existing organizational structures and business methods/models, rendering the net new benefit significantly diluted, if not lost altogether.

It’s very likely that these new externally driven talent networks won’t conform to the existing lines of the organization, and perhaps will have to struggle through to even gain minimal consideration. Certainly in my own world, this would be both the good news and the bad, as new service areas emerge with very different component parts and existing ones take on lesser roles or, in some cases, just go away.

So, yes, there’s bound to be some uneasiness moving forward. But the risk of complacency in face of the disruption that cloud technology and social software have on the market in creating this emerging opportunity far outweighs the risk of engagement. The firms that realize the best path forward in order to harness a large number of passionate knowledge workers operating in an independent world, external to the company, will have significant competitive advantages over those that don’t – especially those with first-mover advantage.

Better answers, faster answers, improved customer experiences, and access to a broader set of experiences are just some of the benefits that are easily gleaned, but the list goes on and on. There are also operational benefits, such as moving more cost of talent from a fixed-cost to a variable-cost model, just like the promise of the public cloud model for processing data.

Embracing the Cloud and Social Software Is the Price of Entry

As I have emphasized, creating this ecosystem of passionate workers is made possible by cloud and social-software technologies. But what would this actually look like in practice? At its most fundamental level, what I have been describing takes the form of an initiative in which the owners evaluate both their organization’s needs and where their prospective knowledge workers are in the world. It also requires these owners to respect their needs, interests, and established preferences for collaboration in the process of developing the tools that will be used to attract these workers and create these invaluable relationships.

These tools could include the usual social-software platform suspects, but will vary for each organization, depending on its architecture preference and a variety of other factors. But it’s safe to assume that they enable blogging, collaboration, chat rooms, internal / external IM, instant connectivity to voice / data / video feeds and outreach, wikis, internal and external social-network services, and the derivatives designed to work purely internally, as well as openly.

We have addressed some benefits and identified some instances in which pieces and parts of this new world are already making a difference. Indeed, we even know of a few service organizations that are already on this path.

So what does this end state look like?

I see a globally deployed, collegial framework of the best and brightest minds in constant touch with others in the network, who freely exchange and improve upon ideas, without restriction on knowledge flows (obviously taking into account IP constraints as appropriate) and able to self-select (or be enticed) into specific opportunities for appropriate compensation.

If we borrow from the Li & Fung example, we make conscious choices about not consuming all of anyone’s capacity for too terribly long, as we would like “members” of the ecosystem to perform both inside and outside our immediate grasp and form a “collection” capability of best new work practices and approaches.

I think new and better ways to work continually occur, and access to new open-source methods may prove ultimately to be much more valuable than our own IP as we often think of it. These ecosystem members contribute, and the orchestrator shares without prejudice the best information available to lift the game of those who are deemed worthy to participate.

Here, too, in the social-media space, the mining of unstructured data (such as chat) will reveal who is chatting about what, and how much, and identify the trends. The value is in the data; so having access could make all the difference!

In fact, in many companies, virtually every other area of the enterprise has been wired to “business intelligence” software and dashboards that help executives make critical operational decisions. Organizations can leverage their existing ERP systems, data warehouses, and smaller-scale HR point solutions for critical insights into the passionate knowledge workforce. They can help companies to make guided decisions that are critical as the business confronts a range of issues, particularly in the war for talent.

We also know that our corporate data contains a wealth of information that constitutes a virtual goldmine of new insights regarding how to best recruit, retain, and deploy our in-house talent. Social media generates a whole new realm of “data,” mostly unstructured, ready and waiting to be filtered, mashed up, and “monetized.” The ecosystem value of data harvested from sources both internal and external to the organization will prove invaluable as it proves the case for establishing and orchestrating external and internal guilds.

Where to From Here?

Every organization must make a fundamental decision about how it chooses to participate in an ecosystem: as orchestrator or as participant? Then, what type of ecosystem does it operate in? This will drive much of the behavior any participant will adhere to. The Deloitte Center for the Edge white paper on ecosytems lays out the broad methodology for accomplishing this – and, as always, the devil is in the details.

My vision is for a professional services organization to both embrace the orchestrator role and push to create a Talent Initiative that accomplishes what I have described above.

Where to start?

The first step is to secure the buy-in of key stakeholders, identifying those strong-willed early adopters who would embrace a potentially “disruptive new way” of bringing brand-new levels of service to clients – not to mention reaching out to a multitude of networks to begin to energize potential passionate knowledge workers in a new and exciting model.

There is also the task of identifying how different areas of the firm behave and which type of ecosystem they require. All of our businesses, of course, have very strict (and appropriately so) rules and regulations on privacy and confidentiality. Accordingly, the ability to adopt these emerging strategies may prove to be either limited or non-existent. Even so, certain parts of our business, such as the IT consulting practice, have historically used, and continue to use, contractors and third parties to assist in the accomplishments of tasks – and each of these and their variants will need sorting out.

Of course, confidentiality of client information and client IP rights have always been, and must continue to be, guarded. And then there will be the great debates on a company’s IP (as opposed to its clients’ IP) and ownership value. We own a vast amount of IP, and those discussions and debates on the value tradeoffs of releasing our IP in favor of market movements and improved value-add will need to be wrestled to the ground.

Challenging? Of course. Change always is. And this type of change goes to the core of all businesses that place value in their knowledge stocks, their belief systems regarding employees and “outsiders,” and on and on.

But I believe the future best model of externally aligned talent is inevitable. The only bet to be placed is who figures out the best execution model and then executes.

About Eric Openshaw

Eric Openshaw leads the U.S. technology sector group for Deloitte LLP and serves as the global technology sector leader.

Eric has more than 30 years of experience advising clients on a variety of important business issues, ranging from enterprise transformation to merger and acquisition analysis to technology strategy. Eric has also assisted clients with business process reengineering, manufacturing / distribution strategy, post-acquisition consolidation, order fulfillment, supply chain, information systems strategic planning, technology (hardware and software) evaluation and design, and development and implementation of software, primarily for discrete and process- manufacturing distribution and retail distribution.

A frequent public speaker, Eric also writes articles on technology and operational improvement for periodical publications.

Eric received his B.A. degree from California State University at Fullerton. He has completed post-graduate work at California Polytechnic University. He is based on the West Coast.

I would like to thank Eric for taking time out of a very busy international travel schedule to create this piece for SNS members. Our conversations together on this subject began at our SNS New York Dinner, continued at the Deloitte Leaders in Technology Dinner at CES in Las Vegas, and now I trust are complete in this issue. Not despite, but because of, Eric’s insights into this arena, I continue to be haunted by the idea that we are just at the very beginnings of understanding what value to assign to ideas, how to engender the passion that leads to real (vs. over-hyped and under-realized) innovation, and how senior management can get the greatest utility from its use.

Given today’s environment of cyber theft and forced disclosure, another layer of management responsibility must be added: protecting this Intellectual Property, once it has been created by workers with real passion.  

I would also like to thank Editor-in-Chief Sally Anderson for another fine effort and result.

Your comments are always welcome.

Sincerely,

Mark R. Anderson

CEO
Strategic News Service LLC                Tel. 360-378-3431
P.O. Box 1969                                       Fax. 360-378-7041
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» How to Subscribe

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If you are not currently an SNS subscriber, the SNS newsletter has been sent to you for a one-month trial. If you would like a one-year subscription to SNS, the current rate is $595, which includes approximately 48 issues per year, plus special industry alerts and related materials; two years are $995. Premium Subscriptions, which include passworded access to additional materials on the SNS website, are $895 per year. Subscriptions can be purchased, upgraded, or renewed at our secure website, at www.stratnews.com. Contact Scott Schramke, scott@stratnews.com, for subscription assistance.

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» About the Strategic News Service

SNS is the most accurate predictive letter covering the computer and telecom industries. It is personally read by the top managers at companies such as Intel, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Cisco, Sun, Google, Yahoo!, Ericsson, Telstra, and China Mobile, as well as by leading financial analysts at the world’s top investment banks and venture capital funds, including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Kleiner Perkins, Venrock, Warburg Pincus, and 3i. It is regularly quoted in top industry publications such as BusinessWeek, WIRED, Barron’s, Fortune, PC Magazine, ZDNet, Business 2.0, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

Email sent to SNS may be reprinted, unless you indicate that it is not to be.

» About the Publisher

Mark Anderson is CEO of the Strategic News Service. He is the founder of two software companies and of the Washington Technology Industry Association “Fast Pitch” Forum, Washington’s premier software investment conference; and has participated in the launch of many software startups. He regularly appears on the CNN World News, CNBC and CNBC Europe, Reuters TV, the BBC, Wall Street Review/KSDO, and National Public Radio programs. He is a member of the Merrill Lynch Technology Advisory Board, and is an advisor and/or investor in OVP Ventures, Ignition Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, the UCSD Calit2 Laboratory, the Global Advisory Council of the mPedigree Network (Ghana), SwedeTrade, The Family Circle (Europe), and the Australian American Leadership Dialogue.

Mark serves as chair of the Future in Review Conferences, SNS Project Inkwell, The Foresight Foundation, and Orca Relief Citizens Alliance.

» Where’s Mark?

* On March 3rd, Mark will be speaking and leading a structured discussion  at the Symantec Board of Directors Retreat in the St. Helena, CA. * From May 24th-27th, he will be hosting FiRe 2011 at the Montage Laguna Beach Hotel, California. * On July 7th and 8th, he will be leading the Accenture C-Suite Network Summit section, CIO Circle Cyber Security Summit, in London.

“Strategic News Service,” “SNS,” “Future in Review,” “FiRe,” and “SNS Project Inkwell” are all registered service marks of Strategic News Service LLC.

ISSN 1093-8494