6 minute read
Internal translucency and blockchain technology are the consequences of the evolution of business and radical openness. Active investment in Strategy Execution Software, the blockchain, and innovation both in start-ups and corporate giants define future tendencies enabling new levels of clarity. Are financial transparency, translucent voting, and more trusting businesses new economic trends to more ethical future?
Époque of
Radical Openness
The world itself is a huge network, where each individual or Internet user contributes to its creation by sharing a post, uploading a video, or writing a tweet, notes Don Tapscott, the presenter at TEDGlobal 2012. The social media usage is growing and will reach 2.95 billion by 2020; radical openness grows along with it, as higher and higher volumes of information become available. It is a positive sign for businesses and customers bringing transparency at all levels. Collaborative environment and idea-leveraging are the major triggers of innovation and undeniable components of translucency, claim John Warnes, Emergency Lab Technology Specialist, and Jeff Wishnie, Former Senior Director of Program Technology for Mercy Corps. Jason Silva, the renown futurist and storyteller, views radical openness as a promising future – it is business evolution accelerator and “wow” trend that will contribute help make transparency and trust irreplaceable components of the business environment.
Translucency triggers radical thinking, augmented future of business intelligence, and constant innovation as the core megatrends affecting the future of economics. According to the OECD’s research, the popularity of radical openness will experience rapid growth in Nordic countries and afterwards will be adopted by other nations. Being more practical, objective, and exposed already helped Scandinavia become economically stable without robust natural resources. Their values of constant idea-leveraging and orientation towards practicality, sustainability, and translucency enable cultivation of radical openness as a core trend. Active political life, financial information disclosure, interest in autonomy, and low corruption rates are the major factors that will make Nordics open-source and transparency-driven economies by 2030s. Moreover, as the result, Nordics score in the top 5 of the happiest countries in the world.
Internal Transparency
and Strategy Planning
With radical openness, actions of governments and companies are becoming transparent and visible requiring institutions to make sustainable and responsible decisions. Now, and in the upcoming future, their choices will not only be driven by regulations but also by their ethical beliefs and conscience. For instance, child labor has always been a trembling issue. According to the US Department of Labor, in 2016, a variety of goods were produced employing child labor in more than 70 countries. A number of companies had suffered when information about child labor usage was disclosed. Moreover, hidden information and insufficient reporting system made this issue flourish and enlarge. With hyper-transparent supply chain, all violations such as discrimination and child labor become visible and cater the principles of compliance, sustainability, and ethics. Digital communication, analytics, and automation are also triggers of radical openness guaranteeing the future of equal opportunities and respect for all.
As a consequence, daily and transparent communications and investment planning are becoming vitalities of successful financial management. Gartner, research and advisory firm, spotted that in the past three years, companies switched from project-based to enterprise-wide software to make their actions visible at all corporate levels. Straight emphasis on the managerial portfolio will assist companies in reaching their corporate goals while maintaining trusting relationships with their employees and cultivating knowledge-exchange. Strategy Management software shares the decision-making processes across the company and improves internal communication. As a result, the shared vision and such openness improve employee engagement and motivation. Driven by these factors, the expenditure on enterprise software worldwide is forecasted to shift from $389 billion in 2017 to $421 billion in 2018 underlining a connection between digitalization and radical openness in companies.
Enabling Financial Transparency
Financial transparency as a part of radical openness is now executed with blockchain – by 2021, the blockchain market is expected to reach $2.3 billion. Giants like Amazon and MasterCard actively invested in this technology and are starting to employ digital ledger in the B2B segment. Microsoft and Bank of America, IBM and China UnionPay are examples of partnerships that take advantage of blockchain to speed and ease financial transactions. The raising attention to this technology is understandable – digital ledger shares the data between all participants of the transaction while the record itself cannot be deleted. It makes fraudulent transactions impossible and guarantees low-cost and fast delivery of finances. Start-ups are also early adopters of the revolutionary transparency. Chain Inc. is a company that works on the development of various financial solutions to be used in banks and stock exchanges. The total investment in this project now accounts for $43.7 million. This decentralized decision-making mechanism could be defined as the first step in the transparent future of financial and banking segment driving the world in the era of radical openness and unveiling a plethora of opportunities to the reality of continuous and borderless exchange and transactions. Thus, radical openness becomes a synonym to fraud-free and ethical environment whereas violations of law become highly observable.
A New Age of Transparency:
Government and Healthcare
According to Don Tapscott, healthcare is falling behind other industries when it comes to information sharing and easiness of processes. Only 16% of healthcare CEOs and executives wanted to utilize the concepts of decentralized decision-making. To show positive dynamics, the number is forecasted to increase to 56% by 2020. Application of blockchain can improve the storage of healthcare and medical records and create an environment for knowledge-exchange to design new treatments. MedRec is a prototyped solution that eases access to medical records and gives right to use for researchers. It contributes to effective resource and time-management while decreasing transportation and production costs in the pharmaceutical industry. Failure to adapt to innovations will lead to a continuous increase of financial burden required for the maintenance of healthcare system and its records.
The impact of radical openness is also perceived as positive at the governmental level. The authorities of UK government believe that transparency can reduce costs, establish trusting relationships, and motivate citizens to pursue proactive participation in political life. In this case, blockchain technology could show the actual spending of the governmental funds and suggests the most effective approaches to governmental spending. For example, Follow My Vote app is a new solution to be used in politics to calculate votes. The app helps avoid fraud and bring democracy to entirely new level whereas the public will participate in the process from the beginning. On the contrary to the beneficial nature of transparency, Miller, financier and author at Times, poses a question whether all transparencies are equal and beneficial. The absence of privacy displayed in reality-shows and secretive information oversharing is the transparency’s drawbacks. For example, GPS-sharing allows seeing the strategic locations of military bases due to GPS-tracking of soldiers’ jogging routes. It raises a plethora of questions, and one of them is “Are radical openness and transparency always beneficial or can this action translucency lead to irreversible consequences?”.
