government – Managing in Information-Intensive Companies

US China currency wars and strategic collaboration

Business units within large organizations constantly compete and negotiate with each other for resources, this was a constant theme in most of the cases we studied within the collaboration module. Teams within business units either lose or gain as a result of these negotiations and changes in resource allocations. We learnt that organizations that are good in collaboration capably handle such trade-offs within business units and find some optimum that is good for the larger organization as a whole.

A typical scenario is happening at a global level with this whole issue on the value of the Chinese currency. As mentioned in this New York Times article, many US corporations will lose heavily if China heeds to pressure from the US government and appreciates its currency – an appreciated Chinese currency would also mean that US consumers would have to pay higher for many retail items that are imported from China. On the contrary, many corporations who are exporters of goods to China would gain with higher volumes of business if the Chinese currency appreciates. The article discusses similar such contradicting stories among Chinese corporations.

What is most striking, as mentioned in the article, is that both the governments are well aware of the fact that a balanced relation between the US and Chinese currencies is good for global trade. However, from the article, It is clear that both countries are looking for local optimum and not inclined to collaborate, although they know such a collaboration would be positive for the larger organization (or) world trade and ultimately positive for them. The question is why. As we discussed in class, most organizations fail in collaboration because they are unable to find a global optimum that works well for the organization. Maybe the case here is that though the countries know what to do, they don’t know how to accomplish it in a way that doesn’t give strategic advantages to the other.

Challenge.gov rewards external innovation, but what about inside?

Challenge.gov is an attempt to address the gap in idea generation faced by the federal government. Vivek Kundra’s (our first federal CIO) found success using prizes to recruit citizen programmers in Washington DC. Volunteer programmers would use the city’s data catalog to develop new services (i.e. DC Bikes, Historic tours, stumble home, etc).

The twist on the prize for innovation approach is that the ideas are not developed in-house. Many of the prize projects seem to focus on external development and deployment–not changing internal processes. Innovations take the form of novel use of government data or pilot deployment techniques.

For example, this challenge asks for “the development of web-based tools or applications to integrate cancer-relevant data from one or more of the following data resources with data available through the Community Health Data Initiative”:

http://challenge.gov/HHS/73-enabling-community-use-of-data-for-cancer-prevention-and-control

While this challenge looks to incubate novel classroom approaches:

http://challenge.gov/ED/60-challenge-to-innovate-c2i

Neither of these approaches seem to address the need for internal innovation. I think this approach is fantastic in terms of extending government resources at low costs, but it doesn’t appear to expose internal problems to new ideas.

Joy