Modula

Every com­pany wishes to be agile rather than slow and dis­trac­ted. As the com­pany grows so does the oper­a­tional over­head. Infra­struc­ture adds iner­tia and drag to your oper­a­tion. It can be very reward­ing to go bedouin.

As Wired puts it:

v. Downs­iz­ing a busi­ness by elim­in­at­ing all but the core assets: employ­ees and the com­mu­nic­a­tions links between them. A com­pany that has gone com­pletely bedouin lacks a phys­ical loc­a­tion, oper­at­ing simply as a net­work of engin­eer­ing, sales, and sup­port staff con­nec­ted 24/7 by Inter­net and cell phone.

Adding sim­pli­city

Usu­ally the biggest chal­lenge with imple­ment­ing a bedouin approach is in get­ting people to over­come beha­vi­oral iner­tia. Many people get very com­fort­able with tra­di­tional approaches. Things often get done a cer­tain way because “this is how we always did it” or “this is how every­body else does it”. Finally, the bot­tom line will tell you the difference.

A com­pany is people with tal­ent. All the other stuff are just neces­sary evils to sup­port the people. Ima­gine the bene­fits if your company’s infra­struc­ture could fit into a back­pack. You don’t really need fixed facil­it­ies to social­ize with your col­leagues. Geo­graphy can be irrelevant.

1. Poor man’s solution

The simplest way to put your infra­struc­ture on diet is to get rid of that old e-mail server and costly soft­ware licenses. Use free Google Apps instead to cre­ate and share doc­u­ments and cal­en­dars. Gmail cov­ers your email needs.

pros: Avail­able every­where. Plat­form inde­pend­ent. All you need is a browser.
cons: You don’t really own your data. Suit­able only for small companies.

2. Call­ing home

Get a hos­ted or vir­tual server. Install some open source group­ware and pro­ject man­age­ment tools and use them over TSL/SSL or set up a VPN if possible.

pros: You have full or par­tial con­trol over your soft­ware and data. More secure than com­pletely hos­ted solu­tions.
cons: User authen­tic­a­tions relies typ­ic­ally only on id/password schema. You still need some admin­is­trat­ive personnel.

tools: Zim­bra, Red­mine, Sug­ar­CRM

3. Cloak and dagger

Set up a totally decent­ral­ized, secure F2F –net­work aka darknet to col­lab­or­ate with your peers. Whether you are plot­ting new busi­ness strategies or plan­ning a coup d’état this solu­tion will leave big brother empty handed.

pros: There is no server. People are the net­work.
cons: Bul­let­proof secur­ity only if con­figured right

tools: WASTE, CSpace, Tahoe, Freenet

These examples are some­what extreme. Your ideal solu­tion lies some­where in the middle.

The primary reason busi­nesses don’t go bedouin is because they think they don’t have to. Fat­ness is easy. People like to settle in and nest. But obvi­ously the status quo isn’t the way to the future. When are you going to take your busi­ness to the next level?