Organizational Shifting

As an engineer, I'm familiar with the fascination the IT world has with emerging decentralizing technologies like SOA and cloud computing.

And, I know how foreign the world of organizational theory, structures, and behavior is to most IT folks...but IT leaders are going to have to become literate in this area if they're going to be effective in matching the new IT to business needs.

The basic reason is that all network technologies trigger massive non-technological shifts. This was true for railroads, telecommunications, and electricity.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison recently began a blog entitled "The Big Shift" to discuss how IT is triggering a fundamental shift in organizations from push-oriented to pull-oriented. They've written about the topic before (e.g., "From Push to Pull" in 2005), but the blog entries are perhaps more accessible.

Is push-pull a more catalyzing contrast than exploit-explore? than complex-complicated?

That's probably the wrong question...more relevant for systems engineers and architects is do you understand how these concepts highlight key aspects of this shift?

The Power of Asymmetric Knowledge

This recent post by Joshua Porter at Bokardo comparing a symmetric social network (Facebook) with one that enables asymmetric social networks (Twitter) is worth reading.

Though the authors don't say it quite this way, my snap reaction was:

Asymmetric relationships are more powerful because they enable much more agile and adaptable in matching information to a decision context.

Symmetric relationships require a much richer shared context...which allows for deeper exploration of a specific context, but is much less agile/adaptable.

Porter links to James Governor's Monkchips blog on the topic which states "Asymmetric Follow is a core pattern of Web 2.0"...which sounds about right.

Why Services Are Hard...

...or at least one reason why... :-)

I ran across a quote from "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?", Lou Gerstner's book about how he changed IBM:

“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game—it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value....I have a theory about how culture emerges and evolves in large institutions: Successful institutions almost always develop strong cultures that reinforce those elements that make the institution great. They reflect the environment from which they emerged. When that environment shifts, it is very hard for the culture to change. In fact, it becomes an enormous impediment to the institution’s ability to adapt.”

I suppose this has always been true, but was less noticeable when organizations were smaller and the world changed more slowly.

Today, most large organizations are fundamentally complex transaction-oriented information ecosystems, or they specialize in the design, development, or maintenance of systems within such ecosystems.

Service orientation (not technology per se) transforms a transaction-oriented information ecosystem into a hybrid that both (a) maintains its transaction processing capabilities and characteristics, and (b) exposes services, enables the relatively unstructured bottom-up/middle-out wiring together of services, and creates innovative new information transformation capabilities (along with new management capabilities).

The culture that produces transaction-processing excellence tends to focus on such qualities as predictability, reliability, and lack of deviance from a standard, and tends toward a bureaucratic organization with well-defined roles, rights, responsibilities, and processes to create and maintain that excellence.

Such a culture is in most ways poorly suited to thrive in a service-oriented ecosystem with its dynamic, emergent, and relatively unstructured exploration of potential information transformation capabilities...many of which are also potentially disruptive.

If you work in a large organization, you may have seen a "deer in the headlights" response to this new "dance" challenge, which seems to be nearly universal these days for elephants since large organizations today are usually information-intensive.

If it's hard for the elephants, it seems even harder for the elephant keepers...who don't know how to do anything but design, develop, and maintain elephants.

And, what makes this especially difficult is that it seems to be as much about turning elephants into composable "ropes, spears, fans, etc." as it is about getting the elephant to move learn new steps.

Seems like more than a minor identity crisis is emerging...

Self-Creation and Knowledge

For the past couple of decades, the term "autopoiesis" has been popular in certain scientific and organizational circles. Its literal meaning ("self-creation") hints at the possibility of some sort of emergent behavior that results in "information for free." This diagram from emergentfool.com is typical.

From a philosophical perspective the term is potentially problematic since it seems to imply that something can emerge from nothing...that there are uncaused effects (or that the assertion that all effects have causes is false). A part of the brilliance of Cynefin is that it largely dodges the ontological issue and focuses on the epistemological one.

Regardless, autopoiesis has been used as a concept to explore how organizations know and how they translate knowledge into action. "Exploring the Foundations of Organisational Knowledge" (Vines, Hall,and Naismith) is a recent paper that takes this approach.

They have a nice discussion of Karl Popper's "three worlds", and apply evolutionary theory to KM in a metaphorical fashion...though I was a bit confused by the conflation of evolution's "random mutation" with an organization's individual intelligent agents engaged in purposeful activity.

As a rough metaphor, there's a lot I like about highlighting the emergent aspect of knowledge. However, I'm not sure how useful it is when it comes to specific decisions and actions. Having slogged through Stuart Kauffman's "Origins of Order" a decade ago, I understand the attraction. And, I'm intrigued by ongoing laboratory efforts reproduce the origin of life and the emergence of complex subsystems in living organisms.

Agent-based approaches that decentralize attractor/constraint-oriented behavior clearly have value. But I wonder whether we've hit "peak emergence" (ala "peak oil") in our understanding of this phenomena...we don't seem to be much closer to a good understanding of the underlying causes of emergent information and behavior than we were before the topic became a staple of popular science 20+ years ago.

Whether we have or not, it seems inevitable that the rate of new emergent behavior will continue to accelerate for the foreseeable future as connectivity and interoperability continue to increase at warp speed.

Side Trails from Empirical Knowing

A couple of references from "Imperial Secrets" I found interesting:

• Persistent Surveillance and Its Implications for the Common Operating Picture" - Kelley's critique in "Imperial Secrets" was of such statements as "Once achieved, persistent ISR coverage will, in theory, deny the adversary sanctuary, enabling coherent decision making and action with reduced risk." I'm reminded of Dave Snowden's highlighting the fact that we filter ~95% of the raw data that hits our senses, and that the sense we make of what gets through our filters is shaped by a variety of factors, including which narrative fragments have been recently activated. For a nice summary of the limits/biases of individual sensemaking, see "The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis." A Panopticon-style capability would dramatically improve decision making in some ways...but it would also shift attention to the limits imposed by basic cognitive and social constraints on translating data into action, and, perhaps more important, would have significant and unpredictable effects on the activities of those under surveillance. Overall, it would seem that the net result is a more Complex space where prediction becomes more, not less, difficult.


• Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis - Another NDIC publication that thoughtfully considers the art and science of transforming data into decisions. I especially liked Table 7 (Analysis: Past, Present, and Future), which highlights various aspects of the shift from in-depth slice/dice analysis to agile sensemaking.

The challenge of knowing irregular, ambiguous, and rapidly changing threats has resulted in an emphasis on capabilities that are more exploratory/agile than exploitative/structured. A couple of articles in Joint Forces Quarterly (Q1 2009) highlight two aspects to this trend. Both reflect a maturing understanding of the limits of exploratory and exploitative capabilities.

• "Hybrid Warfare and Challenges" (Frank Hoffman, pp. 34-39) - "hybrid warfare"is the term associated with what seems to be the next phase of an ongoing transformation to make the U.S. military more agile. It emphasizes the need to operate in multiple "modes" simultaneously to effectively engage an opponent using conventional, irregular, and terrorist tactics in a coordinated fashion. Hoffman acknowledges the difficulty of such an endeavor...one that is similar in some ways to that discussed by Cash, Earl, and Morrison in the Nov 2008 HBR, which I discussed here.
• "Systems versus Classical Approach to Warfare" (Milan Vego, pp. 40-48) is a good summary of the concerns that have been raised about NCW, EBO, and SOD. Attempts to apply Complicated (expert, analytical) tools to a Complicated domain have, unsurprisingly, provoked reactions ranging from skepticism to hostility among many students of warfare. If you're unfamiliar with recent critiques of Systems of Systems Analysis, Systems Thinking, and other mechanistic approaches to warfare, you might find this article interesting. The bottom line is "Uncertainty in war is not only a result of a lack of information, but is also often caused by what one does not comprehend in a given situation." Analytical approaches (crafted for Complicated situations) may actually degrade the ability to comprehend in Complex situations.

Finally, John Arquilla has been writing about network/swarming tactics for years. "The Coming Swarm" is a recent summary of the current situation...it reminded me of Israel's approach to dealing with swarm terrorism.