Social Networks a Feature?

This post asserts that Google's "Friend Connect" is the opening wedge of a shift of social networks from a destination (e.g., Facebook) to a feature.

Sounds plausible to me...at least for networking that is decision-oriented. Decisions are contextual, so it's usually easier to bring the network to the context than to bring the context to the network.

Governing Other's Services

Joe McKendrick makes an obvious, but rarely discussed, point in this post. Your users will be using external services...which means you'll need to find some way of governing them.
I suppose it's the legacy stovepipe enterprise mentality that leads us to not appreciate the importance and difficulty of governing services we don't own.

Predicting Network Structures

In the late 80's I became aware of the Santa Fe Institute and followed their research activities through the mid-90's. Around the time I slogged through Kauffman's "Origins of Order", they gradually fell off my radar (but that's another story).
They remain one of the leaders in complexity-related thought and research.
Today, there's a post referencing some fascinating new research from SFI. They assert that they can predict the structure of a network, given a partial map of it. When researchers find structures that seem to appear across a wide range of domains, there's usually a bit of over-hyping...but this does seem worthy of some attention.

Amazon's Cloud

If you haven't been following AWS, you need to read Wired's article on the cloud that Amazon's building.

"Pulling" Discovery

I suppose the push/pull, exploit/explore, execute/discover contrast is well known to those who live at the intersection of technology and decision making.

If you don't, Dion Hinchcliffe has a fairly painless summary.  I'd point you to Tushman (at HBS) also.

Clouds + SOA = CEP?

If you haven't thought much about SOA, you may not have realized that some sort to Complex Event Processing (CEP) fabric would seem to fit nicely.\

Dana Gardner has a short post discussing this topic re: TIBCO...at the intersection of cloud computing and SOA.

HBR & Complexity

I suppose mainstream applied social science journals like Harvard Business Review feel they must stay grounded in a definition of science that emphasizes the "logic of the facts" (though, my opinion is that social sciences are more logic than facts....i.e., the inferences often run way ahead of the data).

However, real-world needs are usually beyond what a thick-data/thin-logic approach (e.g., Brahe's data + Kepler's equations) will yield...so, there's a tension between social science that's narrow enough to be relatively "hard", and social science that's useful to the practitioner applying it to a real world decision context.

These thoughts were triggered by HBR publishing two complexity-centric articles (at least) in the last few months (the Cynefin article in Nov 2007, and "Strategy as a Wicked Problem" this month (May 2008)).

I suspect part of the reason is highlighted in the second paragraph: "[Companies] can't develop models of the increasingly complex environment in which they operate."  Those of us who have been looking at the changing IT landscape (e.g., SOA, Web 2.0, etc.) over the past few years would second this statement.  It's as true for innovation and adaptability/agility in operations as it is for strategy. 

The problem is that management science has been epistemologically grounded in a reductionist approach to knowledge since it began to be formalized by Taylor in the early 1900's.  Modeling (ideally via math or simulation) has been a basic analytical tool since those early days.  Anyone who deals with complexity knows the limits of modeling...and an understanding of those limits seems to be dawning on the business world.

Like Snowden, the author recognizes that wicked problems are not simply bigger...they're ontologically  ("being-ness") different.

The author defines 5 characteristics of wicked problems in strategy formulation:

• Involves many stakeholders with different values & priorities
• Roots are complex & tangled
• Difficult to grasp; changes when addressed
• Unprecedented
• No "right" answer

And, the author's suggestions are consistent w/ Snowden's discussion of the Complex domain:

• Lots of collaboration (Cynefin: Probe-sense-respond (vs. sense-analyze-respond))
• Define corporate identity (Snowden & Weick have both written at length on this aspect of complexity.  Known/Knowable work does not stress corporate DNA in the same way Complex/Chaotic work does.  This is especially "wicked" when you consider that identity not only helps us shape our environments, but our environment also helps shape our identity)
• Focus on action (again, Probe-sense-respond...and use boundaries & attractors (along with weak signal detection) to shape a complex context).  In the PPG example, Pareto analysis & scenario analysis are used as probes...though I'm not sure Snowden would be very enthusiastic about these two approaches to probing (at least in decision-rich contexts).
• Adopt a "feed-forward" orientation (again, boundaries & attractors...and, the author even says "scan the environment for weak signals")

Overall, a good article on an infrequently discussed topic.  I hope the trend of occasionally addressing the topic continues.