archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Using the automotive industry and an analogous variety of software mega-packages with three-letter acronyms as examples, we’ve been discussing the death of the traditional enterprise for a few weeks. We’ve observed that enterprise efforts relying on massive top-down approaches become inefficient and wasteful, if not counter-productive. They also either fail to support the health of the individuals or groups involved – customers, users, sellers, employers – or in fact directly reduce the relative health of these parties. With Conway’s Law as a guide, we discovered that the structure or form of an organization influences or determines the nature and quality of the things the organization creates.
This all concerns the past: so now it’s time to look ahead, at the new enterprise. Of course, scrying the future inevitably relies on a mixture of hand waving, vague pronouncements, and the occasional “it’s not possible yet to do what this implies” to point the way forward. What’s often lacking is a present-tense example to serve as clear harbinger of the future to come. I came across an example today, drawn from the debate surrounding the proposition that the U.S. Army is close to a breaking point. In an episode of On Point titled Are US Forces Stretched Too Thin?, several panelists (names not available from the program website yet) made three telling points about the Army that show it as an organization in transition from the old model enterprise into a new form, albeit one whose outlines remain fuzzy. I’ll paraphrase these points:

To support this practice, company commanders created a forum for sharing innovations amongst themselves, called CO Team: CompanyCommand. The description reads, “CompanyCommand.com is company commanders-present, future, and past. We are in an ongoing professional conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. The conversation is taking place on front porches, around HMMWV hoods, in CPs, mess halls, and FOBs around the world. By engaging in this ongoing conversation centered around leading soldiers, we are becoming more effective leaders, and we are growing units that are more effective. Amazing things happen when committed leaders in a profession connect, share what they are learning, and spur each other on to become better and better.”
It’s the third point that gives us a clue about the nature of the new enterprise. CompanyCommand.com is an example of a ‘knowledge marketplace’ created and maintained by an informal network within an organization. Knowledge marketplaces are one of the components of what McKinsey calls The 21st Century Organization. Knowledge marketplaces allow knowledge buyers “to gain access to content that is more insightful and relevant, as well as easier to find and assimilate, than alternative sources are.”
McKinsey believes that these markets – as well as companion forms for exchanging valuable human assets called talent markets – require careful investment to begin functioning.
“…working markets need objects of value for trading, to say nothing of prices, exchange mechanisms, and competition among suppliers. In addition, standards, protocols, regulations, and market facilitators often help markets to work better. These conditions don’t exist naturally – a knowledge marketplace is an artificial, managed one – so companies must put them in place.”
On this, I disagree. CompanyCommand is an example of a proto-form knowledge marketplace that appears to be self-organized and regulated.
Moving on, another component of the new enterprise identifed by McKinsey is the formal network. A formal network “…enables people who share common interests to collaborate with relatively little ambiguity about decision-making authority – ambiguity that generates internal organizational complications and tension in matrixed structures.”
In McKinsey’s analysis, formal networks contrast with informal social networks in several ways. Formal networks require designated owners responsible for building common capabilities and determining investment levels, incentives for membership, defined boundaries or territories, established standards and protocols, and shared infrastructure or technology platforms.
My guess is that CompanyCommand again meets all these formal network criteria to a partial extent, which is why it is a good harbinger of the forms common to the new enterprise, and a sign of an organization in transition.
Can you think of other examples of new enterprise forms, or organizations in transition?
In the next post in this series, we’ll move on from the structure of the new enterprise to talk about the new enterprise experience, trying to track a number of trends to understand their implications for the user experience of the new enterprise environment.

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I first mentioned the ailing fortunes of the major U.S. auto makers as an example of the same pattern of decline common to old-style industrial organizations that’s starting in the enterprise software space. I chose American auto makers as an example of failing systemic health that offers insight because they are a visible cultural reference point, and not because I thought their demise was imminent.
But recent news from Ford and Daimler-Chrysler announcing dramatic job cuts and plant closures seems to point at exactly this in an eerie way. The article on Ford’s announcement even includes this quote from Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass, “This may not be the end, but it is certainly the beginning of the end of the automobile industry as we knew it”.
It seems the Iraq reconstruction effort is turning out to be another example of an enterprise infrastructure effort gone awry, in the real world. In the NY Times article Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds James Glanz writes “…gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs” contributed to the ineffectiveness of the reconstruction effort.
That sounds like a classic enterprise software deployment to me
Glanz continues, “After years of shifting authority, agencies that have come into and out of existence and that experienced constant staff turnover, the rebuilding went through another permutation last month with almost no public notice.”
To close the circle and return to the realm of enterprise software, let’s compare the NY Times assessment of the reconstruction planning — “Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects – largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office – had been flawed.” — with James Roberts simple but very relevant question in Grand enterprise projects: why are we wasting our time?: “Instead of trying to eat the elephant whole, perhaps the better way is to take one bite at a time?”
Someone should have asked the same question in the early stages of planning the Iraq reconstruction effort, when the basic approach — bureaucratic, top-down, poorly structured — crystallized and was put into action.

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