Fred Sheahan's List: IT Strategy Discussion

Recently, though, I have come to realize that perfectly healthy groups with solid, well-adjusted IT pros can and will devolve, slowly and quietly, into the behaviors that give rise to the stereotypes, given the right set of conditions. It turns out that it is the conditions that are stereotypical, and the IT pros tend to react to those conditions in logical ways. To say it a different way, organizations actively elicit these stereotypical negative behaviors.

Understanding why IT pros appear to act the way they do makes working with, among and as one of them the easiest job in the world.

Friction between Traditional management and continuous innovation approaches, causes discussed

My point here is not that big organizations shouldn't try to be innovative and fast-moving like start-ups. Rather, with all due respect to Larry Page (who is clearly more successful than most people), trying to turn back the clock on a big organization and return it to its start-up days is probably not going to work. Instead, managers of large organizations should try to deploy other approaches that might be more effective, such as the following:

Six major factors determining knowledge worker productivity:
1. "Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: "What is the task?"
2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of knowledge workers.
4. Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not - at least not primarily - a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
6. Finally, knowledge worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an 'asset' rather than a 'cost'. It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities."

Becoming a wirearchy requires new organizational structures that incorporate communities and networks. In addition, they require new ways of doing work, like thinking in terms of perpetual Beta and doing manageable probes to test complex problems. It’s a new way of doing work, within a new work structure. Both are required.

For better or worse, leaders make a difference.
Yet ‘top down’ as an approach to complex adaptive systems does not work—as the failure of top down approaches in artificial intelligence showed some decades ago. So, exactly how leaders make a difference needs to be kept open just for a moment.

Over a surprisingly brief period, the use of social tools and technologies has grown from limited experimentation at the edge of corporate practice to what’s now the mainstream. But after this strong initial uptake, many companies find themselves at a crossroads: if they want to capture a new wave of benefits, they’ll need to change the ways they manage and organize themselves, according to the results from our sixth annual survey on the business use of these technologies

The Shift Index seeks to measure these three waves of 
deep and overlapping change operating beneath the visible 
surfaces of today’s events. The relative rates of change 
across the three indices can help executives understand 
where we are in the Big Shift and what to anticipate in 
the future

The Pragmatic Pathways framework is comprised of 3 new change approaches: Metrics that Matter, Scaling Edges and Shaping Strategies.

These pathways all leverage new disruptive technologies as well as the firm's extended business ecosystem to get more done with less. Similarly, all three pathways help firms circumvent the political or organizational resistance that can hamper other change initiatives.

Good takeaways and vantage points to answer the question "Do companies adapt too slowly to change?"

Achieving innovation at the institutional level is no trivial task. Executives that attempt large scale, internal change and transformation often face a great wall of resistance. The framework we describe provides executives in large companies with a framework for exacting major change via the pursuit of edge opportunities. In the final sections of this paper, we explore the three key levers of the framework (Focus, Leverage and Accelerate) in greater detail. The framework is further broken down into twelve key design principles to provide greater context and guidance on how to successfully achieve change through the pursuit of an edge.