Group items tagged

When trying to address complexity, we always try doing it in a logical way. We first try 'understanding' the problem at hand and then, we take 'logical' action. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. You have to counter complexity with complex response.

"Wrangling complexity: the service-oriented company"

"We live in an age where emergent technologies continue to have massive effects on business and society. Rising complexity requires companies and economies to cope with increasingly interlocking systems. If we keep on considering systems in a traditional, isolated way, this would lead to a totally locked view of business. This new hyper-connected nature of information entails an unprecedented change in business and societal environments. One major consequence for companies is the imperative to learn to anticipate those changes as well as to successfully adapt to them, or being at risk of disappearing."

"Over the weekend my friend and industry colleague JP Rangaswami wrote an insightful post that pondered how we have gone about delivering on customer experiences as connected to our back-end capabilities. Specifically, he explored an issue that is increasingly challenging many of the large-company CIOs I speak with these days: That the present rates of change demanded of the accumulation of 20-30 years of legacy business systems is greatly exceeding the ability of our enterprises and associated software "stacks" to deliver on them, particularly as cloud, social, and mobile dramatically transform computing today. "

Digital technologies are enabling us to develop systems with huge numbers of interconnected components and sophisticated software that infuses them with seemingly unlimited capabilities. They are penetrating just about every nook and cranny of the economy and of society in general. And, they are profoundly changing the way all organizations operate, as well as our working and personal lives.

Today's enterprises are increasingly facing challenges of rapid change, hyper-competition and complexity. Old methods and structures can no longer support the agility that is needed. Time for a radical management makeover?

In a few short years innovation has moved from being the domain of wild-haired creatives into an effective business process that acts as one of the levers for extracting value [1]. At this point it is timely to pause and consider 'what's next?' After all, the global environment continues to get more complex, competition gets tougher and the demands of customers increasingly sophisticated. How can countries, regions, cities, private and public sector organizations respond to this challenge? How can they succeed in a marketplace where innovation is an established technique, widely deployed? How do we reach way beyond what is possible and proceed as though it could be? In short: in order to maintain competitive advantage, what comes after innovation?

Recent evolutions in our understanding of physics and biology indicate that our environment, including ourselves, is the result of a far-reaching process of interaction and complementarity. Apparently, something makes that matter and organisms -automatically- collaborate growing to larger and more complex entities. Is there a place for business in the universe?

Over the past years, better and more cost effective communication capabilities have been the main drivers for evolutions such as internationalisation, globalisation and outsourcing. Indeed, this improved communication capability has been an enabler for various new and more complex forms of collaboration. At the same time, organisational structures are growing thinner. Is there still room for the traditional company?

Companies are using more Web 2.0 tools and technologies than they were last year, sometimes for more complex business purposes, according to McKinsey's second annual survey on Web 2.0. Companies that are satisfied with their use of these tools are starting to see changes throughout the enterprise.

As high-tech supply chains increase in complexity, they become harder to manage. Collaboration between OEMs, suppliers, and retailers is the answer.

I've seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me.

After having participated in about 15 different re-design projects over the years, one key observation is that the complexity of the re-design challenge often exceeds the ability of individual managers and teams. There are simply too many known and unknown variables and too many shifting parameters for the human brain to make logical and consistent decisions. At the same time, I have observed the relative scarcity of analytical tools. Critical decisions affecting thousands of employees are sometimes based largely on intuitive reasoning.

Most companies start simple, with a few people gathering together around an idea. For small companies, decision-making, task assignments and direct interaction with clients are rather straightforward. With growth, the simplicity ends. As every entrepreneur knows, the initial growth of a company is often synonymous with efficiency drops and decreases in profits, since administrative tasks, indirect structural costs and middle-term forecasts add financial and human pressure on early growth. Overcoming these obstacles is one of the main burdens of start-ups and young businesses. Innovation abounds in the early stages and knowledge capitalization is aided by a common vision of the business. Further growth equates to sustainable efficiencies and market share increases. For decades, organizational growth has been viewed as a positive development, but it has come at a cost.