Pete and I have been talking a lot about our Organizational Design work as we have reflected back on 2009 and what that means in terms of Social Business Design as we go forward. For each piece of strategy that we deliver, we always need to be able to back it up with concrete changes at the organizational level for customers who are ready to act. There will be a post from me on the Collaboratory (You can subscribe to the RSS feed here) later this week with some more thoughts on this.
The reason I bring that up is that in looking at better ways that an organization can operate, we often look at the current service delivery model. How are services shared, delivered and managed? Which functions and resources are centralized and which are distributed? Does centralization mean less flexibility? Does distribution mean less reliability? We look at services inside the organization through the lenses of People, Process and Technology.
This is a long way of saying: I’ve been thinking about “shared services” and how that concept is going to change very soon.
Then over the weekend JP wrote about the The Facebookisation of the enterprise.
JP’s dream is more than just the Facebookisation of the enterprise, he is talking about the personalization of the enterprise.
imagine an “enterprise” world where:
- You chose your own phone
- You chose your own portable computing device (which may be your phone)
- You chose your own desktop computing device (which may be your television)
- You chose the operating systems you put on these devices
In other words, the IT department had “lost control of the device”.
I’m not sure whether we need IT departments to “lose control” of the devices used for work, so much as we need them to “give up control” of the data that is available to whatever devices the user chooses. I think that the Personal Enterprise is one where the definition of “shared services” includes thinking about what the user provisions for themselves, not just what is given to them.
The personalization of the enterprise is already happening. It couldn’t be more obvious these days. People are literally carrying two laptops and two cellphones with them. Sit down in any meeting (although I notice this trend far more in the US than in Canada right now) and you can be sure that a handful of the people there will reach in one pocket for their Blackberry, and then they will reach in to another pocket for their iPhone.
How do Police officers coordinate and communicate while working? Ask some of them: More and more it is happening on their personal cellphones. The radios and dispatch systems provided by most police departments are insecure, lack privacy and have centralized dispatching.
So, where do you draw the line? Where is the walled garden and where are the open spaces? I think this is the trick, and where a lot of enterprises will get caught.
The Personal Enterprise (or the Facebookisation of it) is not about picking and choosing which services get opened up and which have controlled delivery, instead it is about opening up as much data as possible and creating an ecosystem that allows personalization to be developed.
We are now coming out of an era where IT delivery was more efficient when it was done as an end-to-end controlled process. I do not believe that has been anything malicious or wrong about how things have been done to date. Controlling the platforms, devices and information that the end user can have access to was simply more efficient: Laptops were expensive, so you wanted to do a volume deal. Blackberries and service plans were very pricy, and then you needed a “Blackberry Enterprise Server” on top of that, and that only really worked with a full on Microsoft Exchange server setup.
Don’t forget how much Databases (still) cost. Doing millions of transactions? You used to have just a few options. For some of your data those are still your options, but you can now deploy MySQL or Postgres at a web, departmental, workgroup and even personal computer level. So you have 4 of the 5 major database types covered right there with free and highly reliable software.
Lets also not forget how “standards” never really used to be standards at all. They were lock-in tools, and the vendors who supported them gave you just enough rope to hang yourself. Having DCOM flashbacks here. Now you can feel free to tell your vendor to bake that RESTful API in from the start, otherwise you are happy to have it built yourself.
Open the data and create incentives for developers and designers to create practical and beautiful things. Users will scream loudly, designers will listen and developers will build. Utopia perhaps, but not far away to be honest.
The thing that is standing in the way of the Personal Enterprise is that we believe that being complicated is a prerequisite for IT. The truth is however that the services that mean the most to end users are some of the simplest and need the least “engineering”. They are rich profiles, SMS (or BBM) messaging, Email, phone and document sharing.
The personalization of the enterprise is happening in communication first, and the sooner that IT departments can get out of the communication business and focus on data, then we will be in a much better place.
As you point out towards the end, The Fear of the Simple is the big cultural issue to get over.
Your standards vs. REST mention is a good example. Oftentimes, it seems we’ve finally (re-)discovered that simple is better than standards. And yet, if you were to tell people that RESTful design means a bunch of different interfaces, semantics, discovery (reg/rep), people would throw up their hands at all the incompatibles. The problem is, if an interface – or technology – is simple enough to figure out in a few minutes, then you the advantages of standards start to erodes. Not completely – but enough to pull “standards” down from the cemented in best practices spot it traditionally has.
We find our client’s do best when their modes and channels of communications match their key “clients”/stakeholders in the broadest sense.
Pretty simple, really.
This is great stuff. And it gets really interesting to think about applying more deeply to the work structures that exist as well as to the technologies. Imagine that work structures could break free from the org chart. Most people know intuitively that the org chart doesn’t really describe how work gets done … that there are hidden connections, unknown centers of expertise … and invisible departmental walls.
So what if companies were able to study the way that work is really getting done – and organize around it? And what if that “reorganization” wasn’t a one-time thing, but a constant thing based on current priorities for the enterprise rather than the agenda of a department?
I don’t think that any major businesses are working like this yet … but like you, Jevon, I think that we’re not that far away.
Thanks for bringing forward another thought-provoking piece on what social business really looks like.
You hit the nail on the head: Finding out how things are actually getting done today is a key first step, and it gives you an opportunity to layer on technology in exactly the right places. Rather than laying down an entire platform meant to solve every problem, we can start thinking about little pieces of social software that solve specific sets of problems and which create unique opportunities.
[...] The Personal Enterprise"The Personal Enterprise (or the Facebookisation of it) is not about picking and choosing which services get opened up and which have controlled delivery, instead it is about opening up as much data as possible and creating an ecosystem that allows personalization to be developed." Also, love the part about simple being seen as bad: The Fear of the Simple. [...]