The very acceleration in decision making tempo created by Gobalization’s drive toward a 24/7 world hypereconomy, a dilemna that DeAngelis described as “The problem is that the landscape is changing so fast we haven’t figured out how deal with it.“, is going to force large organizations -corporations, states, armies, social movements – to go modular or go the way of the dinosaur.
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Dan tdaxp:
June 15th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Mark,
The next evolutionary step in organizational modularity will be when the modules of an organization are able to self-organize in terms of reacting to an event without requiring central direction to ” pull them apart”. In other words, ” smart modularity”.
Watching this evolve will be interesting, especially under Constitutional limits.
DeAngelis talks about “ruleset automation,” which really are putting in hard limits to stop such smart modularity in the context of regulation. A classic example is the civilian control of the military.
I also looked at this article, but from the perspective of dashboards.
Dave Schuler:
June 15th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
There’s a difference between the globalization that consisted of local production to fulfill the requirements of local governments and moving production for the domestic market overseas.
Distributing a company’s facilities with the modular approach described is only more stable than the monolithic scheme if the political, financial, economic, and social systems within the countries are as stable of those of the original host country or if redundancy is built into the system. If there’s redundancy in the current approach I certainly don’t see it. Quite the opposite.
mark:
June 15th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Redundancy is rarely a bad idea.
To an extent, modules should be able to do at least *some* of the tasks of a more specialized modules in a pinch but that will get into how autonmous you design each module to be and the flow of the organization’s personnel between modules ( thus moving skill-sets from module to module).
“Watching this evolve will be interesting, especially under Constitutional limits”
Very close watching :o)
Shawn in Tokyo:
June 16th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Building in some redundancy is a key to establishing resiliency. Yossi Sheffi, who has written “The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage,” explains in the excerpt I have reproduced below:
“By creating redundancy…firms have a built-in hedge against a severe disruption (system perturbation). However, while redundancy can be helpful it is fraught with risk. Redundancy is expensive and often leads to sloppy business practices. Redundancy can be attained via number of means:
-Inventory–carrying excess inventory in the supply chain.
-Production–maintaining redundant production or servicing lines to eliminate stoppage
-Capacity–enables quicker restarts after a crisis
-IT Systems–highest yield form of redundancy, since the cost of doing so very rarely outweighs the cost of lost information
Depending on the type of entity being managed, a sound mix of the above types of redundancy would be appropriate in establishing a resilient entity.
Shawn
mark:
June 16th, 2006 at 3:35 am
Very cool Shawn – a book for the list. Timely info ! Much obliged !