Tyranny, Terror, and Technology. Some thoughts about the intersection between the challenges confronting business, and those confronting government and society.
In the course of my work with our many customers in DC, earlier this year I had the honor of meeting John Arquilla - coincidentally only about a month after reading a book that he had edited with David Ronfeldt - Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy.
In listening to him speak eloquently and with conviction, and in reading his book, I found an incredible and unexpected parallel between our defense challenges and those that I'd been dealing with for years in commercial environments. Many of my enterprise customers' issues - those that led me to create Groove - seemed directly analogous to those confronting world governments in combating terrorists' organizational forms: The need to coordinate and organize for effective strategy, tactics, logistics, execution. The need to find the appropriate mix of organizational centralization and decentralization. The struggle to get off-the-shelf technology to work across organizational/security boundaries. The need to address leadership and doctrinal issues that arise when effective cross-boundary collaboration becomes mission-critical. Could the solutions also be analogous? [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
