Wednesday, August 21, 2002

The Swarming Organization: Military might meets commercial F500 challenges.  While I've never heard a company call it this, SWARMING is the key theme that many are talking about specific to enterprise collaboration.  It's grounded in providing frameworks to support self-forming teams optimized to embrace an opportunity, or fight a threat... We get to meet some really gifted people as we bring Groove to the marketplace. Those that we have worked with in the US Department of Defense, by far, are the most innovative in their vision for collaboration. A lot is at stake as we face an enemy whose organizational structure challenges our traditional command-and-control/mass-and-maneuver approaches to conflict. The threat of these terrorist networks is just that: networks of nodes that form, pulse, and disband. No head to chop off and the only thing that remains after the chaos is a cold trail and some electronic garbage. This asymmetric threat is the very thing that is driving our military to achieve a laser focus on realizing "information superiority" on the path to "decision superiority". It's the need for rapid formation of people across coalitions and geos, consuming sensor data, taking action, and then disbanding to fight yet another fight with someone else. It struck me as I listened to a DoD briefing some months back that many of the business practices we hear about in the commercial sector share similar attributes. This revelation was fueled further by an article in the March 2002 issue of Wired magazine which focused on organizational "swarming." The article reveals that the notion of swarming finds its roots in DoD, but the relevance to business is striking. At the core is this idea of supporting small units that must come together quickly, having all-channel access to information, in real-time, that can be used to strike with certainty and with overwhelming force. In business, it too is about forming, making a great decision, and executing at the expense of the competitor. The path to decision superiority is rooted in people who gather in the form of small business teams, pulse, and then disband. Real edge phenomena. (read the story here...) 12:25:51 AM