Google's Exponential Returns There is more to Google than useful, simple and powerful products. In the end there will be less Harvard business school cases about its product than its organization. At Etech, first employee Craig Silverstein discussed Google's product development process and the systems that support it. What's different is the use of smaller organizational units (groups of 3 on average) supported by lightweight inter-group communication with a culture of sharing.
The danger of smaller organizational grouping is the potential redundancy or splintering; and the difficulty of realizing economies of scale. The danger and difficulty is overcome through systems, but not the typical enterprise systems that seek to automate processes. The benefit is greater speed and agility (scope).
But in such knowledge intensive work you can't automate what is largely practice. Instead, light weight tools like wikis and weblogs support what people need to get things done and in scale the system yields emergent properties.
Google uses product much like a wiki called Sparrow Web to develop community-shared pages. Originally developed by Xerox PARC it offers lightweight editing without knowing HTML. Its less flexible than a wiki, but works well for functions like submitting great product ideas, launch process forms, reporting and weekly snippets to a common knowledge base. Craig said its "suprisingly good for communication."
It also helps that they acquired the leading blogging software company and they are eating their own dog food. When Pyra's first move when they joined the company was to set up Intranet blogging, "they knew they hired the right people." Blogger serves a relatively older tradition of having people contribute snippets of what they worked on during the past week. But now their software, widely adopted, is giving different people their own voice in the system.
Unlike other organizations they have more people freely communicating about what they are up to and sharing what they learn. Allowing teams to be smaller, yet effective as a whole. And because each communication creates linkages, stays with the organization and builds upon the past -- there are exponential returns to sharing.
What happens when these simple tools are combined with Google's search engine is fairly obvious. The best content and experts emerge.
When an organization scales, its systems and organization are a key component of its competitive advantage. Knowledge intensive companies have struggled to find a mix of both for leverage. Google's greatest innovation may prove to be within and seductively simple.
Without formalized information flows imposed by many enterprise systems, Google has been able to let its employees make their own associations. The right systems and organizational openness fosters social capital within the organization -- which decreases risk and is foundation of intellectual capital.
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