Networks | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

The power of decentralized crisis management : the Gustav case

September 1, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Crisis is charaterized by its suddenty, its unpredictability and the gravity of its possible consequences. It forces organization to react quickly in order to protect itself as well at its components and agents.

That implies many things. Decide on the way to react, which suppose to have reliable and exhaustive information. Then manage to deliver orders, which means to be sure everybody will be able to receive an accurate top down information flow. And, as we can expect either the ascending or descending flow won’t work, making it impossible to make the right decisions or to enforce them, cross flows are needed in order to help people to coordinate themselves on their own.

All of that is about twho phenomenons I wrote about earlier : the fact a networked organization is less fragile than a centralized one (read here for the Toyota and al Qaida cases) and the need for an increased visibility on everyone’s activities and informations in order everyone can adapt its own strategy to the other’s without any central coordination.

I’m sure than everybody, by observation or experience, has the remembering of a crisis situation where no one knew what to to, everybody lacked informations about what what was happening and this lack prevented people from making the right decisions, either at the top or at the bottom of the organization.

By the way…do you know Gustav?

Toyota : a good example of SOO that reduces business risk

August 31, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

First a quick summary of the Service Oriented Organization concept (SOO) : it’s about giving employees the ability (ie tools and organization model) that allows them to bridge the gap between task they have been assignedJ and thoses that are actually required by their day to day job, assuming that organization reached such an optimum in verticality that deviations, that are more and more frequents) can’t be solved verticaly but by adhoc.

A good example comes from Toyota and its integrated suppliers system. This ecosystem is so optimized that expertises, skills, are often unique. What would happen if a factory, manufacturing a piece used on every vehicle, burn ?

Once knowledge will be outsourced, enterprises will only be expertise coordinators

July 14, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 1 Comment

In a previous post I was saying that, one day, enterprise’s main role will be to organize a value chain and coordinate expertises, some of them being internal and some others internal. Economy’s “knowledgization” where assets resides more in individual knowledge, transaction costs near to zero which may cause a reversed application of Coase’s law, and the ability go organize without organization can make us think that enterprises will only have a role of principal and skills unifier.

I won’t be listing again the long list of thinks that are or can be outsourced today, from recruitment to innovation, without forgetting manufacturing, invoicing, R&D.

Fortunately, companies keep what matters : knowledge, expertises. But, perhaps, not for long.

Have you ever heard of KPO ? No ? So please be informed that after Business Process Outsourcing, here comes Knowledge Process Outsourcing

Organization’s networking potential will drive talents

May 29, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

I’ve just read with a real interest this post, about the power of people networks. Top make it short it says that people will be increasingly attracted by regions who offer a strong potential of networking and interactions because it allows them to exploit more their talents and maximise its economic reward.

The author concludes this way ;

I would submit a hypothesis: The capacity of a region for innovation can be measured by the number of formal and informal networking organizations that create “bridging” opportunities across the broadest possible spectrum of society. The richer and denser the skein of bridging networks, the more easily ideas can be communicated through a region, the more spontaneously creative ideas will erupt, and the more speedily people can convert novel notions into business opportunities.

Of course it’s about local development but I think we can transpose it to the enterprise world. That would mean that talents will be more likely to join companies who offer, internally and in the way they interact with their ecosystem, this ability to work as networks, to quickly create value through exchanges and to move quickly from ideas to effective projects.

What say you ?