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Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?
Gary Hamelhas called for fundamental management innovation in his recently publishedbook
The Future of Management
. This call to exploration, experimentation and actionis aligned with the emergence of the much-debated arena of Enterprise 2.0. Here's a keyexcerpt:
This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it's far off. Argue with me if you like, but I'm willingto bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.
Most of us grew up in a "post-industrial" society. We are now on the vergeof a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society. Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn't imply a futurewithout managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn't wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial societywon't produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it doesherald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by "managers". To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated,individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledgedisseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will bedistributed out to the periphery.While Management 2.0 won't completely supplant Management 1.0, thetwo versions aren't entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won't be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those whowish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class fromthose who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: "The biggest issue at stake inthis emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization." This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractablemanagement trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation. It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, yourcompany has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
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It's getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of consumer-basedsocial software ... those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitchedtogether into web services though the use of APIs ... are finding their ways into theworkplace. Why wouldn't they ? After all they are the means by which we arediscovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the onlineenvironment. People have always been creating and building up "..
. knowledge throughexchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things.
"The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment. Whether welike it or not, we are passing from an era in which things were assumed to becontrollable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, alwaysreplicable and (thus) static form, to an era characterized by a continuous flow of information. Because these flows feed the activities of organizations large and small,they necessarily demand to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs ---what we call knowledge work.What today we call Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of theintersection of significant advances in information technology, management scienceapplied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities. Theseforces and factors are converging in today's workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception. Thus, as Hamel asserts, it's useful if notessential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledgearranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart. See allmajor job evaluation methodologies for more detail ;-)I believe that we need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basicrules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is thatknowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making. I am not arguing that weneed to replace hierarchy holus-bolus ... rather, I am suggesting that the combinedcapabilities of information systems and social computing, and two decades of widespreadexperience with team and organizational development processes
permits centralization(read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary
...
both
centralization
and
decentralization.That both centralization and decentralization of information flows in the hands of knowledge workers can operate simultaneously and effectively is, I think, a significantstate change, and should be used to inform the basic assumptions about the design of knowledge work.
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As for the management innovation called for by Hamel ... it is my belief that theorganizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that stretches fromParticipativeWork DesignthroughQWL, quality circles, socio-technical systems approaches, self-
directed and self-managing teams, GE-style "workouts", inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models andapproaches to "management" (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment,resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) likeFuture SearchandOpen
Space.The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulledinto place over the last several decades as software and integrated information systemshave brought constant flows of information to the process of designing, developing anddelivering products and services. This in turn has led to fragmentation of efforts ayproductivity as well as potentially making it easier, faster and more effective to createflows that are integrated and focused. The trick is to be able to do both and choose whichis necessary why and when.Also, now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies. Theprinciples cited in the paragrapsh above have developed over the past several decades tosoften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchicalwork and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information bothinternally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledgework takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiative. These require collaboration andthe horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can bestbe put to use.The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the wayshumans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing forchange(s) as needed. That means understanding much better the structure and dynamicsof networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues suchas decisions about what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved andwhy (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is individual or groupactivity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as themanagement, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores haveexpanded rapidly during the past two decades. The experimentation with inclusive,participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the coredynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web.
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