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Devolving decision making improves productivity - great for Enterprise 2.0
by serengeti on Dec 01, 2007 - 09:32 AM read 359 times |
Carlotta Perez has long had a strong influence on my thinking, and a key part of that is the belief that the organisational structures and cultures that were optimal in the past may not be best going forward. She argues persuasively that the command and control mode of organisation that characterised the most successful firms during the era of mass production will most likely not be appropriate for the age of the internet.
The biggest influence of the internet is probably that it enables switched on firms to do things at a speed that simply wasn’t possible before. Product design times are decreasing every year, supply chain efficiencies are compressing the time from raw material to delivered product and, as I’ve blogged about a lot recently, the internet is increasing the pace of dialogue between customers and suppliers.
To take advantage of this companies need to make themselves more agile. Not many people would disagree with that. More controversially, it has seemed self-evident to me for a while that devolving decision making has the potential to unleash an agility that will always be impossible if decisions have to travel up and down a corporate hierarchy.
It is this belief that has inspired my interest in Enterprise2.0 technologies, and edge-in adoption models. If decision making is to be devolved there will be a requirement for new forms of collaboration - but, for a while at least, these will be varied across the enterprise, hard to predict and may change rapidly. Lightweight collaboration tools that are chosen and configured by the end user are the obvious solution.
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