From an outsider’s perspective, the enterprise environment can appear to be a monolithic singularity. A slow moving behemoth that lacks agility and adaptability. But that’s just the view from 50,000 feet. The closer you get to the enterprise, when you see the actual people making decisions, the people responsible for implementing them, and finally the people that have to work within them, you realize the situation is exactly the opposite.
Instead of one enormous being, you understand an enterprise to be constituted of a swirling mass of individuals. It’s easy to forget that with bigger institutions, but ultimately many of the problems come down to a very human level of coordination. This becomes amplified as a business becomes something that can’t be managed directly by any one person, or even any small group of people. As it becomes more diffuse, the harder coordinated effort becomes. Imagine a game of telephone with an entire large business staff, now add in trying to actually work on product on top of that. ‘
That’s what made reading Michael Keen’s piece on the rate of enterprise change so interesting. He breaks apart how to even begin shifting the culture within an enterprise to adapt to changing IT. There’s no great secret that he’s proposing, but rather that this is a slow, people-driven process. Maybe the greatest insight is that success in this cannot be measured by an absolute change, but rather at what rate the change is occurring. It’s not exactly a snappy piece of advice, but for someone who finds even the idea of transforming an enterprise IT setup intimidating, it made it at least sound approachable.
TVP Strategy comments:
I stated in my last article that an adaptive enterprise—or, as this customer likes to call it now, an extended enterprise—is built, not bought. It is a transformational process, and every enterprise arrives at the task of transforming itself with a different history and different goals, priorities, and needs. My…
Notes from the Field: The Rate of Change|TVP Strategy
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