Future Digital Organisations

1

Towards Understanding Digital Organizations of the Future

Heather A. MooreStrategy & Future Vision, Vodafone Group R&D

European Institute of Industrial Leadership Connected Generation ConferenceNovember 21, 2012

Heather A. Moore | November 21, 20122

World Increasingly Filled with Digital Things

• Tech convergence of cloud, social, and mobile computing … changing the world

• Digital Things

– Things that are losing their material form: books, movies, music, photos, money, …

– Things that never had a material form: Status updates, email archives, text messages, …

• Digital Traces: metadata made by people and systems that provides evidence of action in the world

– mobile phone location history, call log, SMS log, contact list

– social networking log of comments, posts, responses, likes, …

6


Rate of Change

3 source: Stewart Brand


Organisations Now - Everything is Connected

• Globalization - technology binds together systems with radically different time scales:

– financial transactions that happen in milliseconds

– policy that is implemented over years

– social norms that change over decades

– ecological processes that evolve over millenia

• The behavior of each system influences the other in complex feedback loops in which effects may be difficult to trace and latent dependencies exist between seemingly random things

• Both uncertainty and risk increases with scale

3

Sustainability:

• Transparency

• Employee development

• Resource efficiency

Heather A. Moore | November 21, 201210 image source: ncb.org.uk

Is Sustainable Enough?

• Works if conditions are predictable

• Few practical tools for handling disruptions

Heather A. Moore | November 15, 201210 image source: hdwallpapers4free.com

http://hdwallpapers4free.com

http://hdwallpapers4free.com


The Future...

• Unpredictable

• Full of complex & tightly coupled systems

• Fast rate of change

• Wildly variable conditions

3 image source: physicsworld.com

Resilience:

• The capacity of an organization to tolerate disturbances without collapsing

10 image source: National Geographic


What Affects Resilience?

• Extreme efficiency -

• Internal focus -

• Homogeneity of workforce and products -

• Stasis -

• Flexibility

• Inclusiveness

• Diversity

• Innovation


Similar Roles... New Challenges

• Marketing

• Design, Engineering

• Production

• Sales

• Knowledge Management

• Business models

• Intellectual Property

• Product lifecycle


New Organizational ToolkitBe prepared

for just about anything!

Digital Things Progress Report | November 15, 201214 image source: wenger

http://www.telegraph.co.uk



Tech Probes

- see how people appropriate technology

- test social norms

19


New Business Models

3


example: Local Motors- Design phase is social

- Production is normal

- Sales is on-demand

- Completely open source

11


example: Kickstarter

Model for allowing customer to vote which products they want to exist



Adaptive Governance

• Experimentation

• New policies for management

• Tolerance of small scale failures

• Novel approaches to collaboration with internal & external stakeholders

• New ways to promote flexibility (in work environment)

• New institutional & organisational arrangements

3


example: FAVI“You do not work for me or for a boss. You work for your customer. I don't pay you. They do. Every customer has its own factory now. You do what is needed for the customer.'"

11


New Employee Capabilities

• Directing attention mindfully

• Critical thinking

• Participation

• Collaboration

• Network Smarts

“It’s not information

overload. It’s filter failure.”

—Clay Shirky

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/442126.Clay_Shirky?utm_medium=api&utm_source=quote_widget

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/442126.Clay_Shirky?utm_medium=api&utm_source=quote_widget


New Types of Employee Rewards

• Revenue Sharing of Successful New Products

• External Recognition

• Time to Work on More Socially Oriented Projects

• Sabbaticals to work at a Startup

• 20% time for Personal Development

4 image source: Jean Beale


Accepting Influence

This technology probe investigates:

•How are digital gifts experienced as different from physical gifts?

•Does increasing the presence of social obligations surrounding a gift change perceptions of value for a gift? Is it the explicitness of the thought that counts?

•What are the boundaries of control people are willing to cede to others? Do couples agree with these boundaries or does this prompt further negotiation between them?

•How publicly vs. privately are the gifts displayed and does this vary between singles/couples and locations?

•Does the metadata that surrounds a gift change people’s perception of value for that gift?

Digital Things Progress Report | November 15, 201221

Vodafone advertising (INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL USE) image source: www.telegraph.co.uk




Thank you.

Heather A. Moore

email: [email protected]: @hmoore

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Future Digital Organisations

Business

Transcript of Future Digital Organisations