Time for evolution

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. -- Vladimir Nabokov

The development characteristics of traditional companies create a tight coupling of products and or services to company resources deployed in a series of multiple overlays; multiple managers and projects for each product or service and resource overlay; and organizational structures made up of groups performing similar functions. Specific management departments have their own proprietary approach to company management and this creates multiple administrative domains with poor interoperability between them.

Sum up all of these independent resource consuming partial solutions and we have a patchwork landscape and environment that is inefficient to travel, complex and expensive to maintain. Company management involves many processes, procedures, tools for internal reorganizations, block detection, performance monitoring, security, accounting, billing, all within a boss-employee relationships between management and regular employees. Techies in such companies have only basic development functionality with little ability to control activities or make determinations beyond the scope of technical system development. Operations performs the bulk of the work, processing raw data coming from employees, making determinations and instructing each individual employee which actions to take. This skewed relationship is inefficient in a number of ways: there is little sharing of thinking resources because the types of employees were designed independently.

Also, each management function in a traditional company, like financial, HR, development, has its own way of working and human staff and their own performance requirements. Company management functions must know each employee and his or her preferences on an individual basis which imposes additional time and complexity when introducing more agile ways of working.

On top of that, company management departments were designed to support corporations and organizations or development teams at a particular point in time to work with contemporary technology. Each organization did this independently (in good spirit of the not-invented-here-syndrom) and nobody seemed to concern themselves with system level interweaving. Data related to a particular department or function and to a particular management line were integrated throughout the network (or not!), causing a major synchronization problem in turn making evolving products or services, company technologies and company management processes virtually impossible to do in a cost-effective, timely and competitive manner.

"The future is ever a misted landscape, no man foreknows it, but at cyclical turns there is a change felt in the rhythm of events." -- Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present." -- Simone Weil (1909-1943)

In the future, evolutionary agile value nets can provide manageable flexibility points between value net, receivable deliverables, technologies and organizational & business structures. Each aspect is likely to evolve at its own independent rate:

Technology:

• Efficient management and distribution of data throughout the net
• Elimination of physical overlay now needed for service and resource deployment and associated management systems.

Receivable deliverables:

• Enabling new service deployment within both the environments of net and net management service.
• Promoting agile systems activation.

Organizational & business:

• Reducing operations cost
• Enhancing flexibility of management environment
• Providing receivable deliverables in a competitive and timely way

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked." -- John Gall

Nynke wrote this nonsense beginning of 2004. Now it is time for everything else ...