Over the last few days the Enterprise Irregulars have been discussing the definition of Enterprise 2.0. I plan a write up and links to some of their thoughts, but one of the factors discussed is the way the current Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 tools facilitate discussion and the development of ideas, and may begin to affect the way organisations are structured. It set me thinking about both the way the Irregulars have developed as a group, and my brief time working with the W. L. Gore company some years ago.
Way back in 1991 I spent quite some time trying to sell an ERP solution to W. L. Gore’s European operations. (Actually it was an IBM AS/400 based solution - SSA’s BPCS, and I came second to Intentia, but that’s another story). The way the company was organised fascinated me. Bill Gore started the company when Du Pont weren’t interested in his idea to use Teflon to waterproof fabric. He took his idea, started his own company and GORE-TEX® came in to being. However, he organised his company in an unusual way. Their website says:
Our founder, Bill Gore created a flat lattice organization. There are no chains of command nor pre-determined channels of communication. Instead, we communicate directly with each other and are accountable to fellow members of our multi-disciplined teams.
They have no traditional hierarchical structure. They organise themselves in to teams to get the job done. Within each team the leaders emerge. The Gore people say you can tell who is the leader, because they have followers. Gore’s European management team were group of people who had risen to the top because of their ideas and because they had popular support from the workforce. All very democratic, but when they explained their philosophy and approach it almost began to sound a bit like a religion. However, they believed it had a number of advantages. It encouraged innovation and fostered many more product and process ideas than a normal company. Their decision process was interesting, as there would normally be a lot of people involved. For example, for my European ERP system that I was pitching there was a decision committee of around 150, with an actual steering committee of 26 people who attended the meetings - not a sales process you could manage in a traditional way by taking the CEO to play golf or some such! Their argument was that decisions might take longer than a traditional organisation, but once made implementation was much faster because everyone had already bought in to the new concept.
Our group of Enterprise Irregulars has also developed in an interesting fashion. We are a group of 30 or so bloggers from varied backgrounds - software company executives, industry analysts, consultants, venture capitalists, technologists all with a common interest in the current trends in Enterprise Software (and writing about it). Over the last few months we have formed a solid but diverse group with an identity, and have tackled a number of different topics from the SFdC’s AppExchange, to Open Source to Enterprise 2.0. In the case of Open Source, we collectively wrote a rebuttal to a Sandhill editorial suggesting it would be the end of the line for the traditional vendors, which we very quickly got published by Sandhill and elsewhere. We are already looking for ways to publish the Enterprise Irregulars with our own brand identity. We’ve used the technology that we talk about - blogs and wikis and message groups to help organise our communication - something we need to do, because we are based in the USA, India, Spain, the UK and elsewhere. This is made even more remarkable by the fact that most of us haven’t physically met, but we ‘talk’ all of the time. (We plan to fix the meeting bit by having as many of us as possible attend the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in October - should be quite an occasion). The important dynamic here is that the blogging and social networking phenomenon that we are all interested in has facilitated our coming together. Then the availability of easy, zero cost Web 2.0 technology like Google Groups and wikis has allowed us to exchange ideas and coordinate in a way that would not have been possible even 5 or 10 years ago. Back then we would have probably communicated rather inefficiently by e-mail, and at some point we would have needed to make some investment decisions to facilitate some IT infrastructure to help us. Being a loose of group of 30 individuals from as many companies - it would never have happened. Today we are spoilt for choice for tools to help us get the job done Only yesterday one of our number collected together several of our thoughts on a topic (Enterprise 2.0) in an area on his website, but today we are throwing that away and doing it a different way on our wiki - all because the technology is so straightforward and the investment isn’t money, only a little time and thought.
This last thing is, for me, the primary key to the way this technology will change the way organisations work, break down the traditional management hierarchies and underpin whatever definition of Enterprise 2.0 that the Irregulars contribute to. My friend Jon Husband talks about it as the Wirearchy. Blogs, wikis and lightweight Web 2.0 applications which can be created within organisations without significant investment, and without the need for significant IT input. It levels the playing field and allows individuals, departments, groups to do their own thing where appropriate. Above all, it will help facilitate ideas and innovation through better communication. You should be thinking about this and encouraging this type of development in your organisation. I guess Bill Gore would have appreciated Enterprise 2.0 enormously.
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