Post

It's All About Culture (Enterprise IT Beware)

This interesting post by PEG recently highlights an organisations culture as being in reality the only differentiating factor that they have. In his view assets, IP, cost competitiveness, brand and even people can be copied or acquired by your competition but it is your company culture that will lead to success/failure. I agree with his assertion on the importance of culture, and would add that whilst it has always been the case that culture is critical the rapidly changing new world is bringing with it new challenges to competitiveness resulting in culture becoming even more important for competitive advantage. I must clarify here that I see a huge gulf between the ‘official’ culture of an organisation that is documented and presented by senior management and the real culture that is living and breathing on the shop floor (and they rarely match).

This excellent highscalability.com post by Todd Hoff recently highlights the way that the rules framing IT (and business) are changing and how start-ups are becoming a beacon for investigating this new world. When we look at this new world the key elements are flexibility, adaptability and innovation. These traits thrive in start-ups where the ‘culture’ encourages them. Many of these new industry shakers lack the assets, brand and IP to use but excel in using their ‘culture’ to outmanoeuvre bigger rivals and drive innovation in their industry.

Some enterprises get this and are trying hard to foster a more innovative and customer focused culture. The emergence of agile development practices can help to focus the team on the true business value of features and aid flexibility in the use of resources. SAP has recently designed its new office environment to fully promote Agile development practices (see this post), and whilst this on its own can’t change corporate culture, it can remove some of the blockers to a more agile culture emerging. Of course there are many other enterprises that still rely on military inspired hierarchical structures and attempt to enforce a desired culture. This InfoQ article by Craig Smith summarizes recent articles covering how mainstream management are missing the benefits of an agile approach within their organisations. 

“…The management world remains generally in denial about the discoveries of Agile. You can scan the pages of Harvard Business Review and find scarcely even an oblique reference to the solution that Agile offers to one of the fundamental management problems of our times.”

The benefits of Agile practices are well documented and so if this fundamental approach is still not connecting with mainstream managers then how long will it be before they grasp the bigger paradigm shift that is occurring underneath them. This shift is being forged by start-ups and enabled via cloud computing.

Let’s look into what is happening in the start-up space; Todd Hoff’s post again highlights the use of small dedicated autonomous teams with the power (and responsibility) to make rapid changes to production systems. these teams being responsible for the entirety of their systems from design to build, test, deployment and even monitoring. How does this work? Well it can only work effectively via a shared culture of innovation, ownership and excellence. Facebook/Google staff have stated that their biggest motivator is the recognition of their good work by their peers (see here and here). This is ‘Motivation 3.0’ in action with the intrinsic rewards of the job at hand being the main motivation to succeed. Compare this with the traditional and still prevalent command and control approach used in a lot of enterprises with tightly controlled processes, working habits and resources. Splitting the responsibility for each stage of the development lifecycle between different teams (usually separated by reporting lines, internal funding requests, remote locations etc.) and then expecting a coherent solution to prevail is not going to work in this new world.

We are now starting to see the emergence of the cloud as a major force in driving the democratising of computing power and enabling the emergence of empowered teams. Todd’s post covers in detail how the cloud is making the once impossible possible and I recommend you take the time to read it. Only time will tell if the cloud’s impact on Enterprise IT will act as a catalyst to driving the emergence of more agile competitive corporate cultures in enterprises in the future.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.