Comments on: There is no Enterprise

By: Larry Irons

Larry Irons — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:59:18 +0000

Social scientists, including organizational analysis folks, have been debating the action/structure dichotomy for almost 30 years. Just substitute the word emergence for action and you get the exact same argument.

By: Gordon

Gordon — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:08:41 +0000

Oh, I agree that tactic without strategy is indeed meaningless. I’m not arguing that people should just do ‘whatever’. Direction and effective planning is just as vital to success as it ever was.

My point is that sometimes we seem so enamored with these abstractions, and are frequently operating at such a removed distance from the problems themselves, that we risk confusing them for tangible things.

The reality of the enterprise is that it’s nothing more than an emergent system that resides entirely in the minds of it’s employees. Change management isn’t just another problem – it’s the only problem.

By: Larry Irons

Larry Irons — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:52:54 +0000

Tell that to Captain Kirk. But, seriously, any concept you use to talk about large scale organizations is subject to the same criticism. Total BS IMHO, you could also say there is no organization, but that doesn’t change the fact that people attempt to organize their activities in systematic ways. Practices, not processes, have always been the lubricant of organizations. Enterprise 2.0 is an attempt to bring this insight into the everyday activities of people engaged in doing the work of large scale organizations. These things do not happen from the bottom up. Attempts to do it that way remain “experiments” “trial projects” whatever you choose to call it. Tactic without strategy is meaningless.

By: Rotkapchen

Rotkapchen — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:33:03 +0000

Common John, ROI — that’s so wrong-headed here : ) [challenging you with the GREATEST of respect]

ROI is a fundamentally different economic model…one that is a fallacy just as much as the enterprise is.

Let me explain…for most major companies budgeting is done on a project basis, aligned to department numbers (even ‘bogus’ ones — since the major ERP data models require them). As well, for many of such companies there are no ‘enterprise’ budgets. Who’s going to administer them?

I’ve found that most employees are oblivious to the reality of ‘no enterprise’. They’re perfectly willing to run around and blame a ‘they’. So I ask them…go find a ‘they’ to place blame on, find out what their perceived responsibilities are, see how much budget and authority they have. Company after company, I find checklists of things that are being done, only to find that the ‘reality’ of the resources assigned to said responsibility is a veiled set of machinations (ala. Oz the man behind the curtain).

By: Infovark 2009 « Infovark

Infovark 2009 « Infovark — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:33:17 +0000

[...] of your organization’s knowledge and insight from the ground level. We think that enterprises are made of people, and genuinely useful enterprise software has to acknowledge that [...]