Doing Tech

I must confess that I like Bob Lewis.  Quirky, curmudgeonly, always writing with a heavy dose of cynicism toward the established management order. Nevertheless, he has the uncanny ability to always strike pay dirt when he digs, both in his previous books such as Keep the Joint Running: A Manifesto for 21st Century Information Technology and Leading IT: Still the Toughest Job in the World; as well as in his IS Survivor blog.  So I was not surprised to see that Lewis’ latest book with Scott Lee, The Cognitive Enterprise, also serves up a rich entree of insight, heavily seasoned with practical advice and wrapped in a light flaky wrapper of wit.

Lewis and Lee range far in this slim 210-page text before arriving at perhaps their largest insight, that “the way forward is a slippery slope.”  They begin by exposing the falsehoods behind the old “people, process, and technology” view of systems and organizations.  (A model that fails to include customers, by the way.)  In fact, in modern corporations since industrialization this formula has always in practice meant “PROCESS, technology, people” with people the mere agents/servants of the controlling process model and technology of the enterprise.  But what today’s organization needs is “to have all the brains in the enterprise actively engaged in the effort of advancing the mission,” because businesses are fundamentally assemblages of relationships.  Thus, Lewis and Lee call for today’s organization to be a cognitive enterprise – “one that behaves as if it had its own intelligence and purpose … one that acts more like an organism, one where business decisions are about the success of the business in its environment.”

Before describing how to create, staff, operate, and lead a cognitive enterprise, the authors first review several “canaries in the coal mine” – warning signs that the old organizational paradigm is dead.  One such canary is the dramatic shrinking in what they call the “stay-the-same to change ratio” – the rate at which accelerating change is confronting organizations and their environments, as compared to the previous stability that enabled mostly constant business models and long-range planning.  This shrinking stability is largely due to the forces of digital disruption.  Another canary is the dominance of the group that now makes up the majority slice of the workforce – commonly called the millennials, but labelled by Lewis as the “ETGers” – the Embedded Technology Generation.  Often called the Digital Natives, the Embedded Technology Generation members are “the first true cyborgs” – persons for whom technology permeates their lives, who live in a merged virtual/physical reality where the line between the two realms is increasingly blurry.  Creating products and services for the ETGers, and creating workplaces where they thrive and are productive, are major concerns for today’s and tomorrow’s enterprises.

Lewis’ and Lee’s antidote to this malady is a new enterprise model based not on the process-technology-people paradigm, but rather on customers, communities, and capabilities.  A requisite for this model is an environment where the organization “knows” what its workforce knows; that is, where knowledge is shared widely throughout the enterprise.  One where organizational culture and the shared knowledge on which it’s built are the true enduring infrastructure investments of the business.

The authors go both wide and deep in their robust exploration of the cognitive enterprise concept.  This is not another management “seven rules of” fad; much of it fits seamlessly with similar thinking on agility and adaptability, such as that found in General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams; New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.  The implications for the digital enterprise are profound, and IT leaders are among those who owe this book careful consideration.  Don’t worry: on a heady intellectual journey with Lewis, there are always tasty snack stands along the way.  A sampling includes:

• The plural of anecdote is not data.
• Permeability is the new normal.
• This isn’t a problem.  It’s a constraint, the difference being that people can solve problems.  All they can do with constraints is understand them and deal with them.
• ETGers don’t separate their personal and professional lives.  It’s all just life.
• If you can’t model, you can’t manage.
• Experience, someone once explained, is just-too-late learning.

You may decide not to pursue a cognitive enterprise.  (More’s the pity; come back in five years and let me know how you’re doing.)  But you should at least understand what one looks like, and how it might differ from what you’re doing today.  The business you save may be your own.

Michael Dieckmann is the Chief IT Strategist at the University of West Florida Innovation Institute, where he leads the IT Strategy Lab and serves as chief technology officer for the Florida Virtual Campus.