Friday, June 23, 2006
Military Networking
John Garstka - Office of Transformation, US Dept. of Defense.
Kevin introduced him highlighting the Dense connectivity - Convergence happening and how the military enterprise that is huge and defines concept of mission critical.
Here is my summary based on his talk. Innovations in Networked Organization
We spend 20 billion a year on IT stuff (wow that is a lot of money).
Tech on large scale...has a lot of people and process issues....who is in Charge? How do you choreograph all these. My organization is working on trying to get the technology.
My organization is trying to get to the technology and networks but has industrial organizational incentives
Network Centric Warfare
Information Advantage is a Warfighting advantage - when networked - you can do business better
Use information to generate and advantage. Not just substituting
Factor in cognitive and social domains - subtle relationships.
There is a big difference between the Low end and high end.
People are learning languages - like Farssi now.
There was a a really complex diagram that basically went like this:
Robustly Networked Force -> Information Sharing ->Quality of information -> (Common Picture ) -> Individual Situational Awareness -> Shared Situational Awareness and Collaboration -> Self Synchronization (New processes) -> Mission effectiveness
Gulf War - we could see where the tanks were.
Where are the Bad Guys? Where are the good guys?
HOW DOES THE NETWORK ORGANIZATION BEHAVE?
If you know that answer you can be more effective.
Create experiments where the value proposition is putting 10,000 of people on the network doing things in new ways.
Technology process and The Technology Tenants. How do I use the technology and link to outcome process Organizational people component is really hard? Collaboration is a group activity and you need the incentive infrastructure right so that it happens. Technology enables new process. Try to understand these relationships...powerful competitive advantage.
Innovation is not a one dimensional thing.
Revolutions in Military Affairs
WW1 Tank shows up but the process didn’t change
WW2 The process innovation happened
Looks simple in PPT really hard to do in big organizations
Who is in charge?
Question: Large Centralized organizations the technology extend contributions to a broader range is there tension between top down and bottom up?
A good example is Company Commander.com Captains Major
Enemy was innovating - put up website to share insights in real time. Army said really good - pulled innovation in and made it secure. We have today - virtual staff.
Bottom end of the spectrum innovation working well - I want to survive. Top...bureaucratic knife fights. Future combat system - things vs. technology. Investments in Billions of dollars very top down - these investments allow bottom up. The network is there it but the incentives are not there to collaborate.
We have found that nobody owns all this. Lots of people who say they own lots of
Conclusions
Getting the Theory Right
- IMportant to long term sustained investment in IT
Making the Business Case
- improve co-evolution of TEchnology. Organizations, Processes, and People in conducting REturn on Investment analysis
Deploying IT Infrastructure
- How good does the networked infrastructure need to be?
It depends
Operating Networked Organizations
- need to co-evolve TEchnology, Organization, Processes and People to achieve full benefits of Networking.
