Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Friday, June 23, 2006

Perspective: John Garstka, USDoD

John Garstka, Office of Force Transformation, U.S. Dept. of Defense, offers A Perspective in Innovation in Networked Organizations. (Text is not verbatim.)

I contributed to Network Centric Warfare, a book that attempted to find out if networking mattered in the military. We looked at the trade-offs between investing in applications or infrastructure. We asked, why should we spend money on networking?

When you’re networked, you can do things in the info domain much better and faster. That impacts how you organize, train and deploy your forces. Generals talk about advantages in the physical domain – position and force advantage. The information advantage is less well understood.

We’re finding you have to factor in cognitive and social domains when you interpret information. At the service academies, for example, they’re learning the languages of the places where they’ll operate.

To make sense of complex relationships, we developed a value chain. It starts with the relationship between networking and information sharing. As you move across the value chain, you hit a chasm between those who understand the tech and those who don’t. When innovation happens at the intersection of these two domains, there’s a problem.

We try to understand what really matters. Military operations are a team event, doing things collectively. Shared situational awareness can be enabled by blue force tracking, which reveals where forces are deployed. It was enabled by networking apps on tanks, helicopters and commercial satcom. That affected the speed and tempo of combat.

If you’re in maneuvers, you want to look at what everyone can see at the same time. It’s not about deploying tech, but changing how an organization collaborates and assigns info and decision rights. The discussion is about how the networked organization behaves.

We don’t have good simulations to answer these questions. To figure out where the value proposition is, we put people on the network and watched. In general, we learned:

People use the tech because they want to do something. If you don’t have the right incentives in place for collaboration, it doesn’t happen.

There is tight coupling between the tech and the process. Often, the tech enables new processes. You need to understand the relationship between the processes, and how people interact during the process.

Sometimes tech leads the way. But you need a process innovation to reap the award of the tech. If the innovation is disruptive, there’s an impediment to adoption. In really big organizations, there’s a tension between top down and bottom up innovation.

At the top of the ecosystem, there are bureaucratic disputes. At the bottom, people just want to survive. When you talk about investing billions of dollars in infrastructure, you have to think through the adoption curve. You can have the network, but people may not be motivated to collaborate on it.

None of these technologies are independent. People who own the tech innovation have to figure out how to work together, so their tech can interoperate.

Given a fixed budget, the challenge is to figure out what technology will impact your core competency. Whether you’re in commerce, defense or government, you may not get as much tech as you need. Figure out whose job it is to synchronize tech evolution.