In an HBR Blog the irrepressible Andrew McAfee claimed enormous IT investments are helping the enterprise become “…more scientific, more orchestrated, and more self-organizing.” Here at The Network Singularity we are very grateful to Andrew, but do take exception to some of the conclusions.

Overall, we found the piece to be a rather specious editorial. Andrew is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. This sort of doublespeak accounts for more problems than anything else. In his Orwellian style, McAfee even admits the well-know and comprehensive historical failure of IT, to wit,

“The difficulties of getting people to comply with the essential details of redesigned work explain why failure rates among the first wave of business process re-engineering efforts were as high as 70%.”

This paired with happy talk on McAfee’s Trinity of Transformation did not work for us.

Points on scientific IT mgmt are ok if it is bounded by human sense making. Science serves people. 1011 + 0101 = 10000 is not a decision. People make decisions, not machines. Machines DO aid and abet the Hayekian principle of background operations, to wit,

“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." –Hayek

“…scientific method is the bundle of data gathering, experimentation, hypothesis formulation and testing, and bias elimination that has helped us understand the natural world so much better in recent centuries.”

The problem with Andrew’s conclusion is the enterprise is not ‘…the natural world.’ This remark is tantamount to Fordism. Furthermore, the tired notion of ‘transformation’ is hackneyed.

The enterprise is a social world. Using scientific methods on people and complex adaptive systems like organizations fails over and over. Andrew needs to look no further that the great MIT systems dynamics guru Jay Forrester, to wit,

“The human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave.  We think simplistically and linearly.” - classic 1971 paper Counterintuitive Behavior Of Social Systems

Overbearing ‘scientific’ metrics and ponderous methods like Six Sigma applied to complex systems like organizational networks, as Andrew implicitly points out, fail over and over and over.

Meanwhile, orchestration is absolutely not about getting people ‘to comply.’ (?) Look, to orchestrate means to cleverly and creatively arrange something so that it is pleasing or profitable. Effective IT orchestration cultivates and coordinates enterprise knowledge flow to assure sensible and positive outcomes. Fine-grain IT command, control and compliance is NOT orchestration. Good grief!

Few more points.

• Complexity principles like self-organization and scientific management are not mutually exclusive.
• Self-organization and emergence has been around a LOT longer than everything else. They trump everything.
• Scientific mgmt, orchestration and complexity are not some sequential happy trail for IT lifecycles.
• IT must embrace complexity, “to let people interact,” since everything else fails with 100% confidence.
• The multiple IT eras of paying lip service to people is finally and permanently oh-ver!

Rather than some phony notion of  ‘transformation,’ it’s simply better to allow the social structures and properties to emerge and express themselves broadly. Engender improvisation, conversation and authenticity to achieve productivity, innovation and prosperity in IT and through all the business networks.

Finally, we welcome the first glimmer of complexity science creeping into the IT wing of enterprise leadership with Andrew’s remarks on self-organization.

The decades old IT refrain of people, process technology is finally coming home to roost. Thing is, it does not inhabit the glass-room or IT. It thrives well beyond the purview of the risk management and control operations we used to call IT.

IT belongs to people.

Every major IT innovation in history was about democratization of information – minicomputers, PC, client/server, Internet, email, WWW, eCommerce, social media, etc., etc. All were SOUNDLY rejected by the IT oligarchy. Why? Because they put people and value at the center of enterprise logic. Sadly, it is a lesson IT never learned and will never master.

The following chart outlines the true and authentic properties that are driving IT mutation and evolution.

Enlarge 

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