Attributes of an Organic Superstructure
December 21st, 2009 | Published in Articles
An organic Superstructure will provide the most effective platform for Superperformance and its future sustainability. An organic framework is an Agile framework, delivering information faster, more accurately, and ubiquitously, allowing an organization to gain deeper insights into the activities and events that occur at the very edges of their operations. This architecture will enable an organization to execute against new knowledge autonomically, virtually, and collaboratively, without the friction of traditional management systems.
Exciting new attributes of this Superstructure include:
- A High Degree of Openness
- Dramatically Increased Agility
- New Levels of Adaptability
- New Organic Degrees of Freedom
- Fully Integrated Operations
- Speed vs. Mass
- Distributed Decision Rights
- Revolutionary Culture
- Self-Organizing Catalytic Sets of Synchronization
- Nonlinear Peer to Peer Relationships
- Anticipatory vs Reactive Decision Making
- Tailored and Precise Responsiveness
- Maximum Flexibility
- Autonomic Functioning
This is accomplished through the design and implementation of a new approach to an organization’s primary system of work, along with the rigorous integration of the business processes that make up an organization’s driver, mainstay and support processes. Such integration is an important step toward consolidated process controls across platforms and functions. Integrating critical processes is necessary, but more importantly, selecting the appropriate processes for automation and redesigning others based on the functionality requirements of the business owners is a vital step.
Another important step toward achieving an Organic architecture is leveraging advanced technologies that today allow intelligence to be embedded at the very edges of the system. Through an Organic Superstructure, organizations can now understand and weed through opportunities to construct an efficient portfolio for their businesses. This includes understanding system requirements, as well as constructing detailed designs and selection of appropriate software. Across the information technology space a new generation of tools is emerging. From the latest advancements in network infrastructure to the newest social networking applications, a forward view is called for.
It is important to note, however, that a critical success factor for instituting Organic architectures is an organizational commitment to nothing less then a cultural revolution. The “next generation” characteristics of a truly intelligent operation require an evolution in management and leadership thinking, as new understanding will drive new behaviors. Within the new optimization aim of the organization (i.e. Superperformance) it is necessary to provoke the change experience from the inside out, and institute new organizational and governance structures that effectively align business, technology and knowledge processes. Ultimately, the intelligent operation becomes the new definition for operational excellence, as primary value levers are improved and the financial measures of gross margin, cost and asset productivity are positively impacted.


