Intuitions Behind Adaptive Organizations
Decision Making for Modern Organizations
As reported by the BCG Henderson Institute seven of the most profitable companies are now platform-based businesses grounding their success on their ability to learn at different hierarchical levels and timescales(1), but this not exclusive to large companies in fact many smaller scale enterprises are gearing up and quickly learning to run platform based processes by introducing new components of the technological stack as well as new roles of the organization.
Platforms are the main ingredient to blend the human and machine factor in a data driven and process centric fashion enabling a wide variety of capabilities that would be impossible to seize with traditional practices.
The Platform allows to combine seamlessly capabilities such as collaboration, automation and intelligence by leveraging the large scale of data that can now be stored and computed at exponentially decreasing costs and applying the latest advances in computational science and AI. Companies able to ride the wave and transition to this new digital paradigm have secured tangible benefits in terms of new products, more efficiency, increased overall resilience therefore a tremendous competitive advantage opening a gap that might take years to close for followers.
The combination of collaboration and automation capabilities grants access to the power given by new technologies in terms of computing speed, size of data being managed and finally communication between individuals and machines. Evolutions of this magnitude transform the organizations that are now able to encode into the machine not only increasingly intelligent behavior but also the knowledge of the organization itself that is directly collected and stored in the central process automation systems, integrated with the machine learning and AI computing infrastructures becoming the main repository not only of data assets but autonomous cognitive structures as well.
What used to be the exclusive domain of humans is now a combination of machine automation and human assisted actions.
Platforms play a key role in the day by day decision making process at all hierarchical scales of the organization by providing different layers of pre-processed information in the form of analytics, traditionally focused on descriptive and predictive traits through BI systems and now becoming an ubiquitous actionable information based fluid substance flowing throughout IT and human networks and able to perform either human assisted or even completely automated decisions.
This is achieved not only with technological evolution but also with key organizational evolutions where new roles have surfaced and established at different levels of the organizational hierarchy. in fact fueled by the need to collect, manage, compute and make sense of data, organizations have started to hire departments of data architects, data analysts, data scientists, and the related Chief Officers vigorously stretching the quite imaginative list of CxO titles that have popped up in the last few years.
The Platform have also enabled to gain power over timescales that would be unattainable by the human capabilities alone, this is true at microsecond scale, range where trading algorithms perform their buy/cancel/sell activities(3), or at “history of the universe” level where simulation algorithms perform predictions on the data collected on the most diverse branches of science(6).
When approaching such complex problems, technology has started to borrow ideas from the natural world with an increasing rate of success. The biomimicry trend is accelerating and has proven to be successful in a wide variety of domains e.g. new deep learning algorithms and techniques which emerge from the initial intuition of modelling the perceptron based on the functioning of a brain neuron, such techniques are now at the foundation of notable services such as Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant,
Generative models are another example of AI technique getting more popular and powerful with many successful applications ranging from art to photography to video production, 3d object generation, architectural modeling, text to image, image to image translation and more.
At Organization level the ability to orchestrate collaborative operations and enable the new automated functions of control either rule based or through the more advanced algorithms has been identified by many as a key objective through the launch of the most diverse transformational programs and IT evolutions programs to introduce big data or AI related platforms.
Unfortunately to achieve the desired successful results it takes much more than a digital transformation program or the introduction of a new component of the IT architecture.
Dealing with the complexity of a socio-technical system rooted in an ever changing environment requires the ability to embrace and combine a new thinking and holistic approach, a new operational model and a platform able interconnect the different human and machine based entities and manage the data flows at the ever increasing rate we are witnessing.
Facing the challenges of multiple global crises organizations must be able to distill a completely new approach to business that contemplates the social and environmental factors, therefore modifying at its roots the very purpose of business.
Challenging the status quo, evolving by incremental evolution, removing from people recurring and mechanical activities to be encoded in automated systems and enabling to the maximum extent automated decision making is a set of outcomes to be enclosed in the code defining the purpose of next generation organizations.
The quality and the speed of decision-making can be raised by making the relevant data available, and actionable through automated triggers raised by bots whose behavior is based on static rules or adaptive AI powered cognitive processes. The strategic and organizational deployment of the planned targets can be clearly mapped and used to assign activities and track the evolution over time through process mining techniques therefore limiting the overhead on human workforce to the bare minimum. The timing of actions such as the reviews along with their executions can automatically alert all concerned. Communication-flows can be facilitated and managed by ensuring timely circulation, by avoiding swamping people with undesired notifications and email.
Adopting a process centric end to end encoding approach that integrates human and machine actions will unleash the power of Organizational intelligence as a combination of individual, collective and machine based intelligence.
References
1- A. Bailey, M. Reeves Et Al.The Company of the Future, BCG Henderson Institute 2019.
2- T. Dunning, E. Friedman Practical Machine Learning , O’Reilly, 2014
3- P. Fomber Et Al. High Frequency Trading, Deutsche Börse, 2011
4- Bradshaw, Sykes Ecosystem Dynamics, Wiley Blackwell, 2014
5- W. A. Sussland, The Platform of the Agile Management, Routledge 2018
