Traditional organization structure follows a top-down management with ideas and strategy defined at the top then distributed to specialized teams that focus on specific technologies, processes, or resources.
Due to the hierarchical nature of a traditional organization structure, the individuals at the highest level of management may have little communication with employees who are not their direct subordinates. In many large global companies, growing organizational complexity, anchored in strong product, functional, and regional axes, has clouded accountabilities 1.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to quickly lose sight of the larger business objectives as the tasks are delegated into more and more specialized teams. This creates a silo effect where working teams are insulated from sister teams, and isolated from the larger organization. The end result is that it generally takes far longer than expected to deliver a product and it often falls well short of the vision.
Manage the balance between technology and employee skills
The ultimate solution for many organizations looking to untangle their decision making is to become flatter and more agile, with decision authority and accountability going hand in hand.
“Adopting new technology is just one part of becoming a digitally savvy organization. Leaders need to make sure employees are on board, too." - MIT 2.
We need to flip the pyramid and enable self-service creation. The cloud is a means, not an end. Success in modernizing IT through the cloud is driven by a complete standardization and automation strategy.
I believe that cloud adoption has become increasingly easier and possible because of the cloud-ecosystem of products, vendors and a vast library of customer references that we have available to us today.
What can you do when you transform your organization?
Working the “open source” way means collaborating with others by default, sharing wisdom and resources unsparingly, and ensuring the best solutions to difficult problems endure as common knowledge 3.
A major outcome of transformation is that your organization becomes open to the possibility of integrating and adopting new technologies and business processes. This can help you meet business goals in industries that are constantly evolving.
“To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners creating better technology the open source way." - Red Hat 4.
Employees thrive when they have the right technology, the knowledge to use that technology, and the freedom to learn, experiment, and improve things. A good way to think about this is freedom within a framework — employers create the framework, or decision rights, and beyond that employees are able to redefine and redesign work to get the best results.