We human beings are marvelously connected organisms. Our nervous systems and brains seamlessly connect our specialized organs. Our social nature connects us with others in ever-expanding physical and virtual communities.
But connecting humans with shared intent and at scale—for example, companies and other large organizations—is a never-ending challenge for leaders of every era. The larger and more complex the organization, the more powerful the tendency for each component to go its independent way, negating the advantages of size and strength.
Successful leaders find themselves investing great time and effort battling entropy by promoting shared values and priorities for the company as a whole and by bringing large groups together face-to-face to improve interaction and alignment.
But many of these same leaders have failed to give their people the foundational tools to connect data and processes across organizational boundaries. They’ve left the task of automating individual business functions to their respective functional leaders.
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Finance invests in their software applications. Sales does the same, as does marketing, HR and…well, you get the picture. While their technology choices might make sense in the micro, they aren’t designed to work together in the macro.
The result is best described as quiet chaos. Multiple, conflicting views of customers, products, budgets, and employees. No single source of truth that all can agree on. Cumbersome, handcrafted business processes that don’t extend across silos. The outcome is expensive, brittle, and inefficient.
From a business leader’s perspective, it’s even more entropy that must be overcome.
Don’t Miss This Opportunity
As business applications move from yesterday’s company-run data center model to today’s cloud computing model, one might see an opportunity to improve upon the legacy approach. The vision of a single, modern business platform seems within reach.
Unfortunately, without strong, centralized leadership and governance, history has shown to repeat itself, this time in the cloud.
Individual functional leaders will argue persuasively for their preferred flavor of software service, leaving the organization at large with the unenviable task of creating integration and connectedness among these “best-of-breed” solutions where none was designed.
Not an IT Thing
Organizational data and business processes create the fabric of how work gets done. Weaving those threads together doesn’t happen by accident; it happens only through intent.
And, in the modern era, connectedness is a business thing, not an IT thing.
Perhaps we’ll see more business leaders start to invest in connecting their organizations from the inside out. They’ll realize what might be “best” for an individual function might not be optimal for the organization at large. More freedom of choice means more organizational entropy to overcome.
They’ll think in terms of common data models and cross-organizational workflows. They’ll share their vision of a modern business platform that binds together their entire organization as a top priority and not an expensive afterthought.
And, if they succeed, they will have created a sustainable advantage amid a universe of unconnected competitors.
Chuck Hollis is senior vice president for converged infrastructure at Oracle.
