Knowledge Futures: The Agility Imperative

Knowledge Futures: The Agility Imperative

The 21st Century is transformed by true globalization, almost ubiquitous connectivity, and exponential increase in access to data. This degree of access and connectivity has blurred lines of organization and social settings. New demands require us to rethink the way we structure and manage our activities and organizations. Decisions must be made more rapidly and more collaboratively. The ability of organizations to increase their responsiveness, resilience, innovation, and adaptivity is not simply an opportunity to be taken advantage of - it is an absolute requirement for survival. The agility imperative is leading us to re-imagine the ways that organizations must function in order to adapt to the complexity, volatility, and uncertainty of 21st-century life.

This public conference will bring together diverse thought leaders such as Richard Hayes, David Alberts, Vivek Wadwa, John Schlichter, Jimmie McEver, Vallabh Sambamurthy, Arun Rai, Amrit Tiwana, and David Bennet. They will discuss the nature of the agility imperative, lessons learned from recent experience, and emerging work that has the potential to inform transformation efforts. Participants will attempt to identify useful frameworks/standards for agility and best practices, as well as an agenda for future work that will address identified open questions and continue to grow the tools, techniques and methods.

In March 2011, join us for a forum at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University, co-sponsored by OPM Experts LLC, the Halle Institute, and the Mountain Quest Institute (MQI) to explore Knowledge Futures: The Agility Imperative. This event will include panels with experts involved in facing and solving these issues drawn from various contexts including business, military, non-profit and government.

Participants include individuals involved with World Bank operations, Project Management Strategy at IBM, emerging technologies at Gartner, the former Chief Knowledge officer of the US Navy, a co-author of NATO's standards for cooperative engagement, and others. Our goal is to have equal representation among partners from industry, government, acedemia, and non-profit sectors. For more information, contact info@opmexperts.com.

The symposium is two days. Day one is open to all comers. Day two is available only to sponsors. Additionally, symposium organizers will conduct primary research engaging sponsors prior to the symposium, analyze the results, and deliver findings on topics of interest to sponsors at the event. Sponsors will be invited to participate in the development of a book, and to join a benchmarking network designed to help sponsors:

• Learn how others are solving problems of mutual interest
• Determine how well you compare to others
• Improve beyond the bounds of industry standards
• Prioritize opportunities for improvement
• Locate your performance gaps
• Promote "ownership" of key issues and processes in your organization
• Increase openness about relative strengths and weaknesses
• Increase confidence in developing and applying new approaches
• Expand participation and motivation of staff in change programs
• Increase willingness to share solutions to common problems and build consensus about what is needed to accommodate changes
• Increase collaboration and understanding of the interactions within and between organizations
• Develop valuable relationships with others

Goizueta Business School

Please note that the following schedule is evolving and subject to change.

The keynote speaker invited to present at this event is Dr. David Stephen Alberts, Director of Research for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (OASD) for Networks and Information Integration (NII). See PPT : PDF for some of his recent work.

Then keynote speaker Dr. Richard Hayes, President of Evicdence Based Research (EBR) will present on the Agility Imperative.

Panel Discussion: The Future of the Organization

Increasing complexity and volatility drives our future. Problems like unstable markets and currencies, political and social clashes and terrorist strikes, and fundamental questions about economic models make organizational futures uncertain and planning and management increasingly difficult. Emergent solutions suggest that in some contexts, distributed, loose networks of individuals may work together to accomplish tasks only large corporations could accomplish in the past. Think of the Linux operating system versus Microsoft Windows or the 911 terror strike versus a large coordinated military campaign in a foreign land. Does this indicate that corporations will not be necessary in the future? What will their role be if not controller of resources, process and goals? What skills will they need?

Panelists

• Benn Konsynski [moderator] (Professor at Goizueta; noted author, long-time advocate for organizational innovation and researcher on how to make it happen)

• Steve Delgrosso (Director of the Center for Project Management Excellence at IBM; former Director for IBM Healthcare US Division, board member at PMI)

• David Bennet (Founder of the Mountain Quest Institute; noted author, strategist for the US Navy)

• John Houseal (Deloitte Consulting; Senior Manager with experience in various global health projects including one developing global standards for assessing pandemic response capabilities)

• Mark White (Centers for Disease Control; founder of global network of public health professionals; in charge of document clearance at CDC).

Panel Discussion: Crossing Borders through Coordination & Standards

Another way to look at the agility imperative is through coordination. Organizations have traditionally served as resource coordination mechanisms. These new forms of organization are more distributed. Distributed coordination among organizations or independent resources requires shared understanding of changing and uncertain contexts. New research is developing technologies and methods for new ways of visualizing and acting on environmental knowledge. Standards have been a key to such coordination in the past, yet, ironically, they have also led to fossilized bureaucracies and inability to adapt to changing needs. Will some new coordination mechanism emerge? Which technologies will be key in which ways? What will effective standards for agile organizations look like? How will we design them to evolve rather than fossilize?

Other issues of agile organization center on challenges in information management. Housing and distributing information has been a core activity of organizations in the past. Potential from collective intelligence through knowledge sharing, improved productivity through application of diverse skills and knowledge bases, and an increasing trend toward knowledge work all point to a need for new forms of information management in organizations. Organizations structured around knowledge control and hierarchical provision of access rights face tremendous strain as they attempt to enable strategic project groups including people outside their organizations. Worries about digital leaks lead to tight security, which disables knowledge agility. What sort of knowledge sharing norms and tools will agile organizations need? How should they be thinking about their information resources and managing them? How do you get the right information to the right people wherever they are, whenever they need it?

If you pause for a moment and consider how it is that modern economies can function, you will realize that standards are at their base. There is little capacity for trade without commoditized currency. Unless we can count on value to transfer and store, we will not give up our services and goods in exchange for those of others. Similarly, unless we have a means to understand the value of human resources through certifications and standard measures of experience that get represented in standardized (comparable) forms (resumes), we have much greater risk in hiring and must organize labor into strict guilds and forms that cripple innovation of new labor pools due to monopolization of skills (eg. letters of patent, etc.). The value of standards extends beyond representation of abstract value (money) and human capabilities (skill certifications and conventions for expressing academic /job experience). Certainly, the phrase lingua franca reminds us that communications flourish when they have standards not only in vocabulary but also in usage conventions. Core cognitive capabilities are founded on the need to jointly represent and identify concepts, values and goods. These are the resources than enable us to cross barriers and collaborate effectively. With changing notions of how we can interact due to technological innovation as well as shifting and uncertain geopolitical and environmental conditions, the need to quickly reach across domains and cooperate becomes increasingly important.

With this in mind, one of the great challenges of our times is to understand how to craft and use standards that will enable agile coordination of:

• diverse groups of employees (some in our organization, most not; some co-located, most not),
• diverse methods of valuation (contracting, virtual monetization, digital assets, ephemeral assets)
• transient work (short-lived engagements in which resources need access at high speed)
• redirection and prioritization of work (crisis response reallocation of resources; reallocations into emerging opportunities more promising than existing efforts)

Panelists

• Denise Bedford (Kent State University; Senior Information Officer at the World Bank since 1997, developed core metadata strategy; incoming member of the Standards Board for the Association for Information and Image Management or AIIM)

• Geoff Berlin (FAA; incoming President of PMI Atlanta Chapter)

• John Schlichter (Founder of OPM Experts LLC; Chief Architect and Program Manager for the Project Management Institute's standard for organizational project management maturity, i.e. The OPM3 Standard; previous member of PMI Standards Committee and PMI Standards Member Advisory Group; co-founder of PMI Metrics SIG)

• Kevin Stever (CARE; Director of Global Compliance)

• Dominic Thomas [moderator] (Professor at Goizueta)

Panel Discussion: Knowledge, Networks, and Advanced Technologies

Despite its preoccupation with hierarchy, classical organizaiton theory grew up in opposition to the Weberian idea of a perfectly functioning bureaucracy. In addition to assuming lifelike agents with bounded rationality and a propensity for opportunism, the theory assumed from the start that few if any environments are stable enough to allow for perfect parsing of complex tasks; that the limits on parsability require improvisation; and that in understanding how humans act in organizations - administrative behavior - requires attention to this endemic improvising. Ironically the networked and federated organization structure outperforms hiearchy in volatile environments but only through the mechanism of standards for improvisation. As complexity, volatility, and uncertainty increase globally, networked and federated organizations proliferate, and the search expands for advanced technologies to cope with the agility imperative.

Panelists

• Dave Culbertson (VP Security Center of Exellence, CA Technologies)

• Norm Geddes (CEO, Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc.)

• Jimmie McEver - moderator (Senior Scientist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)

• Jeremy Schwartz (Executive Client Manager, Gartner)

The weather in Atlanta is awesome this time of year, and the Cherry Blossom Festival 2011 will be underway. If you wish you can spend Saturday afternoon at the festival or any of a large number of attractions that Atlanta has to offer.

Cherry Blossom Festival

For more information, contact info@opmexperts.com.

"Knowledge Futures: The Agility Imperative" was the firstsymposium in a series hosted by OPM Experts LLC, Emory University's Goizueta Business School, the Halle Institute, and the Mountain Quest Institute in Atlanta, GA in March 2011. For more information or to learn how to become a sponsor for the next one, contact info@opmexperts.com.

The Agile Organization - A Meeting at The Mountain Quest Institute (video)