Innovation, Commoditization and Management in IT
Simon Wardley recently gave a talk at the Butler Group on innovation & commoditization of ITI've talked to Simon a number of times on the subject, and indeed, he's talked at a number of conferences on it. What I find particularly interesting about this one is his foray into the management of organizations. I quite like his S-curve visualization
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Hi Steve,
Actually, when it comes to an activity I'm talking about a process, sub-process or result thereof as opposed to an overall organisation. For example, an activity such as CRM has made the transition from once novel and barely understood (more of an innovation) to something common and well defined (more of a commodity).
An organisation contains a mass of different activities all on the S-Curve, obviously this doesn't describe an organisation which is instead an intersection between activities and actors.
At any one time, if you take a snapshot of an organisations activities you will find it contains a mix of innovation, transition and commodity like activities.
Of course there is a difference between what it contains and how it treats its activities. An organisation can for example create its own processes and methods for dealing with payroll despite the fact that this is a ubiquitous and well defined task.
Furthermore, an organisation can also apply simply control methods to innovative activities in the mistaken belief that this ( ... )
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Thanks for your comments!
I do understand what you mean by an activity, particularly that it is not the same as an organization. I didn't mean to suggest they were, though on re-reading my post I can see why it comes across like that. I was originally talking about a startup's product evolving from innovative to commodity. I figured that by examining where the product was on the S-curve and making generalizations from my own experiences I could gleam some useful information. I think this is where I confused the point - you weren't really talking about products moving from innovative to commodity, but activities.
I should have also mentioned a startup's key activities - say building, running & maintaining and perhaps marketing a product, rather than the supporting activities like accounting, payroll, office management, etc. I believe as a product evolves these key activities change as you suggest, and that new key activities arise at both ends of the S-curve. This in turn forces the organization to change. In the ( ... )
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