Designing Self-Organizing Business Structures

Bob Moll, Monday, October 2, 2006 @ 11:11 am

What is self-organization? According to Wikipedia, it is “a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by an outside source.” IBM’s innovation website suggests such a principle may be applicable to the business world. Can it be used, though, to streamline business processes? Perhaps.

One may look at workflow design as the search for the optimal answer. Lots of inputs are tugging at a process where the goal is to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. The truly optimal process though may require adaptation. For example, if you are calling your bank to check a balance in an account, you are engaging the customer service process differently than if you lost your credit card. The process does not adapt, it just tries to optimally anticipate what you may need. The more complexity you have, the less optimal the “workflow tree” is likely to be. A different approach may be an adaptive process. Once the process knows your call is about a credit card, it instantly adapts its offerings to you.

To design an adaptive business process, one would likely focus on creating modules and rules for how modules may combine as opposed to rigid branches in a sequence. After that, it’s up to circumstance to dictate the actual process. The business would then need to monitor customer experiences to see if the process was actually performing as intended.   

Of course, adaptation can have negative consequences. For a good read, check out Michael Crichton’s novel Prey, which also contains references to scientific papers on topics related to self-organizing systems.

user experience design

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   Is this the same Bob Moll who worked for a period of time at SUBNET Solutions Inc.? If so, please respond to darren.cherneski at gmail.com

   Comment by Darren, Tuesday, October 10, 2006 @ 4:00 pm

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