Innovation, Commoditization and Management in IT

[spurkis]

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

Comments

Re: organisational description

[spurkis]

Hi Simon,

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 case of a growing startup, I believe there is definitely a link between its key activities and organizational maturity.

Finally, something I forgot to mention in the original post: As a manager, part of your job is to determine the best process to use for a given situation. I remember I instinctively opted for Agile on internal projects and Waterfall for changes to well-established products for external clients at Fotango. I find your S-curve innovation/commodity model has helped me understand why I did that. I'm hoping it will help me make the right decisions again in the future!