[Seminar] by Gitte Tjørnehøj. From Claudio Ciborra's "Drift" to "managing drifting digital development"

People tried to do planning to manage situations, companies, technology and so on. However, when the situation radically change, all of the plannings cannot fully response to.

The idea of this seminar told that "stop planning" and be ready for every changes occurs. (Drift). The drifting caused by the complexity of the change, more control means more drift.

That is when the idea of "Improvisation" comes in. The change is important, urgent and people just do not know how, leads to Improvisation.

For example, within a specific situation, where the current system does not fully response to the user's needs, the user improvise by "hacking" (changing in some ways)

And improvisation leads to unique solution.

However, we need to frame improvisation within the specific context. (Minimal Structure)

Every people can improvise, why do we need managers?

• Communication and Collaboration?
• Setting and managing "minimal structure"?
• Aligning?

I though about using improvisation trend to identify the correct direction for organization strategy.

[Excercise] Workplace Assessment Checklist + The Weird Rules of Creativity

The assessment target is EY Vietnam - IT Risks Department that I worked for 3 years.

I did 2 exercises:

Exercise 1

 Exercise 2

Creative attitudes should be encouraged or minimized based on different strategies, phases, times and contexts throughout the life cycle. I believed that creativity and problem should correspondingly rise and fall together.

[Research Project Video] Dublin Bus Application

This research is completed by the cooperation between Phuong Tran and me.

Dublin Bus is a public transportation operator in Dublin City and the Greater Dublin Area. Founded in 1987, Dublin Bus is a subsidiary of the Córas Iompair Éireann (the Irish Transport System). One of the Dublin Bus strategies is to progress improvements in the customer experience through technological developments (Córas Iompair Éireann, 2014). Under the business driven, as the product managers, we want to enhance the Dublin Bus App so that all bus travelers can have better experience. 
We conducted some methods to figure out the customer's demands, suggest a recommendation to improve the app and analyze the feasibility as well as utility of the proposed function. Below is a short film about our research project.

MIS40670_Research Project - Dublin Bus App (Hoang and Phuong)
​
References:
Córas Iompair Éireann, 2014, Statement of Strategy 2015 to 2017. Available at: http://www.dttas.ie/sites/default/files/content/corporate/english/general/statement-strategy-2015-2017/cie.pdf [Accessed on 18 Oct 2015]

Arriva Bus (UK) (2015) Arriva M ticket 2015. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8KqxapVw_k (Accessed: 13 November 2015).

[Study] Economics of information technology

The resulting investment boom led to a dramatic run-up of stock prices for information technology companies:

• telecommunications deregulation in 1996

• the “year 2K” problem in 1998-99

• the “dot com” boom in 1999-2000.
• Combinatorial innovation: set of technologies, comes along that offers a rich set of components that can be combined and recombined to create new products
• Internet revolution took only a few years: The components of the Internet revolution were not physical devices as all. Instead they were “just bits.” 

The “New Economy”
As with technology itself, the innovation comes not in the basic building blocks, the components
of economic analysis, but rather the ways in which they are combined.

Differentiation of products and prices

• highly personalized products can be sold at a highly personalized price
• everyone faces the same menu of prices for a set of related products
• different prices to different groups

price discrimination that is of considerable interest in hightech markets is price discrimination based on purchase history

Switching costs and lock-in
Changing software environments at the organizational level is also very costly => not the trend anymore => Cloud computing

Supply-side economies of scale

• Competition to acquire monopoly. In many cases the competition to acquire a monopoly will force lower prices for consumers (not the trend anymore)
• Reduction in fixed costs (not the trend anymore)
• Competition with your prior production.  v
• Pressure from complementors

Competing for monopoly (not the trend -> disrupted innovation)

Bibliography:

Varian, H. R. (2001). Economics of information technology. University of California, Berkeley.

[Study] How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

What Is Creativity?
The view that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than  good people is rooted in a misconception of creativity.

Power to the Creatives

If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it work.

Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone.

Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel

that it’s all for one and one for all. 

Pixar’s Operating Principles

• Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with 
  anyone
• It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas
• We must stay close to innovations happening in the 
  academic community.

Bibliography:

Catmull, E. (2008). How Pixar fosters collective creativity. Harvard Business School Publishing.

[Study] When collections of creatives become creative collectives: A field study of problem solving at work

Question:
how the locus of creative problem solving shifts, at times, from the individual to the interactions of a collective?

Research methods:
The model is grounded in observations, interviews, informal conversations, and archival data gathered in intensive field studies of work in professional service firms.

To understand how social interactions shape new perspectives on problematic situations and
uncover potentially relevant past experiences, the field study relied on ethnographic-research methods, which allow the researcher to uncover the perspectives of the people in the organization.

The research design collected data from five sources: (1) interviews with key informants, (2) project postmortems, (3) observations of work, (4) tracking of particular projects (whether “live”
or retrospectively), and (5) documents and technological artifacts of the organization.

Overall:

Generation of creative solutions draw from—and reframe—the past experiences of participants in ways that lead to new and valuable insights.

Model of collective creativity that identifies the precipitating roles played by four types of social interaction: help seeking, help giving, reflective reframing, and reinforcing.

• Help seeking describes activities that occur when an individual who either recognizes or is assigned a problematic situation actively seeks the assistance of others. 

• relied heavily on formal brainstorming meetings
• Monday morning meetings in which people would discuss the particular projects and problems they were working on 
• weekly meetings where they would discuss the status of current projects, and people in these meetings would often solicit help that focused on coming to a collective understanding of their particular problems
• when people had problems (or simply needed a break from their work) they would walk the halls asking questions and waiting for a head to pop up over a cubicle wall and begin a conversation
• Set up at least two introductory brainstormers [brainstorming meetings] to get the best minds in the company, the collective consciousness of the office, working on your problem
• Help giving, conversely, represents the willing devotion of time and attention to assisting with the work of others. 
• returned the message from an unknown colleague in San Francisco that day, but spent considerable time helping with that colleague’s request despite an already busy schedule
• willingness to give his time and attention ultimately 
• Reflective reframing represents the mindful behaviors of all participants in an interaction, where each respectfully attends to and builds upon the comments and actions of others. 
• The locus of creativity in the interaction moves to the collective level when each individual’s contributions not only give shape to the subsequent contributions of others, but, just as importantly, give new meaning to others’ past contributions
• relevant new ideas and insights and such reframing of a problematic situation come about not simply because the right people were brought in to help on a project, or because they actively contributed, but also because the participants in the process were able to mindfully consider those contributions and change their previously held conceptions of both the problem and relevant solutions???
• And, reinforcing reflects any interesting solutions they might have found. 
• help that is given may be viewed as criticism or an attempt to gain ownership of ideas—reducing opportunities for reflective reframing and also, ultimately, the likelihood of future help seeking or giving.

Bibliography:
Hargadon, A. B., & Bechky, B. A. (2006). When collections of creatives become creative collectives: A field study of problem solving at work. Organization Science, 17(4), 484-500.

[Study] Reframing the Dominant Quests of Information Systems Strategy Research for Complex Adaptive Business Systems

The competitive performance landscapes of products and services are highly dynamic and co-evolve. The author re-framed three main quests of research on information systems (IS) strategy:
(1) the strategic alignment quest,
(2) the integration quest, and
(3) the sustained competitive advantage quest.

to the co-evolution quest seeks to increase a firm’s agility and dynamism in repositioning itself, identifying profitable product-market positions as the evolving competitive landscape erodes the profitability of the firm’s existing positions

Complex adaptive business systems (CABS). 
In CABS, strategic problems faced by firms have become not only more complicated but also more complex (Camillus 2008).  Information technology (IT) has contributed to the emergence of CABS and wicked problems by fusing into the fabric of products, services, and business processes and by increasing the diversity, adaptiveness, interconnectedness, and interdependency of firms.

A complicated problem has many diverse parts and stakeholders, which increase the combinatorial space of possible solutions. Although difficult, it is feasible to find an optimal solution to a complicated problem because the parts do not dynamically adapt and mutually interact.

Complex problem or “wicked” problems has many diverse parts that adapt and morph into new forms with every attempt to solve the problem. Finding an optimal solution to a complex problem is not feasible; the parts of the problem interact with each other in nonlinear ways, selforganize, and produce emergent macrolevel behaviors that differ in scale and kind from the microlevel behaviors of the parts.

Simple Competitive Landscapes

When a firm faces few choices and the choices do not interact with each other, the emerging competitive landscape is simple. The highest point was the optimal shovel weight. (Mount Fuji )

Rugged Competitive Landscapes

When the firm faces many choice variables and the choices interact with each other, the performance landscape becomes rugged (Beinhocker 1999, Kauffman 1993, Porter and Siggelkow 2008). Multiple peaks and valleys with varying heights and depths emerge. The landscape can look like the Rockies, the Alps, or the Himalayas. 

Dancing Rugged Competitive Landscapes
When the many choice variables of a firm become interdependent with the choices of other firms, the
rugged competitive landscape starts “dancing.” peaks, valleys, and plateaus start changing dynamically in unpredictable ways: peaks that represent profitable business opportunities can buckle, collapse, and morph into valleys that represent losses, and peaks that represent new opportunities can emerge rapidly.

Complex system properties:
Complexity science informs us that a system becomes “complex” and produces a “dancing,” rugged
landscape when the elements of the system show moderate rather than extreme degrees of the following four properties:
(a) diversity,
(b) adaptation,
(c) connectedness,
and (d) interdependence

The Strategic Alignment Quest

A firm’s strategy has two components: 

(a) corporate strategy and 

(b) competitive strategy.

The strategic alignment quest has focused primarily on competitive strategy.

The Integration Quest

The second quest of IS strategy research has been to achieve IT and business process integration within and across firm boundaries (Barki and Pinsonneaultc2005). 

The Sustained Competitive Advantage Quest

The third quest of IS strategy has been to sustain a firm’s competitive advantages. However, with the emergence of CABS and dancing, rugged competitive landscapes, sustaining competitive advantages has become increasingly difficult. 

Reframing the Three Quests of Information Systems Strategy for CABS
To remain fit, survive, and thrive in CABS, a firm must co-evolve with the dancing, rugged competi-
tive landscape. IS researchers have recognized the importance of turbulent environments and argued for firms to develop IT-enabled dynamic and improvisational capabilities and IT-enabled agility

Bibliography:

Tanriverdi, H., Rai, A., & Venkatraman, N. (2010). Reframing the Dominant Quests of Information Systems Strategy Research for Complex Adaptive Business Systems. Information Systems Research, 21(4), 822-834.

[Study] The Platform Organization: Recombining Strategies, Structures, and Surprises

In a rapid changing environment where frantic pace of technology change happens, fixed organizational arrangements or framework can effectively optimize resource utilization. Sharpless organization (Generating new form by recombination) does settle the situation.

Characteristics of Chameleonic organization:
1.  Flexibility
2. Movement
3. Transformation
By 1. Interecting; 2. Penetrating; 3. Collating different organizational arrangements

It looks fragmented and intertwined; still it may be the only form capable of surviving in a high-tech
industry where a monolithic, rigid business identity would not seem as able to cope with the frantic pace of technological change.

The organizational structures which support the technology strategy must be able to cope simultaneously with the management of discontinuities and incremental innovation.
This has put, over time, a premium on the firm's ability to develop multiple, often inconsistent competencies, to deal with the emerging, divergent technological and organizational requirements (Burgelman 1983). As a result, existing structures, procedures, and schemes which influence action
are usually under severe strain, and managers end up feeling they are operating in a very fuzzy organizational environment.

The goal of Chameleonic organization:
In different natures, it meets frequent, sudden and radical changes, not just in products, markets and technologies, but in the very business identity and industries to which it temporarily belongs.

Trend in product life cycle:
The distinctive aspect,  the product—life cycle is extremely short and is becoming increasingly shorter. Thus, these companies must migrate from one industry to another, and even create new ones, at a pace which would be very fast even for simply implementing product changes within a stable technological horizon.

R&D guideline:The problem of defining the mission and direction of R&D, and in general terms, the global technology strategy, does not consist in choosing an alternative among various product lines or markets, but more radically, in repeatedly asking the question,  "what business are we in," i.e., what is the identity of the product, the market, the production process, and the boundaries between what should be done internally and what has to be procured externally, knowing that many of the core innovations are in the hand of external suppliers


Management guideline:
Though managers picture themselves as busy in decision making (forecasting, planning and selecting alternative courses of action) according to the strategy models in good currency, they would be better described as engaged in "sensemaking" (Weick 1979), i.e., in relentlessly picking up the pieces and left-overs of the "broken cosmologies" (past plans, marketing choices, goals, and outlooks) and trying to paste them together in order to make a new sense of t he emerging technologies, markets and industries they are enacting

Bibliography:

Ciborra, C. U. (1996). The platform organization: Recombining strategies, structures, and surprises.Organization science, 7(2), 103-118.