• What we do
  • The People
  • About Us
  • Why Innovation Africa
  • Contact Us
Innovation AfricaCreating the Future Today
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
Menu
  • Feature Articles
  • Innovation
  • Agriculture
  • ICT
  • Technology
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Health
  • Store
  • Contact Us
  • What is an enterprise, anyway?

    September 9, 2013 Editor 0

    This post was co-authored by Mike Loukides and Bill Higgins.

    Bill Higgins of IBM and I have been working on an article about DevOps in the enterprise. DevOps is mostly closely associated with Internet giants and web startups, but increasingly we are observing companies we lump under the banner of “enterprises” trying — and often struggling — to adopt the sorts of DevOps culture and practices we see at places like Etsy. As we tried to catalog the success and failure patterns of DevOps adoption in the enterprise, we ran into an interesting problem: we couldn’t precisely define what makes a company an enterprise. Without a well understood context, it was hard to diagnose inhibitors or to prescribe any particular advice.

    So, we decided to pause our article and turn our minds to the question “What is an enterprise, anyway?” We first tried to define an enterprise based on its attributes, but as you’ll see, these are problematic:

    More then N employees
    Definitions like this don’t interest us. What changes magically when you cross the line between 999 and 1,000 employees? Or 9,999 and 10,000? Wherever you put the line, it’s arbitrary. I’ll grant that 30-person companies work differently from 10,000 person companies, and that 100-person companies have often adopted the overhead and bureaucracy of 10,000 person companies (not a pretty sight). But drawing an arbitrary line in the sand isn’t helpful.

     

    Not “born on the web”
    So, Google isn’t an enterprise? Any definition of enterprise that omits some of the largest and richest companies in the world can’t be right. The contrast between web-native companies and companies that predate the web is interesting and important, but that hardly seems like the right way to define “enterprise.”
    Dull, hierarchical, stuck in the past
    The company your father (or grandfather, maybe) worked for? Sure, there are companies that fit this description, both large and small. These types of companies are not our audience. A company that is stuck in the past isn’t likely to adopt DevOps practices in any meaningful way. Enterprises are not monoliths, and we have found many cases of thoughtful, forward-looking individuals who are members of the DevOps community, learning from the Etsys and Netflixes of the world about how to adapt their cultures and practices to improve their delivery and operations.
    Multiple lines of business
    As companies grow beyond a single product line or market, they often form semi-autonomous divisions and centralize common functions like IT. However, certain companies — Apple is the exemplar — organize functionally rather than divisionally. Microsoft is following Apple’s lead to adopt a functional org structure. Does this mean Microsoft will soon cease be be an enterprise? Of course not.

    What is an enterprise and why does it seemingly present unique challenges to adopting DevOps? After discussing this question with some industry colleagues, we realized our problem was that we were asking the wrong question. Horace Dediu of Asymco provided the key insight by suggesting that whether or not something is an “enterprise” is irrelevant. The key success criterion is an organization’s ability to learn and its willingness to change based on what it learns.

    This struck home. Is an organization sufficiently agile to change its practices when the landscape changes? John Allspaw writes about corporate culture and the need to adapt in his article Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture. The point of doing a post-mortem after a failure is to learn about what went wrong and figure out how to adapt in the future, not to establish blame. Corporations that need to establish blame never learn; they only put in place increasingly inflexible firewalls trying to make sure the same mistakes don’t happen again. The firewalls can’t prevent the next incident (because no two disasters are the same), but they limit the flexibility and freedom the organization needs to improve its operations. Allspaw concludes that you can only learn from your mistakes in a blame-free environment. Corporations can learn when they don’t behave as if everything is a zero-sum game where there are winners and losers.

    Art Kleiner struck a similar theme at O’Reilly’s Foo Camp: companies that are successful over the long term need both cultural exceptionalism (we’re different; the rules don’t apply to us), and humility. Sometimes the rules do apply, and we have to go back to the drawing board and redesign our strategies to face the new situations. The ability to build distinctive capabilities is the key to long-term survival, but the distinctive capabilities can become traps unless they are linked to a culture with a discipline of challenging itself. And with this context, whether a corporation is an “enterprise” is surely much less important than whether it can learn. 30-person startups can learn, but they can also be as hidebound and traditionalistic as the largest corporate megalith.

    Our original article talked about DevOps as a framework of cultural characteristics, supporting practices, and supporting tools. While this is technically correct, it obscures a key point: culture is the high-order bit — specifically, an organization’s culture as it affects its ability to learn and change. However one defines “enterprise,” what really matters is an organization’s culture — its values, norms of behavior, and reward systems determine whether or not it will be able to evolve, whether the challenge is adopting DevOps, or anything else. This is as true for massive international conglomerates as it is for small startups.


    Go to Source

    Related Posts

    • Scientists help deliver genetic one-two blow to deadly wheat diseaseScientists help deliver genetic one-two blow to deadly wheat disease
    • Key Takeaways from the World Bank’s 2012 Maximizing Mobile ReportKey Takeaways from the World Bank’s 2012 Maximizing Mobile Report
    • Brag about Your FailuresBrag about Your Failures
    • Services trade and growthServices trade and growth
    • Our world is full of bad UX, and it’s costing us dearlyOur world is full of bad UX, and it’s costing us dearly
    • Solar power day and night: KIT controls fluctuation of renewable energies by using modern storage systemsSolar power day and night: KIT controls fluctuation of renewable energies by using modern storage systems
    Sovrn
    Share

    Categories: Technology

    Tags: DevOps, Horace Dediu, John Allspaw

    Let Your Customers Streamline Your Business Innovator-in-Chief: The Public Sector – Catalyst of Creativity

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

Subscribe to our stories


 

Recent Posts

  • Entrepreneurial Alertness, Innovation Modes, And Business Models in Small- And Medium-Sized Enterprises December 30, 2021
  • The Strategic Role of Design in Driving Digital Innovation June 10, 2021
  • Correction to: Hybrid mosquitoes? Evidence from rural Tanzania on how local communities conceptualize and respond to modified mosquitoes as a tool for malaria control June 10, 2021
  • BRIEF FOCUS: Optimal spacing for groundnuts in smallholder farming systems June 9, 2021
  • COVID-19 pandemic: impacts on the achievements of Sustainable Development Goals in Africa June 9, 2021

Categories

Archives

Popular Post-All time

  • A review on biomass-based... 1k views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Y... 834 views
  • Can blockchain disrupt ge... 816 views
  • Test Your Value Propositi... 779 views
  • Prize-winning projects pr... 740 views

Recent Posts

  • Entrepreneurial Alertness, Innovation Modes, And Business Models in Small- And Medium-Sized Enterprises
  • The Strategic Role of Design in Driving Digital Innovation
  • Correction to: Hybrid mosquitoes? Evidence from rural Tanzania on how local communities conceptualize and respond to modified mosquitoes as a tool for malaria control
  • BRIEF FOCUS: Optimal spacing for groundnuts in smallholder farming systems
  • COVID-19 pandemic: impacts on the achievements of Sustainable Development Goals in Africa
  • Explicit knowledge networks and their relationship with productivity in SMEs
  • Intellectual property issues in artificial intelligence: specific reference to the service sector
  • Africa RISING publishes a livestock feed and forage production manual for Ethiopia
  • Transforming crop residues into a precious feed resource for small ruminants in northern Ghana
  • Photo report: West Africa project partners cap off 2020 with farmers field day events in Northern Ghana and Southern Mali

Tag Cloud

    africa African Agriculture Business Business model Business_Finance Company Crowdsourcing data Development East Africa economics Education Entrepreneur entrepreneurs Entrepreneurship ethiopia ghana Health_Medical_Pharma ict Information technology Innovation kenya knowledge Knowledge Management Leadership marketing mobile Mobile phone nigeria Open innovation Organization Research rwanda science Science and technology studies social enterprise social entrepreneurship south africa Strategic management strategy tanzania Technology Technology_Internet uganda

Categories

Archives

  • A review on biomass-based hydrogen production for renewable energy supply 1k views
  • Apply Now: $500,000 for Your Big Data Innovations in Agriculture 834 views
  • Can blockchain disrupt gender inequality? 816 views
  • Test Your Value Proposition: Supercharge Lean Startup and CustDev Principles 779 views
  • Prize-winning projects promote healthier eating, smarter crop investments 740 views

Copyright © 2005-2020 Innovation Africa Theme created by PWT. Powered by WordPress.org