O.A.S.I.S. Operational model for Adaptive Organizations
The Platform for Open, Autonomous, Symbiotic Intelligent, Sustainable, Organizations
Many of the most profitable companies are now platform-based businesses grounding their success in their ability to learn at different hierarchical levels and timescales. However this is not exclusive to large companies; in fact many smaller scale enterprises are gearing up and quickly learning to run platform based processes by introducing new components of the technological stack as well as new roles of the organization.
Platforms are the main ingredient to blend the human and machine factor in a data driven and process centric fashion enabling a wide variety of capabilities that would be impossible to seize with traditional practices.
The Platform allows the seamless combination of capabilities such as collaboration, automation and intelligence by leveraging the large scale of data that can now be stored and computed at exponentially decreasing costs and applying the latest advances in computational science and AI. Companies able to ride the wave and transition to this new digital paradigm have secured tangible benefits in terms of new products or services, improved efficiency, increased overall resilience, and therefore have gained a tremendous competitive advantage opening a gap that might take years for followers to recoup.
The OASIS model describes with a biomimicry approach how collaboration and automation capabilities grants access to the power given by new technologies in terms of computing speed, size of data being managed and finally, communication between individuals and machines.
It draws the path to transform organizations by gaining power over different timescales and by encoding into the machine not only increasingly intelligent behavior, but also the knowledge of the organization itself, for improved and more efficient day to day operations as well as decision making processes at all hierarchical scales.
To resemble and mimic the behavior of natural environments organizations must embrace a new operational model, we propose here the OASIS Model, derived by the described key characteristics of Open, Autonomous, Symbiotic, Intelligent and Sustainable behavior that is presented as the foundation for a comprehensive conceptual framework of the key capabilities to be acquired and combined in order to achieve the required and expected adaptive behavior.
To define adaptivity we need to analyze nature and borrow ideas from the behavior of the hierarchical structures we find, by doing it can be easily recognized that biomimicry seems a good approach in order to lay a framework for adaptive behavior potentially able to cope with the complexity of the ever changing environment.
When looking at natural ecosystems that have been able to survive and evolve in the long term, we find congenital properties that are common to all instances leading to seemingly spontaneous or instinctive behaviors in some cases hereditary in other learned , namely, the intrinsic ability to interconnect (Open), the untaught ability to derive concepts and act with purpose (Autonomous), the inherent ability to produce synergetic, systemically emergent behavior, not derivable by the analysis of the single parts (Symbiotic), the inborn ability to learn and encode knowledge used across different domains (Intelligent), the spontaneous ability to produce holistic long term viable behavior by balancing the degree of order and the degree of freedom in the process of growth and evolution (Sustainable).
The following are the guiding principles comprising the OASIS model:
- Create Open Organizations, able to interact and exchange information efficiently both internally and externally at all hierarchical levels.
- Run Autonomous Organizations, able to monitor the environment, learn by generating structure and encoding reusable knowledge.
- Promote Symbiotic Behavior: by creating mutually beneficial co-operating environments for the emergence of beneficial effects that cannot be predicted from the analysis of the single components.
- Design Intelligent Organizations: Able to produce and control, individual, collective and artificial Intelligence
- Foster Sustainable Organization at ecosystemic level through the ability to balance the degree of order and freedom to mimic the typical equilibrium seen in natural ecosystems
Open Organizations
Able to interconnect and exchange information efficiently both internally and externally
Openness refers to the key concepts the key concepts of Biomimicry and Open Systems Modelling in Organizations by providing the foundations of Systems and Complexity Theory. This will be applied to Innovation and Change Management Processes by integrating a holistic approach to organization, business process management, and enterprise architecture through trends analysis as well as practical examples and real life applications explaining the benefits of going beyond the traditional secrecy and silo mentality and implementing modern open models of information exchange and organization.
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Ecosystem Platform Technology"We need to apply a holistic approach to organization, business process management, and enterprise architecture"
Autonomous Organizations
Able to monitor the environment and learn by generating structure and reusable knowledge
Living organisms show a natural predisposition to learn from the environment and retain knowledge so that it can potentially be applied in similar situations across different domains. Organizations must similarly acquire the key capability of encoding purpose and knowledge in their strategy and operations.
Technologies are greatly contributing as never before to the ability to leverage information and distill knowledge through key capabilities such as data driven automation and machine learning and collaborations, but in order to tap into the power, organizations need to be able to encode knowledge, trigger automated processes, orchestrate collaborative interactions and generate proper insights for decision making with a holistic approach.
To help with this daunting task, new roles have been introduced at all levels of the hierarchy such as data scientists, data architects even CDOs.
One role in particular has been gaining traction behind the scenes and has become highly demanded; the business translator brings the key skill of transforming business needs into a language that is comprehensible by systems, often with minimal or no intervention from IT departments, and simplifies the transformation process from requirements and informal habits or group routines into structured and automated procedures by leaving the proper levels of collaborative freedom at the human level.
Workforce and Robotic automation play an important role and new actors have been introduced into the organization to deal with the operational and control complexities spanning multiple domains.
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Ecosystem Platform Technology"Living organisms show a natural predisposition to learn from the environment and retain knowledge Organizations must similarly acquire the key capability of encoding purpose and knowledge in their strategy and operations."
Symbiotic Organizations
Able to create mutually beneficial environments for the emergence of beneficial effects that cannot be predicted from the analysis of the single parts.
Nature seems to follow fundamental unifying principles where single entities balance an inner, innate propensity to nurture and advance their objectives, while fostering a shared purpose of the organization they belong to.
Such organization shows advanced properties emerging from very simple rules that when combined and observed by multiple entities give birth to behaviors that would be unimaginable when analyzing the behavior of the single parts.
Examples of this can be found in the collective behavior of simpler parts such as neurons in a brain or a single fish in a school of fish.
Understanding how natural systems behave and how phenomena such as self-organization, emergence, and co-evolution are produced, can help in the daunting duty of combining the necessities and objectives of the single human with the objectives of the organization and the globalized community they both belong to; many of the innovations diffused in the last few years rely heavily on advances in the aforementioned fields, from the ability to model intelligence to the ability to model trust through the cooperation of humans and machines.
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Ecosystem Platform Technology"Properties emerging from very simple rules, give birth to behaviors that would be unimaginable when analyzing the behavior of the single parts"
Intelligent Organizations
Able to reuse acquired knowledge and given internal and environmental resources for its "purpose"
To be truly intelligent, organizations must be able to harness the main components of modern organization intelligence; namely the individual cognitive capabilities of employees and collaborators, the collective intelligence they are able to produce when interacting with each other additionally augmented by the intelligence produced while interacting with automated systems that are becoming increasingly autonomous and able to manage with increasing rates of success cognitive complexities as new AI capabilities are developed and become publicly available.
Organizations must investigate and implement the realm of organizational cognitive capabilities, inheriting and building on previously introduced concepts such as organizational learning and modern knowledge management, with the key objective to master the art of data driven decision making using the sense-response-action-reaction paradigm with an incremental evolution approach and through the assistance of machine based intelligent processes.
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Ecosystem Platform Technology"Organizations must master the art of data driven decision making using the sense-response-action-reaction paradigm with an incremental evolution approach and through the combination of individual and collective intelligence assisted by machine based intelligent processes"
Sustainable Organizations
Able to balance the degree of order and freedom in order to match the typical equilibrium seen in natural ecosystems
Able to balance the degree of order and freedom in order to match the typical equilibrium seen in natural ecosystems.
Sustainability has become the mantra of our times, but it is often associated with one single indicator, i.e. carbon footprint, and when discussed with different perspectives and points of view tends to rely on ambiguous definitions and interpretations.
There are now over 30 solid years of research in the field of ecosystem dynamics and the integration of more traditional biological approaches with methods derived from information theory, seem to provide promising results when transformed into guiding policies.
The model proposes alternative ideas to approach the sustainability concept associated with growth and development of an organization, and provides practical examples of how methods derived from ecosystem dynamics theory can be transformed into policy and practice applicable to the most diverse disciplines.
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Ecosystem Platform Technology