This week’s curator, Lee Bryant, looks at how we can identify and solve some of the scaling problems that small-team-based organisational structures faec as they grow; he also shares some related guides from Shift*Base and picks 5 links for further reading on the topic.
Micro-services as an analogy for small teams
Our newest team member, Tom Ridings, today publishes his first blog post about how we can draw some lessons from software micro-services in the way that we design and run organisations. He looks at how much recent innovation in banking has just been about creating better front-ends to the same service, but highlights Mondo as an example of a more disruptive strategy that seeks to create a banking platform composed of micro-services (including from third parties) that customers can choose to switch on and off:
“At the flick of switch a Mondo customer could plug in an expense reporting tool that automatically reports their transaction data to their business expense claiming tool, or services like Ravelin (where integration already exists) can analyse each transaction for fraudulent activity in real-time. Traditionally speaking Mondo alone wouldn’t worry the established banks but as an ecosystem with it’s partners it poses a much bigger threat.”
The notion of small teams as micro-services delivered through an organisationsal shared platform is a useful analogy for new approaches to org design, in my view, and it echoes what we wrote last week about joining small teams together through a ‘team of teams’ approach.
Shift*Base Updates
There is a useful guide within the Organisational Design topic area on elements needed to support alternative structures, which might be a useful read for people thinking about how to support small service-oriented teams. We also added a few more management techniques to the library here.
(Don’t forget to let us know what you think we should cover in the future.)
Weekly Linklog
- The rise of Ethereum brings up new disruptive applications such as DAOs. In this article CT looks into how they change traditional markets and law enforcement. Decentralised Autonomous Organisations: Ethereal Sparks Up Googles of Tomorrow.
- Long post challenging the ability of firms to stay flexible in their post-fluid-startup phase: “The math of complexity isn’t changing, and humans have cognitive limits. That means we need to accept that growth of companies post-startup phase will not be exponential, nor even linear, but logarithmic — scaling along with the legibility of a tree.” Go Corporate or Go Home
- There’s power in being more flexible than your competition. Does Your Business Model Look to the Future or Just Defend the Present?
- “What everyone gets wrong about enterprise communication is [the idea] that you will have one product, one vendor, or that that would even be desirable.” What Everyone Gets Wrong About Enterprise Communication
- “This post is about some of the myopic views on disruption in financial services (or any other vertical for that argument), and why I am getting a bit tired of FinTech, RegTech, InsurTech, or whatever AbcTech you may come up with.” How to avoid simplistic conversations on disruption? Petervan
Shift*Groups Updates
Our (free) invitation-only community for change agents and internal practitioners of social business, collaboration and digital transformation remains open for new members, whilst we conduct a review of the site and look at how to improve its user experience and utility and consult on how we can better support the community.
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