Flat Earth

The old hierarchical structure of organisations is again tested and this time by Forrester research. In the summary of Globally Distributed Development Defined, they identify exactly how porous the shell of organisations have become.

One thing they do point up is that the Relationship Value Model has not yet arrived in Forreserland.

They identify this problem:

“The challenge of globally distributed development is more difficult than most companies believe. Application development (AD) organizations have run distributed projects for years — teams work at multiple locations, some developers telecommute, and the customers they serve often work at remote locations. But distributed development in 2005 means much more than this. Not only do AD staff work in multiple locations, but their teams also include third-party consultants and tool vendors' staff, spanning continents and cultures. Companies moving to a globally distributed development model must alter their processes, their tool sets, and their staffing models to address these different types of challenges.”

The same can be said for call centres, distributed manufacturing, all of supermarket food sourcing and almost every form of corporate business today.

This throws up an issue about how we define organisations and we have been down this route before. What this points up the huge value that needs to be placed on the value of relationships and the value of the expert who can aid the management of relationships throughout organisations.

This thinking is also the thinking of the open source movement and much of Web 0.2.

This meanst that now it is time to take the issue further and consider citizen everything. Yes, everything. Journalism, TV, radio, music, video, TV, invention, production, distribution, exchange and horror of horrors – the nature money itself!

We are aware that intangibles are the larger part of corporate assets measured in terms of money (which is only a metaphor for wealth) and now I want to explore this concept further.

If we take money out of the equation, we get a better view of value. It no longer gets in the way of thinking about value.

I am working on it now because I want to look at how the Relationship Value Model can be applied to the big companies? What happens to the big projects, the big engineering, the big aeroplanes.

The thinking begins!

Picture: The Solidity of the Road to Metaphor and Memory, 1934 Misha Reznikoff , oil on canvas 30 1/2 x 40 3/8 Smithsonian American Art Museum