Technology Strategy

Implementing Product Development Methodologies across Cultures and Organizations After experience at trying to bring various methodologies and ways of approaching product development to different types of organizations in different countries, and often not succeeding as well as I would like, I thought I would attempt at finding some explanations. I currently think of 3 dimensions that are the most important in terms of how they impact a generic methodology or approach. This is not an exhaustive list, however, after much thought these are what I feel are the key contributors to success or failure of putting an effective methodology or approach in place within an organization.  Communication The way that people communicate within the organization or team significantly affects the process of product or service development. Different cultures communicate in different ways, some more "open" others more "closed". Some "hierarchical" others less so. ...

I spent some time in the past studying growth in business, of course there are a continuum of opinions on this topic, however, seven dimensions stood out for me. Growth (economic or otherwise) happens when these dimensions are in place: cooperation, collaboration, communication, incentives, standardization and co-ordination. Successful Tech start-ups, consciously or otherwise have elements of these six dimensions in their business model (or user interface ). Take Facebook, for example, the interface fosters cooperation and collaboration it facilitates communication and in some ways stimulates competition. The incentives are physiological, but exist and by allowing developers to plug into their platform they have standardized the platform. All this is well co-ordinated and hence it is not surprising that they are on a growth trajectory.  The same dimensions can be found if we analyze Groupon, Twitter, FoureSquare, Google and others.... Whilst I realize this model is not complete...

Many of the issues we face in our day-to-day lives center around our inability to communicate effectively. This is especially true within the organization. The way in which we organize ourselves in the modern world is in organizational theory termed the "bureaucracy" (not to be confused with the use of the term associated with government red-tape). It is the nature of this form of organization - hierarchies of authority, separation of the office from the person and creation of common organizational goals (to name a few) - that inherently cause communication to be paradoxical. Many paradoxes are discussed in the literature: Merton, for example highlights the fact that organizations need to produce a high degree of reliability of  behavior. Devotion to behavior leads to them becoming absolute; they are no longer conceived as relative to a set of purposes, this interferes with adaptation, thus the very conditions that conduce efficiency produce inefficiency in certain instance...