1. Towards Understanding Digital
Organizations of the Future
Heather A. Moore
Strategy & Future Vision, Vodafone Group R&D
European Institute of Industrial Leadership
Connected Generation Conference
November 21, 2012
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2. World Increasingly Filled with Digital Things
• Tech convergence of cloud, social, and mobile computing …
changing the world
• Digital Things
– Things that are losing their material form: books, movies, music, photos,
money, …
– Things that never had a material form: Status updates, email archives, text
messages, …
• Digital Traces: metadata made by people and systems that
provides evidence of action in the world
– mobile phone location history, call log, SMS log, contact list
– social networking log of comments, posts, responses, likes, …
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3. Rate of Change
3 3 Heather A. Moore | November 21, 2012 source: Stewart Brand

4. Organisations Now - Everything is Connected
• Globalization - technology binds together systems with
radically different time scales:
– financial transactions that happen in milliseconds
– policy that is implemented over years
– social norms that change over decades
– ecological processes that evolve over millenia
• The behavior of each system influences the other in complex
feedback loops in which effects may be difficult to trace and
latent dependencies exist between seemingly random things
• Both uncertainty and risk increases with scale
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5. Sustainability:
• Transparency
• Employee development
• Resource efficiency
10 Heather A. Moore | November 21, 2012 image source: ncb.org.uk

6. Is Sustainable Enough?
• Works if conditions are predictable
• Few practical tools for handling
disruptions
10 Heather A. Moore | November 15, 2012 image source: hdwallpapers4free.com

7. The Future...
• Unpredictable
• Full of complex & tightly
coupled systems
• Fast rate of change
• Wildly variable
conditions
3 7 Heather A. Moore | November 21, 2012 image source: physicsworld.com

8. Resilience:
• The capacity of an organization to
tolerate disturbances without
collapsing
10 image source: National Geographic

9. What Affects Resilience?
• Flexibility
• Inclusiveness
• Diversity
• Innovation
Extreme efficiency -
Internal focus -
Homogeneity of workforce and products -
Stasis -
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10. Similar Roles... New Challenges
• Marketing • Knowledge Management
• Design, Engineering • Business models
• Production • Intellectual Property
• Sales • Product lifecycle
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11. New Organizational
Toolkit
Be prepared
for just about anything!
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11 Digital Things Progress Report November image source: wenger

12. Tech Probes
- see how people appropriate technology
- test social norms
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13. New Business Models
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14. example: Local Motors
- Design phase is social
- Production is normal
- Sales is on-demand
- Completely open source
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15. example: Kickstarter
Model for allowing customer to vote which
products they want to exist
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16. Adaptive Governance
• Experimentation
• New policies for management
• Tolerance of small scale failures
• Novel approaches to collaboration with internal & external
stakeholders
• New ways to promote flexibility (in work environment)
• New institutional & organisational arrangements
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17. example: FAVI
“You do not work for me or for a boss. You
work for your customer. I don't pay you.
They do. Every customer has its own
factory now. You do what is needed for the
customer.'"
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18. New Employee Capabilities
• Directing attention mindfully
• Critical thinking
“It’s not
• Participation
information
• Collaboration
• Network Smarts
overload. It’s
filter failure.”
—Clay Shirky
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19. New Types of Employee Rewards
• Revenue Sharing of Successful New
Products
• External Recognition
• Time to Work on More Socially Oriented
Projects
• Sabbaticals to work at a Startup
• 20% time for Personal Development
419 Heather A. Moore | November 21, 2012 image source: Jean Beale

20. Accepting Influence
This technology probe investigates:
•How are digital gifts experienced as different
from physical gifts?
•Does increasing the presence of social
obligations surrounding a gift change
perceptions of value for a gift? Is it the
explicitness of the thought that counts?
•What are the boundaries of control people are
willing to cede to others? Do couples agree with
these boundaries or does this prompt further
negotiation between them?
•How publicly vs. privately are the gifts displayed
and does this vary between singles/couples and
locations?
•Does the metadata that surrounds a gift change
people’s perception of value for that gift?
Vodafone advertising (INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL USE)
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20 Digital Things Progress Report November image source: www.telegraph.co.uk

21. Thank you.
Heather A. Moore
email: heather.moore@vodafone.com
twitter: @hmoore
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