Blue Heron backgrounders and perspectives

“Managers and owners will favour anything quick and easy - even if it doesn't work - before they try anything long and hard that does work.”  James Womack, founder/chair, the Lean Enterprise Institute, www.lean.org 

Exploring concepts and issues that influence the successful adoption of a community orientation.

Size, complexity and volatility matter.

The design and development of effective partnerships and collaborations requires attention to leadership, governance, management and participation using reference models, standard setting, tools, and services and change management protocols to improve business & technical design and implementation.

We do this because:

In viable ecosystems and megacommunities:

Many public, private and non-profit partnerships and collaborations have been designed and developed using structures, methods and tools inherited from traditional organizations.  When partnerships and collaborations are contained and well focused, it is possible to use singular authority and reward mechanisms and infrastructure approaches from traditional organizations and deliver immediate and acceptable results - at least for a while.

But such early communities encourage larger and more complex builds. The continued use of traditional solutions tends to result in implementations that are more costly than expected, take longer to put in place, and are more fragile than hoped for.

The early design and development of governance regimes and platforms for strategic partnerships and collaborations enables them to successfully scale and extend.

Exploring thinking, themes and directions that drive the community agenda forward.

Backgrounders: setting the scene

Perspectives: things to think about

Two sets of slides that you can use to provide a high-level introduction to communities.

These slides describe how to design innovative communities (S1) and how to energize them for the longer term (S2).

Perspective #1: Governance, Operations and Change Management

Developing comprehensive partnerships and collaborations with management processes and process-oriented systems inherited from traditional organizations may not be viable.

Perspective #2: Communities and Services

How a community reaches its users is a function of its maturity. The more mature a community, the more thought it gives to structuring its user relationships so that they can evolve in response to needs.

Perspective #3: The Evolution of Services

After a decade or more of provider sponsored service innovation, we are now seeing the emergence of independent application providers.

Perspective #4: Working Together

In future, business, governments and civil society will increasingly come together in an array of virtual partnerships and collaborations to innovatively address complex issues, create opportunities, and achieve efficiencies that cannot be gained in isolation.

Perspective #5: Business & Technologists Need to Understand each other

If future generations of more innovative peer-to-peer partnerships and collaborations are to be successful we need better methodologies and tools. But can Business and Technology participants have the discussion that will enable them?

Perspective #6: Innovation and Productivity

Entity and community hosting strategies that support collaboration may be stifling the outcomes they strive to achieve.

Perspective #7: Making Progress - Barriers to Successful Transformation

Partnerships and collaboration are transformational. We need to better understand the dynamics that drive successful transformations, and the consequences of not fully rising to the challenge - because sooner or later - somebody else will.

Definitions:

Click here for the meaning of terms we use in these perspectives