The Business Innovation Dogfight in the Cloud

The Business Innovation Dogfight in the Cloud

A fascinating article by Peter Fingar which discusses the strategy of USAF pilot John R. Boyd and his approach to the concept of agility. Boyd’s concept of always being on the offensive in combat led him to the development of an effective decision cycle called the OODA Loop created from four interrelated and overlapping steps –

1. Observation – select the “right data” and avoid information overload
2. Orientation or otherwise “situational awareness”
3. Decision – avoid analysis paralysis
4. Act – execute the decision and repeat the above

The goal of the above cycle is to “create situations where one can make good decisions more quickly than the competition” where the organisation that “goes through the OODA cycle in the shortest time prevails because the competition is caught responding to situations that have already changed”.

Peter then presents an emerging practice of using Cloud based delivery models (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) to execute business innovation, the most interesting to me being BPMaaS or Business Process Management as a Service. He purports that this approach could support multi-company BPM to engage in truly end-to-end business processes. With this may come the social advantages of collaboration and potentially innovative practices based upon crowd-sourced insight of the process community.

Could this theory of organisational agility be the key to process innovation and consequently organisational transformation?

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