Adaptive Organizations

Just finished reading Tim O’reilly’s great post about the real-time enterprise and why MyBarackObama.com, Google and Walmart were all so successful by creating organizations infused with responsive data technology to sense, process and respond appropriately. Google and Walmart I studied pretty closely at business school - fondest memory was in a class taught by Andy Grove when Sergey dropped by in these goofy spring sneakers to talk about Google’s efforts in India and China. MyBarackObama was on clear display this year and I certainly visited the site, received emails and contributed through the system. An excellent display of a responsive and fast moving organization that could orchestrate a clear, successful, long term strategy. I’ve also seen (read:worked) for a number of internet companies that did not leverage data as well as they could have and had not architected great data responsiveness into the DNA of the company. Interesting to me is for companies that get it right to architect the sense-process-respond notion not only into the company but into each of its products. Products that can evolve and adapt over time to my tastes create truely delightful experiences and still has a long way to go.