Creating Non-Linear Growth - Using Complex Systems Research

Most of the Indian IT services companies are caught in the linear loop - their revenues are directly proportional to number of billable employees they have. It has come to such a passe that each big IT company has actually become more of a real estate infrastucture company - searching for land to house the growth. Below are some pointers to create a value based business model rather than billing rate based business model, using some inputs from complex systems research:

Measurement: Measure operations through a minimal set of metrics rather than the current large set of metrics

Boundary less ness: Create boundary less ness through continuous horizontal communication and open organization

Self-Organizing Teams: Reward, empower, delegate to create self-organizing teams interconnected with other teams having bottom line responsibilities- end to end project groups – sales + delivery working together as a team

Swarming: Experts with specific capabilities come together to execute projects and than go back to their respective capability development

Focus on Continuous Innovation: Intellectual Property in terms of Patents should be created and maintained; a technological look ahead of 3-4 years by creating new technologies should be the focus

Create a RED TEAM: A red team will only work for ideas to supply the same services with a new or radically different way. If we do not create from inside – somebody from outside will create it. We should be looking for disruptive innovations from inside rather than from outside

Networked Thinking: Inculcate networked thinking rather than the Hierarchical thinking – which is current way of doing things

Reach outside World through Knowledge Connectivity: Enable people to connect with outside research groups, symposiums, conferences, workshops – encourage and create research artifacts connecting with thought leaders and create our own thought leaders.

The Upcoming Design Structure Matrix Conference in Munich, Germany

The 9th International Design/Dependency Structure Matrix conference is slated to be held in Munich, Germany (16-18 October 2007). This time it is organized in collaboration with BMW . After having participated in the previous two DSM conferences (DSM 2005, DSM 2006) held in collaboration with Boeing , I can say, the 9th conference promises to be more wider and richer as DSM theory and applications are expanding beyond the initial arenas.

For the uninitiated, DSM is a remarkably simple way to structure complexity of any system and hence an aid to innovation and problem solving. I have used it for project planning, system design, system architecture, enterprise architecture analysis, large scale software system analysis, business re-engineering, etc.

Explore DSM - you may be able to reach the simplicity on the other side of complexity much faster!!