Self-Organizing Virtual Enterprises

Two decades ago, the US military performed some large classified studies of the state of the manufacturing enterprise. The impetus was a by now well known problem: doing complex work in large enterprises is so heavily burdened by the machinery of running the enterprise that things cost too much (typically twice), they evolve too slowly in terms of technology and some things just cannot be done at all. Three radically different models of the future enterprise emerged. One seemed most natural to power brokers at the time, the "integrated enterprise," In this model, large relatively stable enterprises became more "frictionless" wdth information flowing along designated lines of command and control. The enterprise can be and often is "virtual" in the sense that many companies are "linked" in a supply chain. A characteristic is that the integrating strategy and management is integrated with the management of production and capital at the top, with a prime contractor or leader. A second vision was rather radical. It attempted to decouple the three (production, capital, integration). The integrating technologies and methods would be provided from the suiTounding environment, perhaps as standards, best practices