Technology and Organizations

No, collocation in distributed development is not an oxymoron — and I have decades of experience behind my statement. SDForum and SAP hosted a panel for SAP’s global managing directors of their distributed development groups. (Distributed development is how enterprise software (and much other software) gets built.) The decades of experience were provided by Richard Baird (IBM), Cherie Gardiner (Microsoft), Suzanne Kirkpatrick (Microsoft), George Mathew (SAP), Clas Neumann (SAP), and Jeff Pettibone (NetApp) who each talked about the variety of global sites that form the centers of excellence in their production processes. I had the honor of moderating the discussion, which focused on these three questions:

1. What technique/tool/strategy have you tried, and then abandoned/adjusted? What was the critical issue?
2. What have you learned from other companies about the process of distributed development?
3. What are you hoping to do in the future?

Strikingly, no technology tools were mentioned. I know the supporting development and collaboration tools are important to the distributed development model — but tools were not at the heart of these executives’ comments. The focus was instead on organization practices and the motivation and development of the people in their organizations.

When is it worth is to collocate?

• When something is going wrong. One example focused on a situation where two teams were tasked with different parts of project. Instead of focusing on their assigned bit, they become competitive and each designed a prototype of the full model — not an efficient approach (though there could have been innovation benefits if the best of both models were integrated — but certainly not efficient). Solution? Collocating sections of each team with the other. This approach echos one an earlier field study on distributed teams and performance (Babba et al., 2004 pdf).
• When the organizational practice begs for it. Scrum meetings at critical junctures. Certainly many scrum meetings take place in a distributed form, but the energy expected is hard to achieve when portions of the team are up in the middle of the night to participate.
• When you want to learn. One of the execs described how much value his organization had gained from spending time collocated at other organizations. One thought was that this is more likely to go well if you are talking about non-HQ groups (fewer boundaries and concerns to overcome). Idea is that spending a day a week, or a month a year, with another organization will open your eyes to different approaches.

Intentional decision making was another key point in this discussion: Being intentional and explicit about where different tasks are placed; intentional in terms of talent skill set, the career development opportunities provided to the employees, and the life-cycle of the project.

Even without technology examples, this was TOP Management. I expect this panel and audience had a clear vision and control over over their supporting technology options — the interesting discussion for them was for the organizational and people components.

The admonition “don’t do math in public” clearly doesn’t apply to modern R&D. While the Lockheed Skunkworks and Apple are known for their secrecy, many organizations now open up their process so that we can all participate. This is more than “open innovation.” This is public, interactive, innovation.

IDEO, Google, PARC, Yahoo! have/had public websites for their “labs”:

• IDEO Labs: “… is a place where we can show bits of what we’re working on, talk about prototyping, and share our excitement over the tools that help us create.”
• Google Labs: “Explore Google’s technology playground”
• PARC Living Laboratory: “In the spirit of open innovation, this is one of the places where PARC scientists and engineers share their prototype web-based services, alpha-stage software downloads, proof-of-concept for various competencies, and collaborative development programs. These are available free to the public for trial and feedback; in turn, we hope to draw on the diverse perspectives the online community will share. We do not currently provide access to inactive projects (e.g., Map Viewer) here.”
• Yahoo! Next: (defunct?) “… is a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and upcoming projects. It is essentially an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, and a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum. The Yahoo! Next website is currently offline for redevelopment” (from Wikipedia.)

These sites provide outsiders with early access to interesting work, and early feedback from enthusiastic followers. To the extent that we are becoming a sharing/collaborative community, these organizations can gain great value and we can participate in the process.

But, how do you make the choice of openness? How do you decide what to be open with and what to keep secret? There is a full range of possibilities (the range of formal arrangements is nicely covered in When is Virtual Virtuous, by Hank Chesbrough and David Teece). They highlight the issues of whether or not the innovation exists, or must be invented; and whether the innovation will be autonomous or systemic to the organization’s goals and processes. Note: you don’t see Google open sourcing their algorithms.

SAP Labs shows a middle ground. They appear to have standard R&D, but with a local and co-innovation flavor:

“The SAP Labs Network leverages SAP’s rich diversity and technical and business expertise to deliver the best software solutions and services in the IT industry.

Located in high-tech centers across the globe, the SAP Labs Network helps SAP engage the local ecosystems and enable co-innovation.

Seen as a local company within a seamless global network, each SAP Labs location increases SAP’s adaptability and agility to rapidly address changing markets and meet evolving customer needs.” (Thanks, @nilofer for the example.)

Here’s a twist: Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute? I have a couple of examples and will do a follow up post — but it would be wonderful if you could share any examples you have. These can be self-organizing (like much of the open source software), facilitated by membership enthusiast organizations, or….