 called Shaffer Consulting and he's an internationally recognized consultant executive coach, speaker on organizational transformation, post-merger integration and simplification. His clients have included many of the Fortune 500 companies as well as prominent financial government and nonprofit organizations. He was part of the original team that collaborated with the then CEO of GE Jack Welch to develop the GE Workout program which is about creating a faster, simpler and more nimble organization. He also helped GE to develop GE Capital's approach to acquisition, migration. He's the author of other books simply effective how to cut through complexity in your organization and get things done as well as the co-author of rapid results with Robert Shaffer. The GE Workout with Dave Ulrich and Steve Kerr, the Boundless Organization with Dave Ulrich, Steve Kerr and Todd Jick in 1995 which is 20 years and the Boundless Organization Field Guide in 1999. So the fact that the Boundless Organization started in 1995, we were thinking about Boundless around that time or the beginnings of it were emerging is why we're going to look at that right now and see where we've come from, where we're going to and the transformation that's happened with organizations including our own. So in addition to his books from his publications include dozens of articles is a regular blogger for the Harvard Business Review and Forbes. So now if we can do it I'd like to run the video of Ron just introducing himself. Good morning. My name is Ron Ashkenaz. I'm a senior partner at Shaffer Consulting and some of you may have astutely perceived I'm not actually in Edinburgh. I'm right now in Stanford Connecticut and I'm recording this video as an introduction to the session that we'll be having now with Alan Brown and myself. As an introduction to this session let me just say that about 25 years ago I had the opportunity to work with Jack Welch and a team of other people at GE as part of the transformation of GE and one of the key terms that Jack Welch started to use then was the Boundless Organization. He wanted to make GE a Boundless Organization. We didn't quite know what that meant at the time but we listened patiently and we worked on the transformation and gradually over time we began to see that there was a tremendous amount of insight and wisdom in that terminology. Eventually as we made progress at GE several colleagues and I decided to write a book about what Boundless would mean and we wrote the first edition of the Boundless Organization which came out in 1995 which is actually 20 years ago. Since then Alan and the open group have used boundaryless information flow as a key principle for what the open group stands for and in preparation for this conference Alan and I were talking and thinking it might be useful to do a 20 year retrospective on what was the origin of the notion of Boundless Organization and Boundless Information Flow and how does it fit today? Today the world is very different we have all kinds of communications technologies it's possible to talk to anyone anywhere in the world and to have the the internet and the information flow so do we still need to talk about Boundless Organization and Boundless Information Flow so that's the purpose of the discussion this morning is to see where were we 20 years ago how has the world changed and is this still a relevant topic and what does it mean for you for your organizations and for the open group as we go forward so I'm looking forward to this discussion and please participate and join in as we go along thank you. Thank you Ron and Ron I'll be calling on you every now and again maybe to help me out with this is that okay? Perfectly all right and I look forward to it. Okay thank you and I have my version my book of the Boundless Organization here that I've had since about 2001 so it's not the original edition but it's been close to me for quite a lot of this period of time so I'll try and get through some of these Ron was going to do some of these slides but given the audio link and everything else I'll I'll give it a go myself all right so this is the agenda how has the idea evolved what's happened to Boundless Organizations over the 20 years what's happened to Boundless Information Flow are we there yet dad you know are we there yet how long is this journey going to go on do we still need it as Ron just said in today's environment we ran a survey in preparation for this about people's attitudes to Boundlessness how how adopted it is whether organizations feel as though they're in a Boundless Organization and their attitudes towards it and that there's some very interesting results there and some some wonderful we asked an open question about what what does Boundless mean in your organization and we got some really great answers 250 of them took a while to analyze but and summarize but it's amazing and then the last part is you know does that inspire us to do anything and what can we do and really for me it also leads in to the work that you're doing within the open group and the way that now standards have transformed themselves from really being something that followed industry to something now with what we're talking about today is leading industry and and that's an amazing change for this organization and the work that our members are doing so we're gonna go back only 20 years I think that's HD Wells wrote the book about the time machine and something like 1885 or something like that so it's a little bit old but we were also reminded that back to the future the movie that's 30 years old which is scary does anyone remember the book Alvin Toffler wrote called Future Shock which is that you know the challenge of things accelerating and how older people are challenged by the acceleration of information you know that was written in 1970 that's like 45 years old right when he was looking at it now and and if you think about the way things are accelerating and continue to accelerate and always will that that's quite an amazing thing so going back then if we're looking back 20 years I think at the top left there's someone jubilant over the fact that the Dow Jones industrial average past the 5,000 mark in 1995 you went up about 1300 points it continued to go up by about a thousand points the next year and the next year but 1995 first time it broke through 5,000 John Major and Bill Clinton up there Mr. Slobodan Milosevic of the Bosnia-Serbian-Bosnian War that was going on anyone recognize the top one anyone from the States recognize the top one Oklahoma Oklahoma City bombing Premier Rabin assassinated in Israel the Iran sanction started that was 20 years ago grateful dead that was their last tour with Jim Garcia he died about a month after and the first Pixar movie Toy Story came out and then if we come into the technology realm we've got Amazon eBay Yahoo now 20 years old you'll notice that there's there's quite a few up there that that didn't exist at the time Google is just a baby compared to these guys Java right once run anywhere was the slogan from the company right once debug everywhere was what other people were saying I don't know the truth Windows 95 Internet Explorer and how many people have still got a palm pilot in a cupboard we all had a palm pilot the first piece of mobile technology wasn't it really no the palm pilot wasn't it wonderful that little pen DVD that was a I was a kind of momentous year for DVDs with Sonia and Phillips in one camp doing their product and Toshiba and Time Warner in the other camp and there was a big bit of a war going on but eventually they they got together I think the Toshiba Time Warner one out but they got together on on that an HTML 2.0 so they were all going on 20 years ago but closer to home I spent most of 1995 working with the board of the open effects open and OSF and all of our members talking about the merger of X open and OSF to form the open group and that was a fairly horrendous year you know in our history but at the same time we we launched the first branding program the first certification program for products that were entitled to use the Unix brand having been given that by Nevelle we then used it so instead of being XPG for and more alphabet soup because it was XPG for AIX or HPX or whatever it was that all moved to Unix and 95 was the first time we used that so we had some some interesting times there that we were going through the start of a change so we were at the point where the customer side had tired of the issues with portability with Unix they really wanted something more they wanted to be able to integrate things they wanted it they wanted a different style of standard really the the work on developing Unix related products such as DCE was pretty much done and so people wanted to move on and and the companies didn't and so there was this pressure from the customer side to actually reduce and merge these organizations so they wouldn't compete but at the same time the the vendor community that were funding these largely saw an opportunity for significant cost savings in supporting the two organizations so Ron I've put the slide up about with the picture of Jack looking a little older than he did 20 years ago would you like to say something to that slide and something about working with Jack as well we lost him where'd he go where did you leave him last but Ron you're back so the question I was saying I've put the slide up that shows the picture of Jack Welsh looking a little older than he did 20 years ago I was wondering if you could just talk to that and what he was about and what it was like working with him yes well we so we could spend the whole morning talking about what it was like to work with Jack quite an experience but Jack was one of the most intuitive and brilliant business people and even though his his behavior was odd at various times and he was sometimes the most wonderful person to work with and sometimes some he was the person you wanted to stay away from as far as possible but he had this brilliant sense that GE as a conglomerate not only across the conglomerate but across within different businesses that there was so much leverage that could be created by sharing information resources ideas across the different parts of the company and he felt that that was the sort of the secret to productivity and competitive advantage for GE but it was locked up by the fact that everybody was in their own silos their own businesses and it was a very sort of authoritarian kind of company where the people at the lower levels wouldn't talk to the people at the top unless they went through several barriers and several hurdles so he wanted to break that down and see if we could if the company could really move faster and be more nimble by sharing much more information and that that was his notion of boundaryless and he started talking about that in the early 1990s it took us a while to understand what he actually meant and took his his people probably a little longer to figure it out but that that was the essence of what he was what he was talking about and he proved to be quite right over the over the next couple of years and GE's productivity and ability to get things done just tremendously soared after a while thank you and I I saw Jack present at one of these New York World Economic Forum I think it was and I was desperate to ask him the question because we did we developed the vision of boundaryless information flow I was desperate to ask him a question I was getting really annoyed when people kept walking past me with microphones and so on so eventually I I said you know I asked him the question about you know do you see that in the boundaryless organization there is now more need for information to flow in a boundaryless way so that people have got the information they need when they need it the right information to the right people at the right time and he wasn't that pleased with the question but his answer was absolutely spot-on in part right the first part was people always want more information they've never got enough information they always want more get over it right but the other part which was the more intuitive was boundaryless is a way of thinking and acting it's not rigid it's not information it is it's a way that you behave in an organization and the way that you act and as well as the boundaryless organization book one that I mentioned earlier that Ron was involved with was the GE workout program and that described how they went through these 90-day periods of working out this boundaryless way of working in the organization and there it is so what we were doing back then was recognizing the need for change in an organization and historically organizations large scale was important it was one of the barriers to entry and but what we needed to do was to go from that to be agile to have more speed more nimbleness and sometimes that the large size of an organization we inhibited that the role clarification to flexibility back in 1995 everyone had detailed job descriptions of line by line what you will do what you won't do and I don't know how many people have now got job descriptions like that we move to sort of this is where you're going to be effective the job effectiveness description so it's more flexible so that people could actually know what they've got to achieve and I've got some leeway to achieve it rather than having a line by line job description and the other change and this is really a boundaryless thing is moving from having rigid specialization between function departments and so on to being able to integrate cross-functionally and different organizations would have called it different things it's not all about GE there's organizations with tiger teams cross-functional teams workout teams and so on and all of those were we're trying to work across the thing and trying to move from rigid control to a situation where you could actually innovate and bring things through the organization and that that will work together so with the flexibility you can bring innovation but with control and detailed line by line it stifles that somewhat and that speed needs to happen so the the key thing for Jack Welsh was that boundaryless doesn't mean there are no boundaries he said it boundaries need to be permeable to enable business not rigid and get in the way of business and they recognized these four different boundaries or barriers within an organization first of all there's the top to bottom of the organization and the layers of an organization in the hierarchy those barriers of information sharing and of enabling people we went through this empowerment phase didn't we where everyone had to be empowered and that was partly dealing with that horizontal getting people to work cross-functionally we spent a lot of years around about 95 onwards before that as well getting people working cross-functionally and that was a major challenge because where I was like in a finance department we had a completely different culture to the people in the factory or the warehouse or distribution or lo and behold you got these these weird sales people right people didn't talk to each other outside their departments that much right you've got the barriers with your business partners customers suppliers that you need to have more flexibility there and the cultural barrier barriers across for global organizations that really wasn't as flexible as it needed to be and it's not just language it's culture and and everything else so I'm Ron I've brought up the slide that's got the permeable picture can you talk a little bit about that one well I think the notion of permeability is that as Alan just said it doesn't mean no structure because if there was no structure you'd have disorganization but it's the idea that an organization needs to be almost like an organic structure like cells the cell walls are permeable that that electrical impulses blood flows various kinds of things important to regulate the body are able to move back and forth through the cell walls but without the cell walls losing their integrity and that was the same message with with the boundaries organization you need to maintain the integrity of the structure but be able to move the resources and information around in a way that would leverage the capability of the company so that that was the notion of permeability and it's a difficult notion for many people to understand because that boundary list many people say well boundaries we just get rid of boundaries and then we we talk freely with everyone but it's not but there's still need to be certain boundaries and I think that was part of Jack Welch's answer to Alan's question of people always want more information they want to get into everybody else's business they need the right information at the right times and to do that you have to have permeability but it doesn't mean no boundaries at all thank you so here's a little exercise that we're going to look at and this is the first time to use the voting machines so if you can grab a voting machine it's only a little game a little bit of fun but really what what we'd like you to do is just to press the button that says how many f's can you see on that chart all right how many f's can you see on that chart and then just press a button and we'll see what the results are you done no goodness gracious how many f's don't anyone say there's no f in that chart okay what have you all voted you'll press your buttons can we can we magic up some results wow okay the kind of the the mode 26 percent at 6 22 percent at 4 interesting number now the thing is that there are going to be people on your table that have had a different opinion right so can you just take a couple of minutes to discuss what you came up with and we might see if you want to change your vote okay so just take a few minutes to discuss with the folk all right you're done you're done discussing are we able to take a vote again second time yeah yeah press press your buttons again we get a different chart hopefully oops there you go back come on come on come on come on vote again come on press your buttons what do you got how are we doing do we have a result yet hmm so so Ron you can't see this but for your benefit we started off with the majority people 26% roughly at a 6 20 to 24 percent at a 4 up at 8 and 9 I think we had about 4% on 8 a few percent on 9 have we still got that chart yeah so we had 4% on 7 8% on 5 1% on 9 1% on 10 so if we go back to the new chart we've now got 14% on 8 7% on 9 and 1% on 10 but the biggest numbers 32% on 6 30 31% on 7 so I'll ask Ron to explain this but basically it's around perceptions and it's around collaboration so Ron can you just summarize why people saw it differently and I'm assuming what you've got everybody there in the in the audience is that sort of some of the best and brightest of your companies absolutely you're responsible for all kinds of analytical and technical responsibilities that's how they get travel when when when everyone looks at the same thing our perception is distorted by certain we call it lens theory that everybody sees the world through a different lens which is distorted a bit by your education your culture your place in an organization your background your upbringing all kinds of things that influence the way you see the world in this particular exercise many people don't see the the small letter the letter of the the word of it has a an F at the end because when you read it to yourself it sounds like a V and in your mind you're seeing a V instead of an F some people miss the one on the top because they're only looking at the body of the text and many people missed a little tiny one at the bottom what talked about the in the copyright portion there's actually two F's there so people don't see it but the people who see this the best are kindergarteners who aren't worrying about the content and proofreaders who read it backwards but everybody else sees different different numbers of them but the point though is that when you talk with somebody else even for 30 seconds or a minute who may see this who may see this differently you see a different number of F's and it's the same thing in an organization is that we see the world through our own lenses but if you have some dialogue with somebody from a different part of the organization somebody who sees the world a little bit differently sees the competitive situation differently the customer differently you'll get a richer picture of what reality is and be able to make better decisions and that's the notion of a more boundaryless organization is to be able to have that kind of dialogue much more routinely otherwise everybody is stuck with their own blinders sure you've seen many times people at the top of an organization policy or say we need to do this and people at the bottom of the organization who are working with customers or working on the front lines will question it and say you know why why would they do that it doesn't make any sense well it's people have very different perceptions so that that's the the background behind this so there's there's actually one two three four five six seven and two here so there's nine is the answer okay so what about how many black dots can you see how many can you see that's the question Ron how many can we see or how many are there do you want to go through it well if everybody stares at it for a little while you get hypnotized so Alan this is your opportunity if you just speak in a low voice and very calmly and ask everyone to stare at that then everything you say the rest of the morning will be absorbed by them the point of this is that there are actually no little black balls on this chart it's completely a perceptual illusion and the idea that many times in organizations there are things that we imagine but aren't actually there we attribute motives for example and I'm sure all of you who have been in the IT function know that business people will sometimes say those IT people what are they doing they're just trying to take control or they're just trying to force us to do this but oftentimes they they make those attributions without actually understanding what it is you're trying to do and I'm sure at other times people make attributions of the human resource people or the finance people or the sales people so that's the other part of boundary list is that unless we actually have those dialogues across the boundaries we attribute motives to other parts of the organization or to our customers or partners that aren't actually true and those then become almost rigid in how we perceive each other so that's the point of this little exercise so if you put them together there's some things in organizations that we don't see unless we have discussion and there's some things in organizations that we see but aren't really true so we have to have the dialogue to be able to get to what is actually there that we have to act upon and that gets us to what are the key levers for doing that which is the next chart. Yes so the key levers or levers that we've got it's interesting that the first one is giving people the right information to enable them to to do their job and their function but then providing them with the capability we talk a lot about capabilities now don't we but this is back in 95 the capability to use that information and then the authority to do something so I think one of the examples on uses is that on the Toyota production line people have the authority to stop the line if they see something going wrong rather than everything crashing and then there's the rewards and they've been and they've been and they've been significantly trained to be able to know when they see something what it means and what to do about it so it's not enough to just have the information but they have to have the ability to do something with it and then the authority to actually act upon it without having to ask 10 other people for permission which is what happened in traditional assembly lines and then what about the rewards accountability part then Ron well then you also have to hold people accountable for that that it's not you give them the authority to act you have to reward them for doing it well but also hold them accountable when they do it poorly so it becomes a virtuous cycle of doing it in the right way and taking empowerment being empowered but acting appropriately and and then the flatter organizations the delayed structures so this as part of this this whole being able to become more boundaryless is the the more the more levels of the organization you have it's like I don't know if you remember the child's game of telephone where you whisper something to one person and that person whispers it to the next and whispers to the next and by the time you get through the chain the message is completely distorted well that happens in organizations the more layers and level there are so what one of the ways of improving information flow is to just structure the organization so that there are fewer layers and fewer opportunities from this communication and then lastly you have to have the forums for communication this is what Alan referred to the GE workout was to create forums where you brought people together from different functions different hot parts of the hierarchy sometimes from your customers partners or around the world and really works together on a common problem for anywhere from half a day to a couple of days and just got it solved right there and then by getting all the right people in the room together either physically or virtually yeah and even even recently I've heard some of our members talking about their organizations and talking about the fact that it takes six months to get down from one layer to the next layer and any initiative that they're working on so and traditionally traditionally many organizations sort of do a serial communication of you go to one you go to one function and you talk to them about solving a problem you get their ideas then you go to the next then you go to the next then you go to the next and by the time you've gone to six different places by the time you get it back around to the first the idea has changed again and you have to start all over so the more you can get everybody at the same time either physically or virtually to do it together the more powerful it can be to move more quickly and I think that was one of the things that we learned at GE was the the idea of doing that was was very important for creating more boundaryless kind of mindset so what we were starting to have to deal with was this concept of interoperability a lot of the standards have been around portability and now people wanted interoperability and there were many wonderful discussions where we would talk about some new standards that the vendors were talking about and then the banks would stand up and say we've got billions of dollars of legacy we're not just going to throw that out how do we make it work with what we've got how do we integrate it and there was a lot of talk about interoperability and I don't think there's many examples of successful interoperability of large-scale systems we've done a few one one example was with the management systems like HP OpenView and CA Unicenter and things like that not talking to each other we spent years trying to get them together to have a spec that would make them interoperate and there was no way you could do it where we did succeed was with something like LDAP which was a lightweight thing but it took a lot of vendors bringing kit together to test against their other and have these plug-fest plug-a-thons whatever's to actually bring things together and then to codify that as a spec was difficult the way we got around the management systems one was actually an open-source project called own peccasus where actually code was the solution to act as a almost an isolation layer as a translation pipe things like that the interoperability has been a tough ask to do in many ways not just because you can't have a single spec but not many vendors want their products turned into commodities and you don't want them all the same they want to differentiate and every time they differentiate it doesn't work so that was a big challenge for that was coming along and it was part of the challenges around what caused the merge of this organization discussions in 95 96 very unhappy customer side members and around the same time a bit earlier maybe in 93 4 the customer side members predominantly in the UK to start with it was people at the Central Communications Telecommunications Agency the NHS Lloyds banker seems to remember coming together and saying if we're going to make sense of the integration that we need to do if we need to make sense of the large scale of organization we need standards for how to architect them and there was a bit of pushback certainly by the vendors at that time that said well you can't have standards for our standard architectures that doesn't make any sense but also you know we were trying to deal with how we how we please them and that was part of the challenge to the organization that this was really what they needed and in fact the CCTA put up 50,000 pounds to develop a proof of concept but when we looked at that proof of concept to actually flesh it out to anything significant was going to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time so where we went I'll ask Mike Lambert to comment on that because Mike you actually ran these workshops didn't you yeah we started the original demand was for the single definitive open systems architecture we realized very quickly the companies were different and there was no such thing so we rapidly came to the conclusion that what we needed was a framework something that was foundational that people could build on the open group way has always been to try to find a starting point rather than a blank sheet of paper so what we did we got a group of people together for a week in Mountain View and at the beginning of the week we built a decision table so what an earth is an architecture framework how would we recognize one if we saw it in particular what an earth is an open systems architecture framework we then started to apply that for that excuse me we had a beauty parade advocates of different open systems architecture frameworks paraded their wares we got them to strip off so that we could see the insights we scored them and at the end of the day we found this thing called taff him from the US Department of Defense we didn't believe it we thought something designed for an organization that sets out to kill people cannot possibly be the right thing for the commercial world however we redid the decision matrix if you don't know like the result you redo it came out the same result then we investigated what were we trying to do we were trying to find a find something that enabled people to make maximum use of standard components building blocks what was tough in design to do it was designed to transform the Department of Defense from a not invented here organization to one which maximized the use of standard building blocks the great fit we chose tough in we had to do a little bit of work on it but one of the most important things was that tough in brought in the first method and what we've got now is recognizably similar to what you will see if you go back to the archive of the taff him document it was a really important decision the US Department of Defense at that said our jobs not doing architecture standards open group here is tough in they handed over the the rights to it and we would we did everything that we were able to do and it was the basis for the whole of the toga program over 25 years thank you those of you who've been to our meetings before you would have seen dawn my rex present dawn is now deputy director of security at the CIA she was at that time the CTO at this of the Defense Information Systems Agency and it was through her work that taff him was donated to the open group and the first version of toga f came out in they donated in 94 the first version came out in 95 so 20 years ago and then if we go to 2001 by that time we're up to toga version 7 we managed an iteration every year but it wasn't really until toga f8 came along with the business architecture that it really took off version 3 the single unit specification and we were starting to measure or we've been measuring procurements that specified unit's brand where where this information is public and that was over 25 billion at that point it got it to 56 billion before we stopped counting so the next the next event trying to deal with this interoperability question we really sort of challenged us to want to know if our members could do and how we could influence them to do things and Patty Donovan our VP our CC chief marketing officer pulled together a group of people in the transportation industry that was Boeing Airbus and others they told us to say that and we had a meeting in Chicago to understand what interoperability was now one of the standards within the standard this toga is called business scenarios and I'll get the author of that to talk to us a little bit in a minute but we used the business scenario method quite effectively as a as a basis a lot of homework was done to actually draw out the discussion and we wanted to understand what they meant by interoperability and we got halfway through the morning I think and they they pulled us up and said interoperability is just a technical term our problem is access to integrated information the information is important not the interoperability and in fact Boeing donated this slide that many of you may have seen before which explains their situation it explains boundless as well so Boeing like many other organizations have been going through their own version of the boundaries organization and once upon a time they would go from bottom left to top right they will go through buying parts designing and manufacturing and airplane and then thinking about selling it and it was very much an end-to-end process process and so the the legal folk got involved with selling a little but not too much and everyone was in their own silo in their own stove pipe and what they've been doing over the years in order to compete with Airbus and others was to try and get people working cross-functionally so they could speed up the production of the airplanes and so they had to have legal working along selling they had to have sales feeding back into requirements into procurement and so on they had to get these people working cross-functionally they built these Tiger teams and so on but that what they explained to us on this day back then in 2001 was we've got people working together but they're not being effective because although we're getting them out of those silos all of the applications that they have were built for those silos without any concept that they'd ever need to talk to other applications and I guess most of us older ones can remember putting those applications in and not thinking good good they've got to they've got to pass information to other parts of the organization it never never crossed our minds back then and the problem in Boeing's case was exacerbated because not only were all those applications conceived differently we we just worried about what the input was the process in the output but they also had to integrate with their business partners and even then back then in 2001 I asked Boeing how many applications you running and how many business partners if you integrated your infrastructure with and they went away for a couple of days and they came back and they said we don't actually know how many applications we're running but we can tell you we've integrated our infrastructure with more than a thousand business partners and I did the same sort of question at GE and I asked the CIO there and and she was concerned that at any one time there was something like 500,000 people inside their infrastructure that weren't their employees and she wasn't sure if they were just making off with her infrastructure so that was that really captured the problem for us and we moved on from there through the members and Terry led do you want to talk about how we went from I'll talk a little bit about that and then how we went through to well I let me start with as Mike said we had Togaf it started with a collaborative group and a lot of contributions from a lot of people that gave us an architecture development method in I think Togaf 8 we brought in the business scenario method which was my contribution to Togaf and I think some brilliant minds back on back on hey why don't we use our own architecture development method within our problem space and that is why we had this business scenario meeting that Alan referred to and we followed that up with a number of other sessions with members of the open group customer side primarily what that ended up doing was number one bringing different views of the problem and gave us a bigger picture of the problem and it also led to the realization that it wasn't really about interoperability interoperability may help sell solve a problem but it's not the problem the problem was getting access to the right information at the right time and getting that to support no kidding business problems and to actually achieve no kidding business outcomes so it was a great process of taking well the the exercise where you're looking and finding black dots the whole process of getting people in the room and having them talk together as opposed to assuming the views of other folk whether they're management folk or technical folk was was very key so it's about it thank you and this was done in the year that Wikipedia was launched for the first time more boundless information or use this information whichever way you put it so that's that's the vision that we had which is boundless information flow and the the we we got from the need for access to integrated information or an integrated information infrastructure which is what the customer side said and then the vendor said well actually that's our job and and they were struggling over it and I was enamored with the boundaries organization at the time so that's how we got to boundaryless information flow but we also wanted to make sure that security was in there it didn't mean there was no security and it also meant reliable and timely so the right information gets the right people on a need to know or authorized in a reliable and timely manner and that comes out in the survey later so the next question is you know to what extent is the job done do we need need to focus on it and and where are we going so on on this slide we've got a number of things and Ron feel free to jump in so the the first one the global economy is around organizations that once upon a time if you were a global organization you'll send people from your home base to a different country to work as expats and so on and now it's much more of being present in in that country matrices we've always had matrices matrix structures the health care was an it was an old example where people had to report both to the the the health professionals as well as to the people running the organization but now I've spoken to people in some companies like IBM where individuals would have 12 different people to report to in their matrix so you know it's a much more complex world one of the great examples I I saw many years ago and it's not a current example Gordon Moore the founder of Intel and the Moore's law he was asked one day by a new person about you know can I see the organization chart and he said I well we don't have an organization chart in Intel he walked over to a whiteboard he put a cross on the board and then he put a cross around it and he said that's you they're the people that you need to work with and that's all you need to know right that's our organization chart you'll see up there you'll probably recognize what we call it in platform 3.0 which is the convergence of social mobile cloud big data internet of things so the internet of everything internet of things and big data is is up there as people are capturing every piece of information the mobile that bring your own device we've got all of those going on the social media as people access things and cloud computing and when we talk about the ability to scale up in cloud and all of those have got a relevance the millennials are much quoted at the moment but it's a it's a generation thing but there are there are products of what we've created over the years so you can talk about millennials having a different expectations but it's because of the the climate and the culture that we produce and then the sustainability part and the need for startup not only of new organizations but within existing organizations so this is where organization whole industries are changing and some of the traditional barriers to entry are going so yeah back 20 years ago Amazon and eBay came along we get our news and information differently Facebook and Twitter 20 years ago we probably believed everything the BBC told us didn't we CNN that's really only for hotel rooms when I'm abroad right I can only take that in small doses on the transportation side Uber Uber they came along in 2012 so they've only been around three years it's quite amazing lift is a peer-to-peer car sharing taxi type service kayak is a search engine that searches hotel and a flight like Expedia and Trafalgar and all of those kind of things and Tesla cars of course Tesla the first car came out 2008 so that's not too long on the health set healthcare side none of those are particularly young but through acquisition and growth and so on they've come through along the on the music and entertainment we just changed the way people view things in the US in the past Nielsen would measure how many people watched a program through the overnight ratings and that's just not possible anymore because people don't watch things like that they watch it when they want to time shift download from Netflix music through Pandora or Spotify using Apple TV all of those things have kind of changed over the years you know it's it's quite amazing that YouTube came along in 2005 so that's not that old the way things are changing you know no one's safe safe at all we know what happened when Amazon came along now with Tesla that they're completely turning the motor vehicle industry upside down I I'd be very surprised if they got accused of falsifying their emissions could happen no Amazon have suddenly become an IT vendor of some note certainly certainly of some volume now in areas like the Department of Defense as well and you've got an app developer you know a very young one controlling more taxes and disrupting that industry significantly and the customer journey you know something we worry about the customer journey because it's always been there and always you start with someone being aware of your product to service finding something out about it depart deciding to buy it use it pay for it and and the the end product that you want is that they'll recommend it so many years ago I learned that the purpose of advertising for BMW was not to sell BMW cars to new BMW owners it was to reinforce to existing owners what a great car they had so that they would be more likely to recommend them to their friends and I know very few BMW owners that haven't bought a BMW that wasn't influenced by someone else saying how great it was and that's that goes for a lot of a lot of things like that but now it's much more sophisticated than that and we have to be aware of all of the things on Facebook TripAdvisor top table so you know you become aware of it through maybe Facebook or you become aware of it through through the web or you might look at TripAdvisor to see if it's got a good rating and how many people have rated it we do that all the time now so in this case a restaurant they've got to be very conscious of what those ratings are and make sure that it fits with their image it's no good everyone trying to be the same kind of restaurant one of the analogies I like a lot especially if you're trying to change an organization it depends on who you've got in your organization right so if you if you've got a restaurant and you want to get more customers and you want to change the ambience you want to change the menu it's not going to work if your normal customers are Hell's Angels it just it's not going to change a lot there's the textings SMS you'd order it through top table book the book it through top table pay it through PayPal and then rate it afterwards this is actually part that part of some work we're doing with TM forum but also it's part of the new workgroup within the platform 3.0 forum which is the digital business strategy and customer experience so if you take a look at what they're doing they've got a lot of these examples of testing out what those customer experiences are and we've got the disruption curves so you can see in the blue the things that we're talking about obviously enabled by the internet to start with but then you've got social mobile cloud data internet of things coming down into the innovation accelerators the green parts through the 3d printing renewable energy internet things and so on and then coming up to some potential disruptive scenarios so here's a poll Martin did you want to take over from there I need to do that do I this is just works I'm amazed wonderful okay so back to the voting machines not a trick this time this is just a survey okay given the changes of the past 20 years particularly the ability to communicate move information across the world so much more effectively to what extent do you think people want to be able to collaborate even more effectively across organizational boundaries so more effectively do they want to do you think they have a strong desire they'd be okay if it happens or they're really not that interested one two or three real simple oh we got time I love that Wow okay finish voting what's the result how about that so you can't see this wrong but 72% have got a strong desire to be able to collaborate more effectively 25% will be okay if it happens and 4% we think that 4% of the world wouldn't care that much cool what's the next one okay to what extent do you think our organizations are already boundless boundless so one we're already there two we're partly there and three we've got a long way to go okay finish voting what's the result so 4% are already there a third are partly there and two-thirds have got a long way to go cool next okay to what extent do you think becoming more boundless is a cultural social issue or a technology issue is it mostly cultural social is it a mix of both or is it mostly technological it's a big word for a Tuesday morning okay what's the result it's a mix of both okay the techies you're off the hook it's not your fault okay 45% is mostly cultural social social and 55% is a mix of cultural social and technological okay to what extent do you think information flow enables the kind of collaboration across boundaries that people want definitely enables it can help or it doesn't make much difference there you go 53% it definitely helps 43% it can help and 4% it doesn't make much difference that's a relief it could have been worse couldn't it all right but how we doing is that it okay so Ron I've come to the the one that says our view despite the progress learning how to be boundless is even more critical today do you want to cover that one sure but let me just make a first comment on the on the polling which is fascinating results which is a very strong desire or people say that there's a strong desire to have more collaboration across boundaries but also feeling very strongly that we have a long way to go we're not there yet so and I think that that matches what what we've been seeing you know over 20 years lots of progress with with new technology but the social structures and the way organizations are actually run hasn't caught up yet and I think that that's sort of the purpose of this next couple of slides is our view is that despite all the technical progress I mean we have tools now that we just even couldn't dream about 20 years ago I mean not only the rise of the the internet and texting and social media and and smartphones and mobility and the cloud and everything else but just we still that are more boundary list we still need speed and scale and this is one of the things I think we've learned over the 20 years is that it's not going from scale to speed but we need both you need organizations that do have critical mass and resources but can operate with the nimbleness of a small company and we're seeing the companies that are probably most affect larger companies like like with nimbleness and speed and the possibility of integrating their different specialties has been has been very powerful and having real innovation while not getting out of control I think the recent example in the auto industry with with the the emissions controls was a this is not not not the right kind of control but innovation happening probably at levels where it shouldn't happen without control I think the idea is that you need both innovation and control and then to have the flexibility with world clarity to be able for people to organization and be able to do what's needed and have more of the sort of mentality of a startup of let's just jump in and and let's get things done so I think this is the these are some of the still social and cultural issues and organizations that still need to be addressed you just to the I don't think I'll put up the next slide now well we thought the the other they thought before we go to the next slide I've just got a little that radio clip to play and then we'll go through so the radio yes the radio clip this was from the BBC Radio 2 news last Wednesday and they're talking about the police service and some mistakes that they made and the root causes of those mistakes the Chief Constable of West Mercia Police David Shaw has admitted that his force seriously let down the family of a teenager who was murdered in Shropshire two years ago a serious case review into the death of Georgia Williams has highlighted a series of mistakes made by different agencies who had contact with her killer Jamie Reynolds the Vice President of the Police Superintendent's Association Chief Superintendent Gavin Thomas says the case highlights a recurring problem there were clearly mistakes made I West Mercia and agencies but to my view there's a common trait within serious case of yours and that common trait is the inability of various agencies to exchange information in a timely and efficient manner getting the information the right information to the right professional at the right time and I didn't pay him to say that so yeah going to the next slide then Ron well I think the point of this slide is that all of this that we're talking about in terms of creating a more boundaryless organization and mindsets and ways of working is not just within an organization but it's on a more global scale sort of take it up a level it's how do we connect the systems and information flows not just within a company but across companies if you go back a hundred years ago the Ford Motor Company was a vertically integrated from having their own their own minds and having their own manufacturing and having their own sales and assembly etc so they didn't need any other partners now there's no such thing as a vertically integrated company across an industry we have ecosystems of companies that that provide services to customers so you need to connect all the systems across company with geographies it's not just geographies within a company but it's geographies with partners because we almost all things to partners in different parts of the world who can do things most effectively with the least amount of expense and the greatest amount of skill as Alan talked about before the boundaries of industries are changing and that's because there's this notion of companies have different capabilities and if you can find solutions to customer problems by combining those capabilities and then there are there are global problems like terror security the environment sustainability that require companies teaming up and whole industries teaming up and governments teaming up and and other governmental and non-governmental institutions all collaborating to be able to address these issues and doing all that while maintaining some amount of global stability while still having all the disruptive innovation going on so this means information flows and boundary was thinking on a global scale that has never occurred before so I think the the sociological needs of boundary listeners at least in our view are going to be even greater over the next couple of decades than they ever have been before so looking at it from an open group point of view we know about the nexus of forces we know about the open platform we know that internal customers are using their own devices they're bringing their own devices managers of our own cloud services there's so much more pressure on getting the outside coming into the organization using the big data everything increasingly connected all of these things are accelerating but I was reminded by animal Holland of Melvin Conway and his law which it says that basically you are constrained by your organization design you're constrained by your ecosystem you're constrained by that and all of your thinking however smart you are is constrained by the way in which you communicate and how you you communicate within your organization and with your ecosystem so where where we're going with standards and this is this is the great thing for me because I can see that we're now moving ahead of where the technology is going and there's a couple of things so we've got this backbone now pretty firmly entrenched of enterprise architecture that's very well adopted and there's a lot of work going on security forum and around risk and vulnerability management real-time embedded systems looking at high assurance but in reality there's there's two big things going on right now one is from the inside out going to outside in and making that move of organizations and the other is going from IT managing the business to managing the business of IT and we talk about that a little later so here we've got open platform 3.0 an IT for IT and on the security side we've got our open-risk taxonomy and open fare so the inside-out approach so originally what we were looking at is where you know work is assigned to people and it's done in a consistent consistent manner sources they know where they're getting their information the recipients of the information are closed and most of the communication is email or phone or whatever and we're going to a situation where everyone has to respond to real-time events and get information from multiple sources and it's being done in a different way through email social mobile and everything else right I wanted to use a comparison here so this I took from a journal a respected journal back in 1995 talking about the current practice of gate assignments and the fact that every night at 6 p.m. the airlines would file their gate us their arrival times and they would be assigned gates and that wasn't working so in 1995 they decided that they were going to build a model and that model was going to have these parameters by arrival schedule and so on so they they built this wonderful model and you can see that there you know at the top they're looking at the gate characteristic gate characteristics they're looking at the arrival departure characteristics and then the gate assignments arrival type and they they had to assign a gate depending on how many passengers there were how full the plane was how big it was what the elapsed time to clean it was and service it was and all those things and it still didn't work if you get to 2010 you get this kind of scenario it says imagine a scenario where as the aircraft makes his final approach for landing the gates been allocated is no longer available but we've all been there we've sat on runways or we've sat waiting for delayed planes a new gate is assigned and the problem of course is that the people that were going to wave the fly in the people that were going to clean the plate they're all in the wrong gate right so even if you get to the gate get the plane to the gate it doesn't work everyone's in the wrong places a lot of communication is done by voice by telephone and paper and the result is you know people getting to the wrong gate getting their late late departure and extra grant and that the planes had to the airlines had to build in quite a big buffer time to allow for all of this and that meant that they couldn't utilize their planes as effectively as they could if they could turn them around more quickly well today that's much more possible and we don't experience many of the same delays well apart from Ryan air and easy jet but we don't experience many of the same delays as we did we very often know from flight tracker more you know ahead of some of the the staff at the airline when the plane is going to arrive what gate it's going to be at and we're getting the right information at the right time on any device we want and the airport operation staff are getting that same information on any device and it's adapting to that that is what's making a huge difference and the result of course is happy people but as well as that you got these faster turnaround times it's more efficient the planes can be utilized better you don't need that buffer time you don't have the problems with passengers you don't have those delays and departures so huge strides coming through this last 20 years in the way these things are done and a lot of that is coming together with this convergence around what we call open platform 3.0 and this is based on these building blocks and these architectural patterns and as I said earlier you know you we we've got a new snapshot of open platform 3.0 out this week the work group around the digital business experience digital business digital business strategy and customer experience that's it digital digital business strategy and customer experience work group producing a lot of information there and then IT to manage the business moving from that to managing the business of IT I'm not going to talk a lot about that because we're going to be talking about that after the coffee break but here again we're talking about reducing redundancy boundaries latency moving towards value chains and reference architectures I want to whip through the results of the survey we we had 250 respondents to the survey 184 of those were vendors and 190 of them had more than 5,000 employees now these were the this was an analysis that I did of the verbal response we got 250 sort of open question responses and that took a while so you can see that the largest part of the screen is devoted to the people that have a positive their organization believes that boundless information flow is a positive thing 20% think of a kind of uncertain and 15% a negative and out of that if you look at the negative 40% of the negative responses are just saying there's too many silos in this organization 30% are saying boundless information flows just an impossible dream and there's a few quotes to follow that up of the neutral people 70% were just no comment others were it's important but not happening which is what we saw here and it's an unknown concept in our organization on the positive people the those that said boundless information flow is positive in their organization they balanced it with saying yeah but it's making sure that we got access to the information that the right people have got access to the right information at the right time that it is on a need to know or somehow secure depending on level or roll or whatever and that the information has some business value so you have to have the access to the information at the right time and it's got some business it's got some value that you can do something with over two thirds thought it was positive I think we've covered that it's a lovely quotes at the top right is the core of our project success when we apply the open group principles models practice we get the right information at the right time there was a lot of quotes about the right information at the right time just like the policeman it means business agility and data driven the ability to collaborate it's when information flows seamlessly we have a secure environment where all staff can see all information subject to levels of confidentiality need to know there was some some other ones that I liked top right it's like a data unicorn some people believe it exists but no one can point at it and tell you they've seen it that's that's kind of fun or what is your organization think about boundaries information flow they think it's cloud computing or the other one this is kind of interesting if you're talking about global organizations and people that are doing agile or dev ops there are some people of the opinion that if you're bringing in agile or dev ops and you can't be there you're excluded from the process and therefore you don't have access to knowing how the things developing so you don't get the information few other parts only a quarter think they get the right information at the right time about 40% think their colleagues see different information at different times depending on different level function and business slightly better 33% of participants think their colleagues in other locations see different information and only 16% of participants believe customers suppliers and business partners have access to the same information at the same time all good fun this one's kind of fun you've got the top one and the third one managers get real time information wherever they are or get real time information after defined reporting periods wherever wherever they are so the blue and the white kind of go together and the other two depend on certain being in the right place this one splits up 50% so it controls and manages everything on the right hand side on the left hand side it provides the environment and helps the organization and consult we're gonna have a few table questions think I'm running a bit low on time but we'll we'll come back to those if we need to we've got questions okay we come back to those but they're very mind those those kind of questions while we're thinking about this that's kind of wrap up here is that over the past 20 years the pace of change has continued to accelerate and it always will that's just the nature of information and education the need to think and act in a boundless way is critical with necessary attention to security time and as relevance and information value the need to focus on outside in is even more critical as companies function in a more globally locally interconnected ecosystem and the need to integrate IT and technology changes the social structure of organizations and that's even more critical as we create cultures that can embrace that more rapid change so in this context standards that now leading a lot of things rather than just trailing you all as members have this opportunity to influence the changes that are going to happen over the next decade and lead things and that's the mission of the open group boundless information flow and hopefully you'll find this quite exciting as we go forward so Steve you're gonna do the questions yeah please give a big round of applause for that that presentation we fantastic job against some difficulties challenges one thing before we start the questions those of you who haven't been following the conference Twitter feed hashtag OGEDI has been the number nine trending hashtag in the UK for the past two hours so well done for everyone who's tweeting yeah yeah well done well done so Ron do we do we have you do we still have you yes yes I'm still here excellent okay well if I could start with a question for you last month you had an article published in the Harvard Business Review that was called something along the lines of forgive me if I get it don't get it exactly right but something on the lines of Jack Welch's approach to breaking up silos still works can you say a little bit more about the what that was about and the basis for that that follow-up article I think the main point is similar to what we've been talking about here's been 20 years ago when when Welch was talking about the breaking down silos we we didn't have the tools we have now to be able to share information so if we wanted to get somebody from a different function they had to call them on the phone or send over a fax which the time etc and now we we have the the opportunity to have this instantaneous information flow between different different functions but it's still not working and I think this has been confirmed by some of the the polling questions we just did is many of you saying that it's that we're not there yet we haven't created this boundaryless organization so we still have to work hard on the culture of organizations to be able to allow that and facilitate it but the problem is that some of the technology has created so much intensity and time use that even though we have the intention of sharing information we almost don't have the time to have the dialogue and discussion so I don't know how many of you in the audience feel but many of the people I work with it's we're sort of on on call 24 7 now we never get a break and then to think that in addition to that we have to intentionally get other people together to have discussions of things is just really hard so I think that's that the the challenge I was trying to talk about in that article is that even though we have all the tools the in some ways the tools have made it more difficult because they've overwhelmed us with the with the time it takes to keep up with everything okay thank you so I hope that answers your question Steve okay yes he does run thank you thank you so we've got a number of questions coming from the from the audience here so not not specifically addressed to it to either of you but first one something that people process and technology are needed to implement change to realise the boundaryless organization what is the most important role for people for processes and for technology so that might be a tough one yeah what's the most important role it's all of the above yeah I think as Jack well said that it comes down to the people primarily and it's about the approach it's about the attitude of mind and enabling others to have information that's going to empower them enable them to do their job in a given the capability to do something with it and so on it is probably the number one thing technology obviously is the tools you got the right tools to do the job to do any job and in a process you know I'm a big process person so that that's that's always important up most in my mind any comment on that run well fucking just add one of the things I see often is that and maybe it's because of the lack of time that anybody has is that if if most people would just step back for a moment and even just on their whiteboard or with a colleague do a quick process map of what what is the information flow that they're working on where are they where are other people and just just have a basic understanding of it oftentimes we make all kinds of assumptions that other people are getting the information what they're doing with it when they're getting it why they're getting etc. without just taking that it only takes a few minutes to to reflect on what is that what is the process map of the information flow and what can we do to make it better and that that's a combination of it we I think we have the tools to make it better but we often don't reflect on where the leverage points to do that right okay thank you another question from the audience wonderful to see the evolution of boundaries information flow over the years the concept of information has changed in a sense that information today has much more soft values included for example people organize around information as can be seen in Wikipedia Twitter things like that I'd like to hear your vision on this way on this very fundamental change to our concept of information in relation to the boundaryless information flow of it people organizing around information and the soft values of information hmm yeah I don't know about the soft values there's there's good and bad there isn't there there's there's people organizing around it information for bad purposes but it doesn't mean to say they're not getting the information flow right so it is more a case of you know in an organization we're thinking primarily about for organizations functioning rather than going out and choosing a restaurant really for the restaurant it's important that you've got your monitoring TripAdvisor and Twitter and things like that you know United Airlines very responsive if I if I phone them up and ask for something I get very short they don't want to know if you put something out on Twitter that they're there in two hours right and that's the way they've organized that they're their business to actually respond to that social media thing and I think that's that's an important aspect but for any anyone in an organization really if you think of the Goldenmoor organization chart which is your there and there's people around you the question is am I getting the information I need to do what I'm expected to do and then have I got the capability to do what I'm expected to do and am I passing the information to people I should be passing it to who are authorized to get it to enable them to do things well I think this gets us into probably the whole notion of data analytics and big data we have tools to analyze data in different ways now that we didn't have even a few years ago to look at what are the trends and patterns and how to better organize around those trends and patterns and respond to them what one of the challenges of big data is that we tend to do analysis of almost huge amounts of data but it may not be the right data so I think with that sort of outside in thinking if we if we if we have the right data to look at I was working with one company that was for example looking at the commuting patterns using cell phone data that was being tracked to see how what are the ways that people are moving through cities using cell phone data to look at the commuting patterns and that was being very useful to the cities in terms of being able to shift the way that they manage their the streets and the rail lines and the bus lines etc so I think we have an ability to organize around data and respond to data in ways that we didn't have before we have to make sure it's the right data and be creative about that but I think that's a whole new frontier that is going to be very powerful in the coming years okay thank you so we've heard that social and cultural issues are key to achieving boundaries information flow have you seen any examples out there specific cases about how these kinds of issues have been addressed with some success maybe once a year on well I think we see a lot of the example I just gave is is one of somewhat success and being able to look at commuting patterns requires collaboration between cell phone providers city planners city transit people etc and having sort of bias third unbiased third-party facilitators who are managing that data and looking at the patterns and being able to to do that I think that's the beginnings of that kind of trends the the example that Alan talked about with airports is another opportunity for that now some of these are happening in sort of disruptive disruptive ways uber ubers sort of takeover of the of the taxi industry and transportation industry is really a data flow issue of they're able to kind of manage data flow between the providers and they and the people who are looking for service and you know it's not not always perfect as we you know see that that that doesn't always work but it's working far better than anything before so we're starting to see real examples of where boundaryless information flow is having profound impact on the customer experience and the ability of companies to be able to provide or ecosystems being able to provide the right information in the right the right time the right place was still a long way to go I think is your survey in the polling that you just did and that that's quite exciting Alan maybe you have some other examples well almost every one of our conferences is someone talking about how they're using that information and and very often it's couched in an architecture type discussion the talk of type discussion but talking about you know you've got councils talking about how they're gathering data around their what they're doing for their local citizens and how they're doing that and providing information out to that you've got whole governments like the Korean government providing the government services because they're able to provide the right information to the people that need it when they need it and then you've got car manufacturers who are gathering data on everything that moves in their vehicle and using big data to actually find ways of improving their vehicles you've got railroad organizations being able to do predictive maintenance because they've they've got better information coming in that sense it's everywhere no yes I mean I see it on a more micro level to even within organizations like in in hospitals and hospital systems seem much more rapid translation and transfer of information about clinical best practices you know what what drugs work with what conditions what treatments for which kinds of illnesses that that used to be you know every doctor would have their own sort of way of doing things and now we're seeing much more uses of boundary with flows of those information so that patient care in some hospital systems is really being quite positively impacted by being able to quickly learn from what others have done not just in that hospital system but across the world and that's a very very powerful kind of opportunities there well you've also got people diagnosing themselves based on what they've seen online as well and coming to the conclusion that they have everything under the sun wrong with them but but yeah in the right hands it's it's good stuff and you've got all the fit bits yeah the fit bits all the all the where yeah so another question from the audience tools are not the issue with a very big exclamation mark after it the questions that need to be asked are what information do I need to do my job what information do we need to drive the business forward and what information will help me to make a decision the problem is people and organizations don't know how to articulate those questions any guidance on getting those questions articulated well now how I do it it's like you know yeah it is a case of communicating with whoever will listen if you're not getting the information you believe that that's what you need to do your job you need to give people the information that you're not getting the information I need to tell people it's a two-way street it's been like what you said about your chart yeah so yes yeah in the case of that police clip everyone had a lot of information that they weren't sharing other people didn't know that they had the information so they didn't know to ask for it so the fact that there was no way of pooling that information meant that the people that could have used it didn't know it existed and couldn't get it right and therefore that it was no good to them okay Alan you mentioned sorry runs something to add well if I can add I mean I think this is a leadership issue as much as a technology or more than a technology issue if you think of MBAs and people who are trained for leadership positions in companies they're not usually trained in information flow thinking so this is a case where the the business has become an IT every company has become basically an IT company in terms of managing information flows and making sure that the information is the right place the right time for the right decision structures most managers have not been trained in that then it's not taught in in business schools so it's much more sort of intuitive and people making it up as they go along but I think the best managers are asking those kinds of questions which is who needs the information when do they need it how do we get it to them and how do we empower them to be able to do something with that information yeah and the problem it's a great great question yeah and and the problem very often like that example is that there are such deep silos within the organization another question do you think the huge sunk cost of legacy systems is as much of an issue now or a barrier now that as it was 20 years ago that's one for the audience I think we might hear more about that later but you know 90% of your budget is spent on maintaining the legacy isn't it something like that the ability to turn on a dime doesn't exist and and you've got this latency and dependability and so on and so one of the things we hope that we're going to see with it for it is a way of making making some of that less painful but yeah you still got that legacy or heritage whichever way you look at it that you have to deal with and organizations are prisoners of both their legacy but also their culture and their communications yeah systems okay we're getting close to it running on time but last question I would imagine one did to my heart legal constraints can be a barrier to boundaryless information flow how can they be overcome or handled well there's there's two parts of legal constraints once the lawyers what one is real legal constraints and others of people telling you there's legal constraints just because they want to block information all right and we've been there so if there are true legal constraints like data privacy in in Europe then you have to you do have to obey the law right and and you do have to protect information now you can you can integrate information and sanitize it in such a way that you can make be aware of information but you can't pass it to third parties necessarily but within within an organization if you're within say the police force if they're joined up they can pass information around because it's the same organization they're not passing it to third parties if they're different organizations and West Merseye police is a completely different organization to the Metropolitan Police then there may be a constraint on whether they can pass the information around and that's a problem for the politicians right now if I could jump in there Steve many years ago at GE there was an example in the GE nuclear business where they got together and looked at all kinds of things that were constraining their ability to do business and the people in the room said well we can't do this because I mean we're highly regulated the lawyers won't let us do this the regulatory commission won't let us do this and they went through all these reasons why they couldn't do anything and when they actually sorted it through they said well look what are all the things you can't do they found that many of those were things that their interpretations of what the legal constraints were and the regulatory constraints but they wasn't actually the legal and regulatory constraints and they found that about 80 percent of it had been self-generated so what happens in organizations is oftentimes you it's easy to blame the lawyers or blame the legal constraints or blame the regulators or say that's a convenient way to say we won't do anything but oftentimes when you dig beneath it you know we we we interpret those in ways that that leave us little room for discussion but if you really talk about them oftentimes there's much more flexibility than than we think there is we see it often in merger integration where you know we say we can't do anything because the lawyers you know we can't we can't share anything those privacy but if you actually talk about it and ask through there's an awful lot that could be done even in the constraints of the of the legal system so again there I would just encourage the open questioning of those constraints as opposed to just accepting them it wrote yeah okay thank you there was a comment it was just for information really in July 2016 the European Union will be announcing the introduction of a new data protection law and large organizations will have two years to comply should they fail to comply then they could be fined up to 10% of their revenue yeah yeah the EU likes the 10% of revenue thing doesn't it and I think it's going to get interesting that you know the recent kind of final nail in the coffin for safe harbor and on data protection is going to lead to some really interesting situations in the next few months I think so so that that's all the questions we have we're pretty much bang on time so once again I like to thank everyone for their thank you all for voting thank you all for the contributions and the questions and mostly thanks to Alan and Ron for the contribution and for being up so early in the morning run in Connecticut thank you very much so my pleasure sorry I couldn't be there in person I'd love to have a scotch with everybody at some point yeah hope you can enjoy it without me yeah we'll have one for you Ron absolutely thank thank you thank you for everything leading up to this and including it thank you very much thank you