Storey Gate or the
Cabinet War Rooms provided the idea for Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise.
Storeys
Gate was the heart of a decision making environment, and critical component
of a sense and respond system.
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Author Biography
Mark
Kozak-Holland has over 20 years of systems integration and services
experience gained internationally. Mark helps organizations evaluate how
emerging technologies can impact their business and enhance existing business
processes to the customer. Mark is passionate about history and advocates
that we move through repeating cycles of historical change. Paying attention
to how historical projects and emerging technologies of the past solved
complex problems of the day provides some very valuable insight into how to
solve today’s more challenging business problems. Mark authored his
first book titled “On-line, On-time, On-budget: Titanic lessons for the
e-business executive” as part of a lessons from history series with IBM
press. The book explains in layman's terms how to deliver an Internet
project successfully using Titanic as a case study. Mark has completed his
second book in the series "Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise."
Mark regularly writes
white papers, contributes articles to magazines and speaks at events.
Background to Series
Taken from an
interview with Hugh Woodward on 7th July, 2005.
Q: History,
information technology, business strategy, and project management. That is
not a typical combination of interests. How did you develop such broad
expertise?
A: Yes it is
unusual. I’ve always been passionate about history and interested in
emerging technology. When James Burke created his “Connections
series” in the late seventies it was just inspirational. He started in
the past and weaved the connections together to create the eight inventions
that ushered in the modern technological age: the computer, the production
line, telecommunications, the airplane, the atomic bomb, plastics, the guided
rocket, and television. Here was a fresh approach that brought these two
subjects together and made them relevant. Not only did it highlight how we
got here, but provided insight as to where we were going and how technology
could shape the future. I always thought about how effective this was as an
educational tool. Later in my career I realized that using historical
analogies was a powerful and non-threatening way to get a point across.
Q: Why Winston Churchill? I presume an adaptive strategy is necessary to
winning any military conflict. .
A: I'd been in London, conducting a
business discovery for a Business Intelligence project -- using information
to leapfrog the competition. I'm keen on learning from history so I visited
Story's Gate, Churchill's underground bunker, where he ran the war from 1940
to 1945. It was re-opened as a museum, after having been closed down and
preserved intact from the day it closed.
When I walked into Churchill's bunker, an idea I had [for a second book in
series titled Lessons from History] fell into place quickly. Churchill's
Adaptive Enterprise
will be published in July.
Leading up to the Second World War, Winston Churchill was swept into power in
May 1940. He came in as a last cast of the dice, during a period of
calamitous change. In the UK,
you had Dunkirk--an
absolute disaster, where they managed to save the army but lost most of the
equipment. So Churchill comes into power and is facing this formidable enemy
that has conquered most of Europe.
The UK
was not prepared for war, and he had to react to a calamitous situation and
turn it around. Churchill's Adaptive Enterprise is about how he faced change
and, as a leader, was able to grapple with his organization and literally, in
a month, turn the UK
from a civilian economy into a military economy.
He was able to create a sense and respond system, which culminated in the Battle of Britain. It was won through
pilots, with a whole system behind them. The pilots were put into position
through the clever use of intelligence and information. This is where the
parallels come in. In today's world, companies may not be in a dire position
but they need to be able to react to and to offset circumstances that impact
them. They need to be able to use emerging technologies to do that.
The book weaves
the two stories together to compare how Churchill set up his organization to
defeat the invasion using information technology and the emerging
technologies of his time, and how companies today need to be able to offset
challenges by creating what we call an Adaptive Enterprise using information
technologies.
Being there and seeing the bunker exactly as Churchill had left it sixty
years ago brought home how little things had changed. Here's Winston
Churchill in 1940, dealing with the same kind of problems organizations are
dealing with today. He was trying to leverage information to better
understand what was happening and managing resources to defeat the enemy. The
more I looked into it, the more the parallels became very clear.
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