Adaptive Management: Patterns for the E-Business Era

by Jim Highsmith

In the mid-1970s, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, and others at Xerox PARC articulated a vision of distributed personal computing. The PC revolution of the 1980s achieved the "personal" aspect of the vision, while in the 1990s, the Internet phenomenon is completing the "distributed" side. IT managers, swept up in the sheer magnitude and difficulty of the business strategy and technology transformation resulting from this distributed-computing idea, haven't fully considered its impact on their own organizations. The same software technology that has enabled decreasing time to market, catapulted us into the era of e- business, and created intense competitive turbulence also impacts the very essence of what IT organizations do and how they are managed. We, the technologists, extol to executives how the Internet and e-business are going to change the very core of their business, and at the same time we blithely assume the status quo within IT management. The future is not going to work out that way.¹