by Richard Veryard
There are increasing problems with cross-subsidy in many industries, as the once predictable linkages between the loss-making elements and the profitable elements are eroded. This in turn calls into question the integration logic (“North-South”) on which many large firms are (have been) based. To support a relational strategy instead of a positional strategy, such firms must develop a new kind of integration logic (“East-West”).
by Richard Veryard
In his HBS March interview, Andrei Hagiu identifies Wal-Mart as an example of an organization that is transforming from a traditional merchant into a two-sided platform. Let’s look at the (asymmetric) structure of this transformation.
by Richard Veryard In his Confused of Calcutta blog, JP Rangaswami (now CIO of BT’s Services Division) picks up a definition of Enterprise Architecture from Andrew McAfee: “IT that specifies business processes”. JP argues that…
by Philip Boxer
As we develop our understanding of the three asymmetries, it is helpful to associate them with three corresponding forms of economy that their management generates.
Title: An Examination of a Structural Modeling Risk Probe Technique Authors: Anderson, W., Boxer, P., Brownsword, L. Category: Published Publication Year: 2006 Where published: SEI Special Report The integration of demand dynamics into a structural…
Title: Metropolis and SOA Governance Part 2: Taking Governance to the Edge Authors: Philip Boxer & Richard Veryard Category: Published Where published: The Architecture Journal 6 Discover the challenges faced by asymmetric forms of governance…
by Richard Veryard
There are two interesting aspects of the attempted reforms of healthcare in the UK and elsewhere: the muddled notions of power to the edge embodied by some of the proposals, and the repeated attempts to enact similar reforms over the past thirty years.
by Richard Veryard
Masood Mortazavi uses Transaction Cost Economics to explain the difference between Managing to Contract vs. Managing to Relationship. In this post, I want to link this discussion to the key notion of Asymmetric Demand.
by Bernie Cohen
As we move into a technological era in which socially critical systems are built around large and complex, locally universal ontologies, such as openEHR, the Semantic Web, e-government and Network Centric Warfare, we will need increasingly powerful tools and methods to mediate pragmatic and ontological negotiations among embodied individuals. One such set of tools and methods, built around BRL’s PAN (Projective ANalysis), is currently being deployed within the context of its associated methods of asymmetric design.
Our goal is to be able to meet the challenge of managing the dynamic adaptability of large complex systems-of-systems to evolving and disparate contexts-of-use.
by Philip Boxer North-South dominance works when the environment can be assumed to be symmetrical to North’s assumptions about it. As the variety of actual demands on the organization increase, making this assumption increasingly less…