Your IT department should behave like a jellyfish, says Gartner IT organisations that want to thrive in plague-time need to model themselves on jellyfish, says analyst firm Gartner. The metaphor was offered today in the keynote of the virtual Asia-Pacific Gartner Symposium, which thanks to a certain virus will this year precede the event’s EMEA incarnation. Speakers outlined their belief …
As far as I can tell from the article, this was just a talk about the network organizational structure. I don't know when I first encountered it, I think on some management training course in the early 1990s, so it has been around for at least several decades.
The challenge here is making a pretty tedious subject sound newly relevant and exciting, to the point where it even appears newsworthy. However, it sounds as if the speaker has managed to do this very effectively by evoking a striking analogy.
It predates the nineties by centuries.
Think of any empire in the past, due to the inherent latencies that prevent instant command, all of the disparate parts would need to act semi autonamously for the benefit of the whole.
That would apply to armies in the field or local administration.
A slightly more modern situation isvthat of many shop chains where individual managers were better placed to apply strategies that suited any given shop according to its locale and demographics
Don't do it. Please.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-fix-jellyfish-sting-180963582/
Recommends vinegar to kill the sting, then tweezering away the tentacle, then applying heat to "inactivate" the venom. It seems to me that heat is liable to inactivate the victim as well, so possibly stop short of causing actual burns.
So First of all you need to carry vinegar and tweezers.
Or duct tape perhaps, apply lightly to the tentacle then lift off? I haven't tried this, and a day at the beach with duct tape might mean being asked awkward questions.
I think the analogy you were looking for should therefore be an orchestra rather than a jellyfish.
The rest of their blather talks rather a lot about central brains coordinating and directing things, i.e. the complete opposite of how a jellyfish works. So just the usual attention seeking Gartner nonsense. I'm surprised Gartner haven't bought up all those companies that manufacture digesters for manure that can produce methane, because they're so good at making money from bullshit.
I suppose that would be a bit better than uncoordinated action without a central brain, which is what I've mostly encountered when consulting with organisations larger than a (quite small) critical scale. It was either Bill Hewlett or David Packard (I think Packard) who said "as soon as the organisation reached the scale to require identity badges, the entire culture changed".
Above the scale where individuals can hide in the crowd personal responsibility goes out the door and oversight becomes perfunctory (personified by (Dilbert's Wally). Witness Equifax, where the Chief Security Officer wasn't aware that they didn't have an inventory of their applications.
I don't know what it is about Gartner and the other "trusted advisor" firms. I guarantee this will be making the rounds on LinkedIn, reposted by hundreds of middle managers with lots of hashtags like #itjellyfish and #dontgetstung. And there will be hundreds of comments from similar middle managers, "Oh, what a visionary you are! Can't wait to celebrate your success in operationalizing this!"
Gartner keynotes are like crack for a crack addicted IT middle manager or CIO. They give them all sorts of new things to talk about in strategy sessions, plus give them a scapegoat. They can easily say "but Vendor X was in the Magic Quadrant! I can't be blamed for this dismal implementation failure/cost overrun/shelfware!"
So, a Jellyfish.
They've not adapted in millions of years, and exist in a very beneficial environment. The ones that aren't toxic and destroy everything around have a massive attrition (fail) rate due to critters that can eat them (because they have a brain), but as a group they survive by having a disposable mass of low quality organisms that are entirely interchangeable and undifferentiated.
When a significant change happens (say it gets a bit stormy), a huge quantity can be completely destroyed (washed up on the beach as food for the gulls). But that's apparently not a problem. After all, you can just chuck any tech/team in place of another, can't you. Nat West? Nat West? Anyone? Nat West?
Actually, what they probably should have been saying is that an IT entity should behave like a higher organism, with an autonomous nervous system that tracks and deals with behaviour on its own, but raises exceptions that a higher brain can deal with (and sometimes override).
It's adaptable and effective. Unlike the jellyfish that relies on an endless supply of one of them to work.
As usual, Despair.com has a highly relevant comment on Gartner's approach: https://despair.com/collections/demotivators/products/achievement
Gartner seems to be arguing that parts of an organisation should be able to act on their own initiative, and call on other parts to act in concert whenever necessary, without bothering with an executive decision-making process in an emergency, which tends to slow things down. The 'jellyfish' analogy is, I accept, somewhat cumbersome and was probably for laughs, but the idea of having competent people in positions where they are trusted to function without direction on every matter does seem appealing.* The real problem with incompetent or excessive management is they need to justify their existence by being seen to do things, like hire McKInsey's to tell them how to truly kufc pu the organisation (I've been McKinsey'd, it was not a happy experience).
Of course jellyfish are eaten by sea turtles, so they are not all bad.
*OK, I'm retired, so this is a moot point for me.
Disparate parts acting rapidly to cope with incoming information and situations that they need to flag and deal with? That'd be the "Sympathetic and Parasympathetic nervous systems".
Most animals have them, and they work in conjunction with a brain to provide complex and adaptive behaviour that has let animals colonise every nook and cranny of the planet.
Unlike jellyfish that just hang there and pretty much do not a lot.
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