The Swarm Enterprise

I don't make a point of hawking my employers wares on this blog, I'm really not trying to sell anything here, but I read something pretty interesting on CSC's Leading Edge Forum blog. The entry is talking about the new report "Digital Disruptions". The specific post "The train has left the station" talks about how tech savvy employees are driving new technologies into enterprises.
It got me thinking about the level of power and influence employees now have in their companies and how that has changed over time. The enterprise as we know it probably emerged during the early industrial revolution. I suppose they needed the structure to co-ordinate the efforts of so many people and machines. They turned to the only model they had at the time - the military and so the early enterprises - even up to as late as the 1980's were mostly fairly heirachical.

The next step really sees companies focussing down on somehting they might call their core business, and having suppliers and contractors do the other stuff. These arrangements became optimised by collaboration across the supply chain (sometimes agreed between peers or forced by individual very powerful members in the chain). This is a trend (albeit a simple one) where management structures give up power to suppliers, customers, vendors etc.

Can we make a prediction? I spoke in a previous post about the possiblity of using swarms of automated robots to transform the mining industry - are we moving towards an enterprise model which is just huge collaborations between independant actors? Its a model that could work really well in a knowledge based business, it could be really efficient, and it could be enormously agile.

I love to hear some thoughts.