Collaboration & Partnerships in Orbit

My son Alexander showed me the above fascinating four part informal HD video tour of the international space station over the weekend, and it really made me think about the similarities between the enterprise business world and this collaborative environment.

The 15 nation ISS partnership has various connected modules orbiting above you as you read this and sees 15 sunrises and sunsets a day at 17,210 miles per hour...

The ISS appears charmingly cluttered and disorganized and as current 2009 commander US Astronaut Mike Fincke (who speaks Japanese and Russian) floats around on this guided tour between european, Japanese and North American sections I'm struck by how IT department like it is, albeit without gravity. There's no sense of up or down with laptops and equipment on ceilings, walls and floors. Some of these areas feel like different departments in a company with different functional needs.

'Everything in the space station needs to be negotiated - although we're going fast, we're not in a hurry' Mike says at one point over a huge floor storage area of water bags.

This is technology collaboration in a very real sense - there are various docking module areas containing lots of newly arrived cargo - they organize these deliveries to rebuild the space station from the inside with new technologies ( the projected completion date of the current iteration is 2011). A lot of people use the example of not being able to rebuild an aircraft in mid flight as an analogy with retrofitting for example a foundational enterprise CRM system back on this planet, but this is essentially what these astronauts are doing on the ISS.

Getting the space station into orbit required massive strategic and practical planning; like a successful corporation that successfully clears the seed funding runway to achieve financial lift off, this is analogous with what it takes to keep a company running and successful.

Air is like money, cut it off and you've got instant problems; partnerships are critical and so is negotiation and collaboration. No single national entity could pull this off at this point in the earth's history, and the need for high levels of transparency and honesty in order to keep the enterprise safe and fruitful are also similar to today's modern open business methodologies.

While many think of large companies as giant glass fronted tower blocks filled with cubicles, the underlying infrastructure and relationships are a lot more like the international space station: complex layers of technologies meeting the needs of partnerships and collaboration needs that evolve over time.

The ISS is a great metaphor for the modern enterprise - in a constant state of construction internally and flexible enough to support many ongoing projects and needs. The old paradigm of building a rocket to propel a heavy object through space on a time critical mission culminating in an ocean splash down if all goes well seems very web 1.0, to make an IT analogy.

The flexibility and openness of the ISS's modular environment is in comparison very Web 2.0 in its physical characteristics, right down to the informal communication devices in the cramped quarters of each astronaut.