Who has responsibility for choreographing people, process and technology in a large organization that spends about $20 billion a year on IT? John Garstka discusses the challenges of networking a large organization such as the United States Department of Defense. The DOD has a great deal of technology but an industrial age set of incentives. It is an organization in which nobody owns all of everything. Individuals and groups own individual parts.

In an organization the size of the DOD how do you synchronize innovation? How do you collaborate on decision rights? How do you manage relationships? How do you foster an atmosphere in which the conversation is no longer about the technology but how you share information? Fostering the relationships between all the moving parts, and the incentives they share, is the key to successfully networking a heavily dispersed military where operations are a collective series of independent events. Mr. Garska argues that success is directly related to the amount of focus that is placed on bridging the gap between technology and the cognitive and social domain.