Burn after reading
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a big fan of the Coen brothers comedy films and I’ve seen their latest installment of the genre, the name I borrowed for this post. Since I know even less about the business of cinematography than about the business of politics, I figure that I am uniquely qualified to draw some obvious parallels between the storyline of this movie and our current, politically induced, economic crisis. Essentially it is a story of a woman who has a burning desire for cosmetic surgery that she does not particularly need and definitely cannot afford. However through the carelessness of a caretaker (the law secretary who loses the info in the gym), unyielding power of entitlement and total disregard of personal responsibility as a citizen or a human being, she gets her surgery. Are you following me so far? The CIA gets involved, people get killed, good times! But at the end the the CIA chief, after authorizing the expense for the plastic surgery, asks a pivotal question - “So, what have we learned?” The answer is “Nothing. We didn’t know what it was all about in the first place”.
That brings me to our current economic situation - since nobody accepted responsibility for any single policy or action, which led to this crisis, I have to conclude that we have learned nothing except more distrust in people who try to scare us to do “something”.
You may ask why did I completely abandon the topic of this blog, which was focused (I hope) on economics and management of IT as a leverage for organizational transformation initiatives. Let me assure you that I have not done such a thing, I just decided to examine the current political situation in order to learn and understand better the challenges of transformation management.
Let’s define for the purpose of this discussion, that the role of management is to optimize available resources to achieve a specific goal. The specific goal could be an expansion of the organization, or survival of the organization during contraction cycles. Either one could trigger an organizational transformation initiative and its success would depend on the execution of IT and the adoption of change of people in the organization. It is very common to separate responsibility for these two parts or even totally disregard the latter part and that’s what causes most breakdowns in attempts to change the way organizations function. However it is also very common to blame technology and IT for the outcome. Therefore when the inevitable question “So, what have we learned?” is posed, the answer is not very conducive to future success.
We have to accept responsibility for our mistakes in order to learn from them.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.