Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve just started a new ‘Orga­ni­za­tional Archi­tec­ture’ group on Slideshare, to explore links to user expe­ri­ence, and ques­tions like these:

• What is orga­ni­za­tional architecture?
• How does orga­ni­za­tional archi­tec­ture relate to user experience?
• What can user expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers bor­row from OA to become more effective?

Join now!

The cul­ture, struc­ture, and work­ings of an orga­ni­za­tion often pose greater chal­lenges for User Expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers than any tech­ni­cal or design ques­tions at hand. If you’d like to know more about the fac­tors behind these sit­u­a­tions, be sure to check out We Tried To Warn You: The Orga­ni­za­tional Archi­tec­ture of Fail­ure, by Peter Jones, just pub­lished by Boxes and Arrows.

Peter is an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant with deep exper­tise in research, prod­uct design, and strat­egy. His talk for the panel on fail­ure at the 2007 IA Sum­mit was insight­ful and in-depth, and this two-part series offers quite a bit more very use­ful mate­r­ial on the roots and warn­ing signs of orga­ni­za­tional fail­ure (by com­par­i­son, con­sider the very brief post I put up on the same sub­ject a few years ago.)
Peter’s is the sec­ond writ­ten fea­ture to come out of the fail­ure panel (my mis­sive on the par­al­lels between entre­pre­neur­ial and soci­etal fail­ure was the first). I’m look­ing for­ward to part two of We Tried To Warn You, as well as addi­tional fea­tures from the remain­ing two pan­elists, Chris­t­ian Crum­lish and Lorelei Brown!
Here’s a snip­pet, to whet your appetite:
How do we even know when an orga­ni­za­tion fails? What are the dif­fer­ences between a major prod­uct fail­ure (involv­ing func­tion or adop­tion) and a busi­ness fail­ure that threat­ens the orga­ni­za­tion? An organizational-level fail­ure is a rec­og­niz­able event, one which typ­i­cally fol­lows a series of antecedent events or deci­sions that led to the large-scale break­down. My work­ing def­i­n­i­tion: When sig­nif­i­cant ini­tia­tives crit­i­cal to busi­ness strat­egy fail to meet their highest-priority stated goals.”

For reg­u­lar read­ers won­der­ing about the recent quiet here, a notice that Boxes and Arrows will shortly pub­lish an arti­cle I’ve been work­ing on for a while in the back­ground, titled, “It Seemed Like the Thing To Do At the Time: The Power of State of Mind”. This is the writ­ten ver­sion of my panel pre­sen­ta­tion Lessons From Fail­ure: Or How IAs Learn to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bombs from the 2007 IA Sum­mit in Las Vegas.
I’ve writ­ten about orga­ni­za­tions and fail­ure — Signs of Cri­sis and Decline In Orga­ni­za­tions — in this blog before (a while ago, but still a pop­u­lar post­ing), and wanted to con­sider the sub­ject on a larger level. With the rapid spread of social soft­ware / social media and the rise of com­plex social dynam­ics in on-line envi­ron­ments, explor­ing fail­ure at the level of an entire soci­ety is timely.
In The Fish­bowl
Failed or fail­ing soci­eties are an excel­lent fish­bowl for observers seek­ing pat­terns related to social media, for two rea­sons. First, the high inten­sity of fail­ure sit­u­a­tions reveals much of what is ordi­nar­ily hid­den in social struc­tures and pat­terns: Impend­ing col­lapse leads peo­ple to dis­pense with care­fully main­tained social con­struc­tions.
One source of this height­ened inten­sity is the greatly increased stakes of soci­etal fail­ure (vs. most other kinds), which often means sud­den and dra­matic dis­rup­tions to basic liv­ing and eco­nomic pat­terns, the decline of cities and urban con­cen­tra­tions, and dra­matic pop­u­la­tion decrease. Another source is the very broad scope of the after­ef­fects; because a fail­ing soci­ety involves an entire cul­ture, the affects are com­pre­hen­sive, touch­ing every­one and every­thing.
Sec­ondly, soci­eties often com­mand sub­stan­tial qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive resources that can help them man­age cri­sis or chal­lenges, thereby avert­ing fail­ure. Smaller, less sophis­ti­cated enti­ties lack the resource base of a com­plex social organ­ism, and con­se­quently can­not put up as much of a fight.
Exam­ples of resources avail­able at the level of a soci­ety include:

• Lead­ers and plan­ners ded­i­cated to focus­ing on the future
• Large amounts of accu­mu­lated knowl­edge and experience
• Sophis­ti­cated struc­tures for deci­sion mak­ing and control
• Mech­a­nisms for main­tain­ing order dur­ing crises
• Col­lec­tive resilience from sur­viv­ing pre­vi­ous challenges
• Sub­stan­tial stores of resources such as food and mate­ri­als, money, land
• Tools, meth­ods, and orga­ni­za­tions pro­vid­ing economies of scale, such as bank­ing and com­merce networks
• Sys­tems for mobi­liz­ing labor for spe­cial purposes
• Con­nec­tions to other soci­eties that could pro­vide assis­tance (or poten­tial rescue)

Despite these mit­i­gat­ing resources, the his­tor­i­cal and arche­o­log­i­cal records over­flow with exam­ples of failed soci­eties. Once we read those records, the ques­tion of how these soci­eties defined them­selves seems to bear directly on quite a few of the out­comes.
I dis­cuss three soci­eties in the arti­cle: Easter Island, Tikopia, and my own small startup com­pany. We have insight into the fate of Easter Island soci­ety thanks to a rich arche­o­log­i­cal record that has been exten­sively stud­ied, and descrip­tions of the Rapa Nui soci­ety in writ­ten records kept by Euro­pean explor­ers vis­it­ing since 1722. Tikopia of course is still a func­tion­ing cul­ture. My startup was a tiny affair that serves as a use­ful foil because it shows all the mis­takes soci­eties make in a com­pressed span of time, and on a scale that’s easy to exam­ine. The Norse colonies in North Amer­ica and Green­land are another good exam­ple, though space con­straints didn’t allow dis­cus­sion of their failed soci­ety in the arti­cle.
Read the arti­cle to see what hap­pens to all three!
Semi Ran­dom Assort­ment of Quo­ta­tions
In the mean­time, enjoy this sam­pling of quo­ta­tions about fail­ure, knowl­edge, and self, from some well-known — and mostly suc­cess­ful! — peo­ple.
“Tech­no­log­i­cal change is like an axe in the hands of a patho­log­i­cal crim­i­nal.” — ALBERT EINSTEIN
“It is not the strongest of the species that sur­vives, nor the most intel­li­gent, but the one most respon­sive to change.” — CHARLES DARWIN
“It is impos­si­ble for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” — EPICTETUS
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” — THOMAS EDISON
“It is on our fail­ures that we base a new and dif­fer­ent and bet­ter suc­cess.” — HAVELOCK ELLIS
“Life is a process of becom­ing, a com­bi­na­tion of states we have to go through. Where peo­ple fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it.” — ANAIS NIN
“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” — RABINDRANATH TAGORE
“Who­ever longs to res­cue quickly both him­self and oth­ers should prac­tice the supreme mys­tery: exchange of self and other.” — SHANTIDEVA
“Fail­ure is instruc­tive. The per­son who really thinks learns quite as much from his fail­ures as from his suc­cesses.” — JOHN DEWEY

For those in the enter­prise IA / UX space, The next fron­tier in IT strat­egy: A McK­in­sey Sur­vey cen­tered on the idea that “…IT strat­egy is matur­ing from a reac­tive to a proac­tive stance“is worth a look.
This nicely par­al­lels a point made about the reac­tive mind­set com­mon to IT in many large orga­ni­za­tions, in dis­cus­sion on the IAI mail­ing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld’s post Infor­ma­tion archi­tects on com­mu­ni­cat­ing to IT man­agers, sum­ma­rizes the orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion in the IAI thread, and is worth read­ing as a com­pan­ion piece.
Lou’s sum­mary of infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and user expe­ri­ence voices in the enter­prise arena is note­wor­thy for includ­ing many exam­ples of strong cor­re­spon­dence between McKinsey’s under­stand­ing of how IT strat­egy will mature (a tra­di­tional man­age­ment con­sult­ing view), and the col­lected IA / UX view­points on address­ing IT lead­er­ship — typ­i­cal buy­ers for enter­prise any­thing — and inno­va­tion.
Dialogs that show con­ver­gence of under­stand­ing like this serve as pos­i­tive signs for the future. At present, a large set of deeply rooted cul­tural assump­tions (at their best inac­cu­rate, usu­ally reduc­tive, some­times even dam­ag­ing) about the roles of IT, busi­ness, and design com­bine with the his­tor­i­cal lega­cies of cor­po­rate struc­tures to need­lessly limit what’s pos­si­ble for User Expe­ri­ence and IA in the enter­prise land­scape. In prac­ti­cal terms, I’m think­ing of those lim­i­ta­tions as bar­ri­ers to the strat­egy table; con­strain­ing who can talk to who, and about which impor­tant top­ics, such as how to spend money, and where the busi­ness should go.
Con­sid­er­ing the gulf that sep­a­rated UX and IT view­points ten — or even five — years ago, this kind of emerg­ing com­mon under­stand­ing is a good sign that the cul­tural obsta­cles to a holis­tic view of the mod­ern enter­prise are wan­ing. We know that a holis­tic view will rely on deep under­stand­ing of the user expe­ri­ence aspects of busi­ness at all lev­els to sup­port inno­va­tion in prod­ucts and ser­vices. I’m hop­ing the rest of the play­ers come to under­stand this soon.
Another good sign is that CIO’s have won a seat at the strat­egy table, after con­sis­tent effort:
Fur­ther evi­dence of IT’s col­lab­o­ra­tive role in shap­ing busi­ness strat­egy is the fact that so many CIOs now have a seat at the table with senior man­age­ment. They report to the CEO in 44 per­cent of all cases; an addi­tional 42 per­cent report to either the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer or the chief finan­cial offi­cer.
Look­ing ahead, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and user expe­ri­ence view­points and prac­ti­tion­ers should work toward a sim­i­lar growth path. We fill a crit­i­cal and miss­ing strate­gic role that other tra­di­tional view­points are not as well posi­tioned to sup­ply.
Quot­ing McK­in­sey again:
IT strat­egy in most com­pa­nies has not yet reached its full poten­tial, which in our expe­ri­ence involves exploit­ing inno­va­tion to drive con­stant improve­ment in the oper­a­tions of a busi­ness and to give it a real advan­tage over com­peti­tors with new prod­ucts and capa­bil­i­ties. Fewer than two-thirds of the sur­vey respon­dents say that tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion shapes their strat­egy. Only 43 per­cent say they are either very or extremely effec­tive at iden­ti­fy­ing areas where IT can add the most value.
User Expe­ri­ence can and should have a lead­ing voice in set­ting the agenda for inno­va­tion, and shap­ing under­stand­ings of where IT and other groups can add the most value in the enter­prise. To this end, I’ll quote Peter Mer­holz (with apolo­gies for not ask­ing in advance)
”…we’ve reached a point where we’ve max­i­mized effi­ciency until we can’t max­i­mize no more, and that in order to real­ize new top-line value, we need to inno­vate… And right now, inno­va­tions are com­ing from engag­ing with the expe­ri­ences peo­ple want to have and sat­is­fy­ing *that*.“
McK­in­sey isn’t mak­ing the con­nec­tion between strate­gic user expe­ri­ence per­spec­tives and inno­va­tion — at least not yet. That’s most likely a con­se­quence of the fact that man­age­ment con­sult­ing firms base their own ways of think­ing, orga­ni­za­tional mod­els, and prod­uct offer­ings (ser­vices, intel­lec­tual prop­erty, etc.) on address­ing buy­ers who are them­selves deeply entrenched in trad­tional cor­po­rate struc­tures and world­views. And in those worlds, every­thing is far from mis­cel­la­neous, as a glance at the cat­e­gory options avail­able demon­strates; your menu here includes Cor­po­rate Finance, Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy, Mar­ket­ing, Oper­a­tions, Strat­egy…
BTW: if you weren’t con­vinced already, this should demon­strate the value of the $40 IAI annual mem­ber­ship fee, or of sim­ply read­ing Bloug, which is free, over pay­ing for sub­scrip­tions to man­age­ment jour­nals

Mark Blu­men­thal, of Pollster.com, recently posted a set of text clouds show­ing the words used by each can­di­date in the Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial debate Thurs­day night. The clouds were gen­er­ated from tran­scripts of the debate, using Daniel Steinbock’s Tag Crowd tool.
Can­di­dates’ Text Clouds

In the screen­shot of Mark’s post­ing, it’s easy to see this is a great exam­ple of a col­lec­tion of text clouds used for com­par­a­tive visu­al­iza­tion and inter­pre­ta­tion. The goal is to enhance under­stand­ing of the mean­ing and con­tent of the candidate’s over­all con­ver­sa­tions dur­ing the debate, an idea I explored briefly last year.
Just a month ago, in a post that iden­ti­fied text clouds as a new and dis­tinct tag cloud vari­ant, I sug­gested:

text clouds may become a gen­er­ally applied tool for man­ag­ing grow­ing infor­ma­tion over­load by using auto­mated syn­the­sis and sum­ma­riza­tion. In the infor­ma­tion sat­u­rated future (or the infor­ma­tion sat­u­rated present), text clouds are the com­mon exec­u­tive sum­mary on steroids

Sup­port­ing the com­par­i­son and inter­pre­ta­tion of polit­i­cal speeches is an inven­tive, timely, and resource­ful appli­ca­tion that could make text clouds a reg­u­lar part of the new per­sonal and pro­fes­sional toolkit for effec­tively han­dling the tor­rents of infor­ma­tion over­whelm­ing peo­ple in impor­tant sit­u­a­tions like vet­ting polit­i­cal can­di­dates.
I espe­cially like the way this use of text clouds helps neatly side­step the dis­heart­en­ing ubiq­uity of the sound­bite, by aggre­gat­ing, dis­till­ing, and sum­ma­riz­ing all the things the can­di­dates said. I sus­pect few — if any — of the cam­paigns real­ize the poten­tial for text clouds, but they def­i­nitely know the detri­men­tal power of sound­bites:

“It’s a mess,” said an exasperated-sounding Mr. Prince, Mr. Edwards’s deputy cam­paign man­ager. “Debates are impor­tant, but in these big mul­ti­can­di­date races they end up not being an exchange of ideas, but just an exchange of sound bites. They have become a dis­trac­tion.“

From Debates Los­ing a Bit of Lus­ter in a Big Field

The value of a col­lec­tion of sound­bites over an insight­ful dia­log is — apolo­gies for the pun — debat­able. But even if a sim­ple exchange of sound­bites is what the new short­ened for­mats of many debates yields us, text clouds may help derive some value and insight from the results. The com­bined decon­struc­tive and recon­struc­tive approach that text clouds employ should make it pos­si­ble to bal­ance the weight of sin­gle remarks of can­di­dates by plac­ing them in a larger and more use­ful con­text.
His­tory Repeats Itself
In the longer term view of the his­tory of our responses to the prob­lems of infor­ma­tion over­load, the appear­ance of text clouds may mark the emer­gence of a new gen­eral puprose tool for visu­al­iz­ing ever greater quan­ti­ties of infor­ma­tion to sup­port some qual­i­ta­tively ben­e­fi­cial end (like pick­ing a good can­di­date for Pres­i­dent, which we sorely need).
The under­ly­ing pat­tern — a con­sis­tent oscil­la­tion between man­ag­ing effec­tively and inef­fec­tively cop­ing, depend­ing on the bal­ance between infor­ma­tion quan­tity and tool qual­ity — remains the same. Yet there is also value in know­ing the cycles that shape our expe­ri­ence of han­dling the infor­ma­tion cru­cial to mak­ing deci­sions, espe­cially deci­sions as impor­tant as who leads the coun­try.
The NY Times tran­script of the debate is avail­able here.

I’m try­ing some­thing new for the 2007 IA sum­mit — a panel! I am one of four pre­sen­ters for a panel titled Lessons from Fail­ure: or How IAs Learn to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bombs. We have a promis­ing set of speak­ers: Chris­t­ian Crum­lish, Peter Jones, Lorelei Brown and myself.
My por­tion of the panel will focus on how states of mind, cul­tural out­looks, and unspo­ken assump­tions about prob­lems and their proper res­o­lu­tion shape responses to fail­ure — on both small and large scales. Our goal is max­i­mum audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion and min­i­mum talk­ing­hea­di­tis, so please don’t be shy about shar­ing exam­ples and join­ing the dis­cus­sion.
Of course, we’re one among many rea­sons to attend. Quite a few things look espe­cially inter­est­ing on this year’s sched­ule, includ­ing sev­eral of the pre-conference ses­sions that touch on rapidly evolv­ing areas of prac­tice such as design­ing for social archi­tec­tures and enter­prise efforts.
Hope to see you in Vegas!

A few months ago I came across a pre­sen­ta­tion titled Orga­ni­za­tions in Cri­sis and Decline, by Ran­dall Dun­ham. After giv­ing exam­ples of orga­ni­za­tions in cri­sis and decline that include Kmart, Gen­eral Motors, United Air­lines, and Michael Jack­son. (inter­est­ing exam­ple of an enter­prise…), Dun­ham goes on to sum­ma­rize typ­i­cal symp­toms of cri­sis, the strate­gic con­se­quences of decline, and 10 behav­iors of unhealthy orga­ni­za­tions.
I came across this while doing some research on how the struc­tures and cul­tures of orga­ni­za­tions influ­ence modes of think­ing, resilience, and deci­sion mak­ing, so this is related to some of my post­ings on enter­prise soft­ware. It might be a while before I have the chance to write up all the ideas, so I’ll share Dunham’s mate­r­ial now.
Why is this of note to IAs? Quite a few Infor­ma­tion archi­tects (prac­ti­tion­ers, not just those with the title…) are actively look­ing for effec­tive tools and modes of under­stand­ing to help frame and man­age enter­prise prob­lems.
Under­stand­ing the signs of decline and cri­sis in orga­ni­za­tions can help infor­ma­tion archi­tects and other change agents under­stand the envi­ron­men­tal con­text of a sit­u­a­tion in the crit­i­cal early stages of set­ting expec­ta­tions and roles, and before it’s “too late”, when every­one at the man­age­ment table has strong opin­ions they must defend. In other words, before mak­ing a leap is into an active project, a plan­ning and bud­get­ing cycle, a strate­gic vision ses­sion, etc.
I see (at least) two very impor­tant aspects of a sit­u­a­tion that Dunham’s warn­ing signs could help iden­tify; how healthy an orga­ni­za­tion is, and what lat­i­tude for activ­ity and change is avail­able. Build­ing on this, these cri­te­ria can help iden­tify sit­u­a­tions to avoid or be wary of. Of course, orga­ni­za­tions in cri­sis and decline can present oppor­tu­ni­ties as well as risks, but some­times the ship is going down no mat­ter how much you try to patch the holes…
For those with­out pow­er­point, I’m going to present some of the mate­r­ial here as text, with acknowl­edg­ment that I’m bor­row­ing directly from Dun­ham, who him­self cred­its this source: Mis­che, M.A. (2001). Ten warn­ing signs of strate­gic Decline. In Strate­gic Renewal: Becom­ing a High-Performance Orga­ni­za­tion (pp. 25–30). Upper Sad­dle River, NJ: Pren­tice Hall.
Typ­i­cal Symp­toms of Crisis/Decline

• Lower earn­ings & revenues
• Increased employee turnover
• Reduced mar­ket presence
• Decrease in cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion & interest
• Increas­ing costs & high struc­tural costs

Strate­gic Con­se­quences of Crisis/Decline

• Lower mar­ket value
• Incon­sis­tent strategies
• Mis­align­ment of inter­nal strate­gies & exter­nal goals
• Dimin­ished capac­ity to attract top talent
• Increased vul­ner­a­bil­ity

10 Behav­iors that Sig­nal Decline

• The orga­ni­za­tion exhibits a lack of under­stand­ing the envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic real­i­ties con­fronting it, or is in denial
• The man­age­ment of the orga­ni­za­tion is arro­gant with regard to its view of the world & assess­ment of its inter­nal com­pe­ten­cies. Ex: Icarus Paradox
• The orga­ni­za­tion has lost per­spec­tive with respect to cus­tomers, prod­ucts, sup­pli­ers, and competitors
• Man­age­ment and employ­ees have an insu­lar focus or pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with inter­nal processes, inter­nal mea­sure­ments, and politics
• The orga­ni­za­tion has lost its sense of urgency and lacks an atti­tude of self-determination
• The orga­ni­za­tion is rely­ing on his­tor­i­cal and poorly con­cep­tu­al­ized or inap­pro­pri­ate busi­ness strate­gies and tra­di­tional man­age­ment meth­ods to address new & dif­fer­ent challenges
• The orga­ni­za­tion has the propen­sity to repeat mis­takes and fails to learn from past experiences
• The orga­ni­za­tion has low or slow inno­va­tion prac­tices and is late to mar­ket with new products/services
• The orga­ni­za­tion has a ten­dency to recy­cle mar­gin­ally per­form­ing managers
• The orga­ni­za­tion relies exclu­sively on inter­nal tal­ent as a source of leadership

Key Fac­tors that Con­tribute to Decline

• Age of the orga­ni­za­tion: Older, more estab­lished firms may rely on legacy practices
• Size of the orga­ni­za­tion: Large firms with many ver­ti­cal lev­els can have trou­ble adapting
• Finan­cial suc­cess and past per­for­mance: Past suc­cess can lead to desire to fol­low same path in hopes of future success
• Own­er­ship and equity struc­ture: Is there account­abil­ity at all times to out­side agents?
• Envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences: Exter­nal shocks
• Abil­ity to learn and dis­cern pat­terns: Lack of learn­ing orga­ni­za­tion culture
• Certainty/uncertainty: Effec­tive­ness of change management
• Lead­er­ship: Young & inex­pe­ri­enced with­out desire to learn

Suc­cess Can Drive Crisis

• The same processes that lead to suc­cess in an orga­ni­za­tion can also lead to failure
• This is because suc­cess pro­motes rigid­ity, resis­tance to change, and habit­ual response
• Biggest prob­lem — peo­ple learn the ‘right’ way to solve a prob­lem and do that over and over again, even if that way will no longer solve the problem

It’s true these are quite gen­eral. Nat­u­rally, the art is in know­ing how to apply them as cri­te­ria, or inter­peret what you found. As a quick test of accu­racy, I’ve used the behav­iors and warn­ing signs to ret­ro­spec­tively review sev­eral of the orga­ni­za­tions I’ve seen from the inside. When those orga­ni­za­tions showed sev­eral of the behav­iors and warn­ing signs at an aggre­gate level (not nec­es­sar­ily my group, but the whole enter­prise) then the strate­gic con­se­quence dun­ham men­tioned were vis­i­ble at the same time.
From a prac­ti­cal per­spec­tive, a rat­ing scale or some indi­ca­tors of rel­a­tive degree would be very use­ful. In order to gauge whether to stay or go, you need to under­stand the inten­sity of the decline or cri­sis and what action you can take: for exam­ple, do you have time to go back to the cabin to save your hand­writ­ten screen­play before the ship sinks?

I first men­tioned the ail­ing for­tunes of the major U.S. auto mak­ers as an exam­ple of the same pat­tern of decline com­mon to old-style indus­trial orga­ni­za­tions that’s start­ing in the enter­prise soft­ware space. I chose Amer­i­can auto mak­ers as an exam­ple of fail­ing sys­temic health that offers insight because they are a vis­i­ble cul­tural ref­er­ence point, and not because I thought their demise was immi­nent.
But recent news from Ford and Daimler-Chrysler announc­ing dra­matic job cuts and plant clo­sures seems to point at exactly this in an eerie way. The arti­cle on Ford’s announce­ment even includes this quote from Gary N. Chai­son, a pro­fes­sor of indus­trial rela­tions at Clark Uni­ver­sity in Worces­ter, Mass, “This may not be the end, but it is cer­tainly the begin­ning of the end of the auto­mo­bile indus­try as we knew it”.
It seems the Iraq recon­struc­tion effort is turn­ing out to be another exam­ple of an enter­prise infra­struc­ture effort gone awry, in the real world. In the NY Times arti­cle Iraq Rebuild­ing Badly Hob­bled, U.S. Report Finds James Glanz writes “…gross under­staffing, a lack of tech­ni­cal exper­tise, bureau­cratic infight­ing, secrecy and con­stantly increas­ing secu­rity costs” con­tributed to the inef­fec­tive­ness of the recon­struc­tion effort.
That sounds like a clas­sic enter­prise soft­ware deploy­ment to me
Glanz con­tin­ues, “After years of shift­ing author­ity, agen­cies that have come into and out of exis­tence and that expe­ri­enced con­stant staff turnover, the rebuild­ing went through another per­mu­ta­tion last month with almost no pub­lic notice.“
To close the cir­cle and return to the realm of enter­prise soft­ware, let’s com­pare the NY Times assess­ment of the recon­struc­tion plan­ning — “Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuild­ing pro­gram on huge pub­lic works projects — largely over­seen by the office, the Project and Con­tract­ing Office — had been flawed.” — with James Roberts sim­ple but very rel­e­vant ques­tion in Grand enter­prise projects: why are we wast­ing our time?: “Instead of try­ing to eat the ele­phant whole, per­haps the bet­ter way is to take one bite at a time?“
Some­one should have asked the same ques­tion in the early stages of plan­ning the Iraq recon­struc­tion effort, when the basic approach — bureau­cratic, top-down, poorly struc­tured — crys­tal­lized and was put into action.