This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Don't Be a Sap -- I knew I liked Sig. In a comment to today's earlier post, he points out that the conversation on culture and technology has branched into a discussion of the self-similarity of processes across company borders that has made them a collection of followers...
"...some monolithic enterprise software makes companies even more identical in how they do things, in ways of business models.
"Love it when they push their wares as being "best business practices". Translated: "This is a copy of how the others do it!" At the end of the day only way you can compete is by getting into the office two hours before everybody else."
How 'bout some word association? You say "best practices", I say "benchmarking", a long time pet peeve of mine, as pointed out here. I'm sure that the "best (so far) practices" that are institutionalized by such entities as enterprise software and massive consultancies have been well benchmarked across a range of companies and industry sectors, resulting in a clown clone war trying to impersonate competition.
Even going beyond the handcuffs of one-size-fits-all software-driven processes, the ones that really do it right (usually those that do it first or close to first), like Wal-Mart and Toyota are the leaders. A couple years ago, I wrote...
...as processes and approaches are copied over and over again, they lose fidelity to the original, just as a copy of a copy of a copy does on paper. As the clarity of paper copies suffer, the potency of approaches suffer, especially when attempts are made to match it to the inevitable different starting points. There is no such thing as a canned solution -- each situation searching for improvement must take a clean look at where they are at, and determine for themselves the constraint that limits their performance, the culture that perpetuates it, and how to use the available tools and techniques to create a new solution for themselves.
Otherwise, such efforts will be limited to crippled attempts at catch-up to those who have gone before.
Those who feel compelled to jump on the bandwagons of the leaders, whether the band's tune is based on EDI, Lean, or RFID, are relegated to, as Sig points out in terms those who buy into the best practices of enterprise software, the role of follower.
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