Government

Simon Wardley, the creator of the always useful “Wardley Maps” has a quip he shared a few years ago about the speed that the IT departments of large enterprises react to technological change. A graph showing that enterprise technology is adopted much slower than everyone else The Enterprise IT Adoption Cycle. Simon Wardley, CC 3.0 BY-SA While funny, the humor is pretty close to how we all see enterprise computing. Many would argue that government is the same. It is a common litany that government is slow and unresponsive. We often hear comments about how government workers are lazy, or that governments should be run like a business. In this article, I will use a pace layer model to push back against this argument, and then offer a more nuanced point of view. ...

In Goldratt’s classic The Goal, there is a scene where the hero, Alex Rogo, is sitting in his car on the hill overlooking his factory. He is eating pizza and drinking beer while thinking about the question his mentor, Jonah, posed. What is the goal of your company? Alex considers the question and eventually concludes that the goal is to make money. One of the features of the chapter is that his internal dialog forms the initial thinking of what eventually becomes a quantitative and qualitative framework for measuring and improving the performance of the factory. The frameworks are Theory of Constraints and Throughput Accounting.s ...