In November 2012, the US Air Force finally decided to cancel its Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS) modernization project after spending US $1 billion on it. ECSS was intended to replace more than 240 outdated Air Force logistics computer systems, some over 40 years old, with a single, integrated system. The Air Force deemed the effort critical to the successful modernization of its antiquated and operationally costly logistics infrastructure. However, in April 2012 the Air Force’s comptroller told the US Senate Armed Services Committee, “We’re now approaching seven years since funds were first expended on this system…. I’m personally appalled at the limited capabilities that project has produced relative to that amount of investment.” The Air …
Author
Robert Charette
Former Yankee baseball player Yogi Berra, known for his insightful malapropisms, once said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” This would be an apt description of the current state of enterprise risk management (ERM). In theory, ERM is useful in addressing the question, “What is the best use of corporate resources to create or protect the most value for the enterprise?” Yet in practice — except for a few exceptions like that of the successful avionics firm Rockwell Collins – it has fallen woefully short of meeting this objective. Over the past decade-plus, organizations have found ERM extremely difficult and costly to implement, with many early ERM adopters …
My prediction for 2013 concerns the end of work for most of us — which may not necessarily be a good thing. Back in 1995, social activist and economist Jeremy Rifkin wrote a controversial book called The End of Work in which he argued that both blue and white collar jobs across the globe were increasingly becoming the private preserve of information technology intensive systems. Rifkin claimed that “software surrogates” were leading to a steady and permanent decline in the number and types of jobs that humans could do better. The inevitable question society soon had to face, he argued, was what actions were urgently needed to deal with the end of work as we understood it. …
We believe leadership is just as much a definable science as management. What has made this notion difficult for most people to grasp is that leadership is seen as being something someone is born with (or not). In addition, management appears more “concrete” to people than leadership. Management is something that they can get their hands around because it is largely about following a set of defined processes. We would argue that most C-suite executives are selected on their management skills, not their leadership skills, which is why there is a dearth of leadership across both corporations and government. This has occurred in large part due to the fundamental reengineering of organizational structures, operations, and finance …
The worst mistake is not telling the boss. Or so said an article a few years ago in the Washington Post about the importance of immediately disclosing problems or mistakes to your boss.1 I am a great believer in this idea as well, which is part of what the late management theorist and practitioner Peter Drucker called “information responsibility.” Without knowing the true state of play, it is pretty difficult to manage enterprise risk effectively.2 This Washington Post article came to mind again as I read a Bloomberg News article last week dealing with the roots of the financial meltdown,3 as well as from a recent coincidental conversation I had with a friend of mine …
The current period of financial distress has again placed CIOs under the spotlight, and they are being asked the same question that their predecessors from the early 1990s were asked: “What value is our company getting for its IT investments?” In a bit more déjà vu, the alignment of IT with the needs of the business remains the number one priority of CIOs, CEOs, and BoDs (according to “IT Transformation: Creating a Strategy for Success” published in Economist, August 2008). Why is it, CEOs and BoDs are asking their CIOs, that after 20 years you still can’t solve this problem? To top off this historical symmetry, this is a period — like the early 1990s — …
So long to the gorilla dust at GM. That’s what billionaire entrepreneur founder of EDS and ex-General Motors executive Ross Perot called the annual optimistic projections of GM executives during the 1980s, as it continued to lose market share. “When gorillas fight, they throw dust in the air to distract one another,” Perot said. Gorilla dust wasn’t just thrown only by Chairman and CEO Roger Smith throughout the 1980s, as GM’s US market share dropped from 46% to 36%, but also by his successors Robert Stempel and Jack Smith throughout the 1990s and Richard Wagoner into the 2000s as well. GM’s current US market share is under 18% — that was, before the bankruptcy announcement …
I am sitting here, sipping my free cup of coffee at McDonald’s, looking across the parking lot at the huge going-out-of-business banners strung across the entrance to my local Circuit City store. “I wonder,” I joke with the McDonald’s manager, who I know pretty well, “if they had to pay for those banners up front and in cash?” A couple of years ago, I wrote about Circuit City’s inability to manage its enterprise risks: I wouldn’t be surprised to see the company sold in a few years, or at the very least, its top management replaced. At the time I wrote that Circuit City had decided that it would replace its higher-paid employees with lower-paid …
For the IT community, the incoming US administration could be a very interesting one. President-elect Barack Obama is going to be the US’s first tech-savvy president who understands the power of the Internet. It is obviously overstated, but some political observers, such as Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, claimed that, “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.” During the campaign, President-elect Obama made several wide-ranging promises in regard to technology. For instance, he promised to protect the openness of the Internet by strongly supporting the principle of Net neutrality; he promised to deploy a …
We were saddened to learn that a former member of Cutter Consortium’s Enterprise Risk Management & Governance advisory service, Art Gemmer, passed away in his sleep. Art helped pioneer project and program risk management at Rockwell Collins, where he worked for 27 years before leaving and starting his own consulting company. His obituary can be found in The Gazette Online. Services will be held Friday, 28 March.
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