Beyond being thrilled about Burt Rutan's achievement and what it may mean for us, I have been thinking recently about the difference in Project Management Approach that this project displays. Is there something dysfunctional about the traditional approach that makes getting a good result fast and cheap all but impossible?
I keep thinking in this context about IT projects.
The loser organizations are obsessed with with security and hence miss the point - that security is always prejudiced when you rely on large hackable name brand proprietary enterprise systems. They seek security in the wrong place and by doing so actually take more risk.
Loser organizations fear novelty as risky and seek security by embracing the known. Consequently they are not open to a new and inexpensive way of solving a problem. Going into Space on $20 million is impossible for NASA. Building a government website for less and $1 million is impossible.
Scale itself drives complexity and risk. Rutan had to think small - this was the road to success. Most large organizations think that they have to think big - this is the road to complexity and hence to a high risk of failure.
In IT, most organizations recall the old systems saying that "no one gets fired by hiring IBM". They seek the safe bureaucratic choice hoping that they as individuals will not get fired but lose site of the organizational outcome which is that their real job is to deliver a system that will drive more value. In seeking safety, they inevitably drive down the return on investment. Many large systems add no value at all.
Today there is nothing more operationally vulnerable than a proprietary system. Proprietary systems bring all sorts of risk with them. They are hackable, they are clunky as they were designed to fit all, they cost a lot to develop and to maintain and they create dependence on inside experts who have customized the monster and on the supplier. Above all they don't work well. They have a very low ROI.
Paradoxically, Open Source enables you to avoid all these risks. They are hard to hack, they are neat, they fit you like a glove and they are easy to develop and to maintain. Above all they work well. They have a very high ROI.
So loser organizations start by not seeing the systemic risks of seeking security in the known. They then fail further by not seeing the point of the system which is to create value.
Having made the wrong strategic call by selecting a hackable and clunky system, they are then forced to build an impenetrable firewall. They are so frightened by being hacked that they reject interaction.
So loser organizations are obsessed with static & on-way proprietary systems. Having such a vulnerable platform, they naturally fear the risks of interaction. So a site like Town Square for Charlottetown is built on a clunky proprietary platform and has very little real interaction and hence functionality but cost millions. Try and do anything on this site of value to you. An Open Source approach would have cost only thousands and would have had a great deal of interaction and functionality.
Can large organizations overcpme this risk? I don't think so. No one is larger than Wal*Mart and they work very differently from the typical loser. Wal*Mart rejects the traditional approach entirely. Here is a model of how do do well, go fast, get great results and be inexpensive.
A lesson for us all.
