This is logged in as "Misc" because i didn't find a "Business" archive.

"What, exactly, got us here? How did we end up in this fine situation?"

There will be, I'm sure, a number of opinions on this. Ed, I submit that until we come up with some kind of answer, we will be doomed to repeat history.

I would submit that what got us here is basically an attention to near term bottom line. Twenty-plus years ago, my MBA instructors indicated that the event attention horizon was moving closer and closer all the time. They indicated that this was NOT apropriate, but was what was being pointed to by many corporations. MBA schools are not out to change the way corporations think but to provide people prepared to take their place in the corporation.

At that time, the short term was considered to be 2 years. It has since shrunken to the current quarter and in some cases the current month.

With evaluations being based on the short term performances (ever shortening term, as it were), the long horizon problems, which take time and sap resources are ignored. The Y2K problem is just such a problem, with just such a resource sapping, evaluation impacting solution. Thus, the problems were NOT attended to in a timely manner.

Somehow, we need to develop a framework in the corporate world that rewards attention to DISTANT problems or situations, and works on LONG TERM results.

Chuck, a night driver, who drives consultants, who are working on getting their customers to become even MORE JIT than they have been.

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), September 05, 1999

Answers

In 1992 I was agitating very loudly to have what's now called Y2K addressed in our next five-year plan. The greatest resistance was that no one in our management center could hitch themselves to the issue and "ride it to the stars".

A long-term project that outlasted the management team's projected tenure in their position was of no career benefit to anyone in management. Hence the issue was dropped in favor of something that could be done in three years or less. That being a timeframe more in keeping with personnel turnover rates for promotion to other assignments.

I kinda imagine that the current trend towards nobody ever finishing the projects they start is another contributing factor to the incredibly blind view that both government and private industry show towards Y2K. Very few, if any of the originators are still with the projects that started four years ago. Most have gone on to greener pastures in the job market or been put out to pasture, period, by their employers.

Management types who started Y2K projects have probably been re- assigned two or three times by now. No one has any loyalty to those projects because they didn't "give birth" to them and their only legacy will likely be a connection to some project they didn't start, but were charged with when it failed.

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), September 05, 1999.

Folks, come on.

No matter what "we" (your choice of what "we" means) discover about the causes of this idiocy, what makes you think that generations to come will accept this as "wisdom from on high"?

Unless we restructure our entire world culture into an extremely cautious, conservative, "What was good enough for Grandpa is probably too good for me" society, we will make mistakes.

History repeats itself. Look at the desperation in the Bronze Age as local sources of tin dried up in the Mediterranean basin. They were forced into long, dangerous voyages to strange, unknown lands beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Greeks and Myceneans got most of their tin from the British Isles, an impressive and dangerous voyage).

Our ancestors were dependant on whale oil for lighting in this country. Kerosene was invented Just In Time (pun intended) to provide another fuel source as the whales where disappearing. Did we learn then to avoid possibly limited resources? Hardly.

Did the Cambodians who built Angor Wat take steps to avoid the problem of their soil turning into a light stone (laterite?) a few years after the forest was burned and the soil exposed to sunlight as it was farmed?

The knew about the stone, they built their cities from it..........

Over and over, we have built cultures dependent upon scarce resources or on "shifting sands". We leap from crisis to emergency to low grade concern and back again. Is this due to our primate background? We finish with something, we drop it and it goes away? We need a new resource, we "leap" from an empty branch to a new one.....

Sorry, maybe just rambling this morning, but I have little hope of the wisdom of older and wiser heads prevailing permanently over strong willed and ambitious young folks who are SURE they can make an idea work, even if it has long term flaws........

-- Jon Williamson (jwilliamson003@sprintmail.com), September 07, 1999.

Sorry, I did not make my main point.

Most people WILL NOT plan for the future if it causes problems with plans they want to implement today.

-- Jon Williamson (jwilliamson003@sprintmail.com), September 07, 1999.

Good posts, Chuck, WW and Jon.

The top-notch sw orgs (few but they exist and I've seen two) have understood from CEO to grunt coder that quality makes short-term as well as long-term sense -- and augments JIT along the way, in fact, helps warrant that JIT won't collapse (from the org's point-of-view, can't control the rest). There are some apparent investment trade- offs (for instance, addressing Y2K in 1992) but they really are only apparent.

"Quality" here is a marker for doing most (not even all) the practices that have been KNOWN to produce reliable software for 25 years.

The real mystery is why the simple common sense of this can't be communicated well enough or understood well enough at the boardroom level (ie, that short- and long-term corporate and individual advantage converges at quality software).

Talk about DGIs!

-- BigDog (BigDog@duffer.com), September 07, 1999.

I've posted similar sermons before, but here goes.

As a consultant I get to see how alot of companies operate. In a number of the larger ones, this little percetion problem seems to crop up. Mangement will decied that they need to please the stock holders. They will cast about for a way to do this and come up with a hair brained way to cut costs. I use the term "hair brained" because the cost cutting measure ultimatly involves cutting down on the quality of service that the customer gets. And do you know what? It works....for a quater. Then the customer goes elswhere, but they are still on the books for 1st or 2nd quater that service got cut so an increase in profits appears temporarily. Do you see how stupid you have to be to do this? The customer has a unique relationship with us, the service provider. One might almost term it vital. You see, the customers are the people WHO GIVE US MONEY!! IF WE MAKE THEM HAPPY THEY GIVE US MORE MONEY!! And that translate relativly soon, into something that is good for the stock holder as well. If you put the stock holders first, you may loose your customers. To take this further, management frequently "saves" money by getting rid of one of the largest cash outlays. That would be payroll. The pointy hairs figure that if they dump the employess who make lots of money and hire others for much less fresh out of colledge to do the same job, they have saved a bundle. Then, in six months when they hire all the former employees back as consultants (at a tidy rate, I might add) the payroll ledger still shows a savings. Put if they look waaaaay over to their other hand at the outlays for consultants, they would see that they are actually paying more for the same peope they had before they sent them on their way (with a sizable retirment package). This shows an inability to understand how an action to one part of the company produces a response in another part of the company. It is systemic. (where have I heard that word before?) Now, if the system called "The Company" is beyond the understanding of it's management, what does that say about how well they understand the system they exist in?

Keep your...

-- eyes_open (best@wishes.net), September 09, 1999.

what got us here, & will take us further'down the slippery-slope. is REJECTION of GOD,s answer. namely>HIS SON.

-- a-son. (dogs@zianet.com), September 11, 1999.