Saturday, March 29, 2008

G3 - The Governance of Hammers

Governance implies a context where decisions need to be made about the control of a capability.

Decisions about the control of IT currently are mostly made in the pre-deployment phase. This is no different from non-IT capabilities, and reflects Tool factors, People factors, and Context factors, driven by a large chunk of pre-IT inertia.

Here's a few observations (about non-IT tools) related to why we have minimal formal Governance for physical tools like hammers:
  • Tools are dumb and people are smart

  • Tools are dumb because they have traditionally been built for a specific purpose with limited configurability

  • Tools are built with limited configurability for a specific capability since the physical world usually has a trade-off between effectiveness/efficiency (in a specific context) and adaptability (across a range of contexts).

  • In the physical world, it usually makes more sense to provide a user with a range of special purpose tools than a single morphable tool...the Leatherman-style tools being one notable exception.

  • Contexts are often unpredictable enough that a single morphable capability would be difficult to design and difficult to use.


Bottom line: In the physical world, we create simple single-purpose capabilities (tools) that users combine in an ad hoc manner to achieve a goal in a specific context.

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