How consultants concludes that their list fits the needs of a client is rarely open to discussion. I have a large collection of "best practices" from consultants and professors. Their fundamental flaw is that none of these lists have been ever publicly validated by any independent measures of performance, such as profitability or gains in market share. Each list contains different items, in varying order of importance. Where a list has been appearing for several years, it changes every time.
There was a time when owning IBM stock, smoking Lucky Strikes, driving a Cadillac or depositing your money in a Savings & Loan Association would always make somebody's "best" list. But, if you suspect having acne or malaria, a good housekeeping manual of recommended health practices will not do you much good. You better find someone with sufficient know-how to correctly diagnose what remedy will cure you.
The "best practices" approach allows a consultant to write his report on the basis of somebody's authoritative check-list. That is quite easy to do, especially if the consultant lacks operating experience. It can be accomplished quickly because it bypasses painstaking fact-finding. In contrast, a consultant who relies on analysis and diagnosis would spend much time examining why an organization malfunctions and what are some of the characteristics that cause failure. That is difficult, requires patience and calls for much substantive knowledge about the conditions in the workplace and in the marketplace. That's why the consultants with the check-list can price their services more attractively.
Beware of consultants who claim legitimacy when they assert that they are in possession of universal insights in how to deliver superiority. These presumption that someone can compile a generic list of what makes for excellent information systems is misguided. Every firm is different, every organization has different needs and therefore every information system implementation must fit the particular conditions of a particular enterprise. This is why the current fad of awarding recognition for excellence, based on juries with a checklist, is insupportable. I have checked the names of the declared "winners" from a number of computer magazine contests and find that the selections had a dismal record: over one third were losing shareholder value when they were nominated and over two thirds found themselves in that position within three years after the award.
The principal finding from a detailed analysis of the characteristics of the Computerworld most excellent Premier 100 companies is that they are different, in just about every conceivable measure. Their CIO's report to different levels in the organization. Many of them rely on mainframe computing using older machines. Some of them distribute personal computers widely, others do not. Some of them have large IT expenditures per capita, others are miserly in their spending. Some devote over half of their budget to new systems development, others are coasting along on program maintenance. The ones who have large training and education budgets are not the ones who are most profitable. No consistent pattern of IT practice emerges from the twenty nine measures that were collected from the Premier 100 companies, whose financial and productivity performance for 1992-1994 was indisputably superior to 900 other U.S. corporations.
"Excellence" arises from the way management harmonizes its available resources, which are different for each organization. The future belongs to those who can cultivate diversity which adapts to conditions of the marketplace, rather than follow preconceived theories. This is why I believe the current fashion of telling companies what generic "best practices" to follow is only a temporary set-back from traditional methods that call for observation, testing and validation of results.
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