Archive for March, 2010

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Rereading “The Halo Effect” and Thinking About Open Government

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

As I read about the plans for implementing Open Government, I decided that I needed to reread The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers.  Not because I am dismissive of open government but because I want it to succeed.  And one way of ensuring success is to make sure the plans don’t fall victim to these management delusions:

  • The Halo Effect – Attributing organizational success to unrelated factors such as leadership, strategy, workplace motivation, etc.
  • Delusion of Absolute Performance – Seeing success as absolute rather than if the organization is doing better than its competitors.
  • Delusion of Rigorous Research – Confusing the quantity of research with the quality of research.
  • Delusion of the Single Explanation – One factor completely explains success or failure.
  • Delusion of Correlation and Causation – This should be a familiar one.
  • Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots – Basing a sample only on outcomes such as only studying successful companies.
  • Delusion of Lasting Success – No company is successful in every business environment.
  • Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick – Confusing cause and effect.
  • Delusion of Organizational Physics – Companies and the people who inhabit them are not easily predictable and the complexity inherit in their relationships makes them hard to study.

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    Combining Project Management and Knowledge Management

    Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

    I’ve seen several attempts to merge project management with knowledge management.  It’s a worthy pursuit because the synergy will greatly benefit the organization.  The big question is how to do this successfully.  Chuck Tryon and Suliman Hawamdeh at PM Hut have an interesting spin – include Requirements Management into the mix.

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    Four Major Stories That Point Toward?

    Monday, March 1st, 2010

    1)  WhiteHouse.gov goes Open Source (Drupal) – actually reported on10/25/2009 but the original story has been updated to include the contractors: Acquia and Phase2.  The contractors also had folks at the OpenGov workshop I attended.

    2) U.S. Department of Defense to allow Social Networking on unclassified computers – Check out their Social Hub.

    3) Pew Research Study shows we get our news through social networks – “The latest study from Pew Internet analyzes the news Americans are consuming and various different ways they find news. Based on a sample of 2,259 adults, the study reveals that three fourths of the people (75%) who find news online get it either forwarded through e-mail or posts on social networking sites, and half of them (52%) forward the news through those means.”

    4) UK Newspaper, The Guardian, opens new API on political information – You don’t even have to register to access APIs that will feed election and political information into apps that you create.

    So, governments are going open source and embracing social networking at the same time people’s news consumption shifts to online social networking applications.  Almost a perfect storm of open government.

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