Dangerous ideas

I should point out at the beginning that I don't like change very much in my personal life, and was quite outspoken in my distaste of the huge changes that my kibbutz has undergone in the past few years. Putting this simply, I "signed up" to live on a kibbutz on the understanding that such and such were the rules; in the past few years, those basic rules have been changed (often to their opposites) and so at times I feel that I have been lied to. But I'm won't be writing about such long reaching and personal changes here.

At work I've been developing recently what some might define as revolutionary or even dangerous ideas. Such an idea changes the current method of operation in some area, hopefully for the better. These ideas are considered dangerous because they change the status quo and cause people to realign themselves. Such ideas are generally designed to improve management's control and understanding of the business procedures, to make life easier for those implementing the procedures, and like all good doctors, to do no harm.

Not all of my ideas stick, but there have been some very good ones over the years which helped my company perform better (or at least improve management's knowledge of how well we were performing).

As I have probably written before, at the end of 2006, my company was merged with another company. Both companies make office furniture; we make chairs, they make desks and cupboards. We had the same owners.

Until the end of 2008, both companies were run almost autonomously, especially in my field of IT, and there was very little knowledge passing between them. 'My' company had its business practices, and 'they' had theirs. This was often a source of frustration to me, as I could see places where I could improve their practices, but there were high placed managers who refused all changes, and generally tended to demean and even insult me, normally claiming that I didn't understand anything and that 'my' company was doing everything wrong. There were one or two practices in the other company which were suitable for implementation in 'my' company, and these were accepted almost immediately.

This year, for various reasons, those managers are no longer working in the company, and suddenly I find myself in great demand to improve the business practices of the other company. Not only is nobody opposing me, I am being encouraged to change and improve. When one considers the fact that a year ago I was on the verge of leaving, one can see what a huge change has occurred.

Most of the changes that I have suggested are practices which are being used daily by 'my' company, and have been in use one way or another for several years, so they are tried and tested. Sometimes it's easy for me to think of these changes, and sometimes hard, but one thing is clear: the development of these ideas tends to be very fast, whereas the implementation tends to be very slow.

The implementation is slow because other people have to absorb the ideas; they have to overcome their natural opposition to change, and they have to accept the ideas. As they are Israelis, they also have to argue about them. I wrote three years ago about change, and am aware that certain changes have to be performed slowly and in small steps. Unfortunately, changes in usage of ERP programs require that everything is changed at once; if one changes only a little bit, it can be worse than not changing.

At the moment, I am feeling a little like Copernicus or Galileo. In the 'old' days, astronomers constructed a cosmology in which Earth was the centre of the universe. In order to support this cosmology, astronomers were forced to make more and more special cases, or obfuscate the theory in order to allow observation to match theory. Occam's razor had yet to be invented. Copernicus showed how a helioconcentric cosmology better matched observation with a simpler theory.

Coming down to Earth, the 'other' company constructed a series of operations in order to support the admittedly complicated processes of production extant in their factory. On the basis of these operations, more esoteric operations were added, and so on. None of these operations are supported in the 'native' version of our ERP program, but because the program is extensible, extensions were created. These extensions became part and parcel of their way of life, and became even the focus for 'religious' wars (well, arguments).

Then I come along, and say "if we do such and such, then we can accomplish the same thing with less effort and better use of the native ERP functions". As people have become so attached to their way of doing things, it is exceedingly difficult for them to understand, let alone embrace, what I am suggesting.