The curse of the CMS!

It largely resembles the 'Tower of Babel' scenario when you try to get the IS team to get into a conference call with the Web development team and the Knowledge Management team to come up with the portal requirements. It suddenly feels like no one understands the other any more. IS rolls their eyes virtually at every suggestion for social networking thrown in by the Knowledge Management team and the graphic design team seem to think that no part of this conversation is of any relevance to them.
This largely is due to the inability of the team to see beyond the single story that they believe is the only view that they see of a technology portal.
Whichever team you belong to, and whatever be the work you are assigned to, there are only three focus areas for you.

1. People
2. Processes
3. Technology

The latter two are inanimate, but surprisingly, people seem to focus more on these rather than on point number one.
Lets take a look at every aspect of a good business or great project management and we will see where the focus is on these 3 areas.

Balanced score card-People
After action review-people
RACI chart-people
Change management-people
Emotional intelligence-people
Lesson learned- people
Agile-people
Six sigma sponsors-people
six sigma champions-people
Lean Value-enabling activity-people
Knowledge management-people
CoP's-people
Collective intelligence-people
Story telling-people

Even information architecture which does the information mapping is done for people. For people to have a clear understanding so the solution architecture is created without mistakes. That brings us to:

Poke yoke-People
Kanbans-People
Andon boards- people

I think we are clear here that people are the focus. Its important that the business is not compromised and the Voice of Business is listened to...but every business starts off with the Voice of the Customer-PEOPLE!

Process Approach!

There are very many advantages to the process approach. S.M.A.R.T goals, pilot areas, sixsigma, focus groups are a few of them. An unstated element to every process approach is that a sponsor somewhere sits in to bring about the systems perspective at every project review. The null hypothesis that is assumed here is sometimes proven false. The alternate brings about the issues of pursuing a single story!
Pre-1990 none of this mattered. We had what we wanted in the palm of our hands. Everything that mattered existed within stones reach...if not the process, atleast the neck that could be placed on the chopping board,if the process failed. Present day scenario is a lot rougher. You dont know who sits where, what is the culture, what is the language spoken, what time of day it is and who actually is the person accountable. This failure model is popularly referred to as the 'global model'. If this is the model that is implemented, then the single story no longer holds good. Multiple processes have to run in tandem and the reviews are measured against the system.
An household example of the systems approach. My geyser trips the home electrical unit every time I switch it on. When the plumber was asked to fix it, he said that he was currently unavailable and the short gap measure to make things work till he came over was to keep the water running while the geyser was on. This worked fine. The issue is, when the focus is only on the project and not of the system, we fail to see long term failure in the light of short term wins.
Our society is paying for water and the water problem is acute. The fix should have been :
1. either to stop using the shower and switch to bucket water
2. To use another bathroom till this was fixed.

On home ground, examples are so sinmple, they are usually attributed to just using your common sense. (which surprisingly fails more often that not)
In large organizations, every drop that is lost with bad decisions and with approaches that dont look at the system in its entirety, costs!Costs the company &bleeds it!