Several people picked up on this one after Gerold Kathan sent out a note about it, but perhaps David Sprott said it the best:
- davidsprott: RT @gkathan: John Seddon – a master class in how NOT to use IT in services. Optimize value, not cost. Brilliant. http://tinyurl.com/dygdcpg
It’s a 40-minute video (split into three parts) of a keynote by John Seddon at an IT-conference somewhen last year. And it’s magic – absolutely brilliant.
If you’re into enterprise-architecture, business-architecture, organisational-architecture, service-design, or any related field such as service-management of any kind, you need to watch this video – there’s no other way to say it.
Some of the insights I picked up on my first pass through include:
- “standard times are for dummies”
- “manage for value, not cost; if you manage to costs, your costs go up”
- “it’s failure-demand, not value-demand”
- “specialise – it increases the costs”
- “people who study systems focus on demand”
- “[you get better results because] you’re trained to identify the things you’re not capable of doing”
- “we get rid of all the activity-measures, because they’re of no value whatsoever”
- “whenever we create a back-office, we see an increase in activity: it should be a signal… but what do they do, no, they specialise the activity, they outsource it, they lean on people to do more faster, and that just creates more work.”
- [vid3, 05:00-07:30 "it's just wrong"]
- [on 'Lean'] “never give it a name: if you give it a name, the managers will expect if to come in a box”
- “the problems you’ve really got are not the problems you think you have, when you study”
- “[Taiichi] Ohno’s favourite word was ‘understanding’”
- “[managers think] if you’re a service organisation, and you standardise the work, the costs will go down – wrong!”
- “when you standardise and specialise in service design, you stop your system absorbing variety, and your costs go up: economy comes from flow, not scale”
- [important summary in vid3: 13:00 - 14:30]
I’m going back to watch it again… very strong recommend.