As most of the regular blog readers know, I'm a recent graduate of the School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. And with the shiny new master's degree I earned last month comes some interest in information technology.
This was brought home when I found and was reading a rather interesting article on the changing fortunes at McDonalds (registration required). The whole article is worth a read, because McDonalds has been slumping, and they're trying to turn it around, despite the one two punch of having one CEO die from a heart attack and his replacement getting diagnosed with colon cancer.
But the part of the article that struck me as interesting, with the interest in IT that I have, was the following quote:
And Cantalupo touched on a major move he knew would shake the system. He had decided to kill one of Greenberg's pet projects, a $1 billion investment in technology.Bell recalls that he and most top managers had supported the computer project when Greenberg launched it two years earlier. He was skeptical when Cantalupo suggested killing it. But ultimately, Bell said, it was the right call.
"Given where the business had gotten to and where we needed to focus, it was time to jump off the train," he said.
Now, as somebody looking for a job in the field, I'm supposed to support IT projects wherever I see them, right? Well, that's not quite the case. Sometimes you have to step back and look at the bigger picture, and by reading the whole article, it's quite clear the bigger picture had been ignored by focusing on this IT project.
One of the big problems in the world today is that everybody assumes that computers and the Internet are the be all end all of life, and the truth is that it's not. It's a useful and somewhat important piece, yes, but sometimes there are bigger problems and going with newer and better IT doesn't always mean a faster and leaner company.
It's something that bothered me with some of my classes, this sort of one true way, and how [XML|multimedia|information strategy] will set us free. Truth is, nothing is that simple. It's a complex world and there's more than one solution.
Posted by katster at June 28, 2004 12:00 AM