LTYM - Paving the Cowpath

Letters to a Young Manager

Paving the Cowpath, #533
LTYM >

Please note that this letter is in-process; the following are my notes

Dear Adam,

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Don’t be in a hurry to put in a new system, no matter how promising or avant garde it may seem.

First ask some questions about the underlying business process. When was the process first introduced in your organization? Are the people who developed it still around? How many hand-offs and approval steps does it have? Have you mapped it out yet? How does it compare with oter organization processes? Does it make doing buisneess with your orgrnaization easy for customers?

Michael Hammer's famous quote in the 1980's heyday of business process reengineering and systems: ’Don't pave the cowpath.’ [1]

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Sincerely yours,
Ed

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[1] "It is time to stop paving the cow paths. Instead of embedding outdated processes in silicon and software, we should obliterate them and start over. We should “reengineer”our businesses: use the power of modern information technology to radically redesign our business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in their performance." --Michael Hammer, "Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate," HBR, July–August 1990.
https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate

Takeaways:

Automating can be a way to fail by avoiding the underlying process changes required

Discussion Questions:

For Further Reading: