Preventing the next Fort Hood tragedy, by design

This recent tragedy at Fort Hood was only the latest in a series of crises that would likely have been prevented if the U.S. Government had adopted a logical holistic system design when I first began making the argument more than a decade ago. Since that time we’ve witnessed trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost; 9/11 and two wars, Katrina’s turf battles and incompatible communications, the mortgage bubble and global financial crisis, and now the Fort Hood massacre. The current trajectory of systems design and function isn’t sustainable.

“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.”  – Thomas Jefferson

While this particular tragedy is still under investigation, patterns are emerging that are very similar to previous crises, including 9/11. So let’s take a closer look at this event relative to what is currently possible with organizational design and state-of-the-art technology in order to better understand how to prevent the next crisis, for it will surely occur unless prevented by a logical holistic system design.

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http://kyield.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/preventing-the-next-fort-hood-tragedy-by-design/

Priests of the Past: IT Preservationists

I was reading an interesting two article series at CIO– The Future of ERP, by Thomas Wailgum, which catalyzed many thoughts of the past, present, and future.

The article contains one of the best quotes I’ve seen from CIO in years, which prompted this post:

“There are many things happening here that are good for users, good for the IT profession, good for business. It’s just good, good, good,” Pierce says. “You know, what’s slowing this adoption are all the priests of the past—all the preservationists. All the interests that are built up around the edifice that is enterprise software….

–Todd Pierce, CIO of Genentech

In the context of the article, Pierce is apparently.....