Hard-hitting IT commentator Dr Simon Moores gives his personal take
on the hot issue of the day.When Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of
History, he was thinking of a new world order that followed the end
of the cold war. One where unrestrained capitalism had prevailed
over what we understand as democracy.
However, mix capitalism and technology and you also stimulate the
expansion of two separate but connected forces: globalisation and
virtualisation.
Today, business is both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously and
concepts of corporate governance, have, in a number of prominent
examples, been discarded as irrelevant luxury. Fifteen years after
the film
Wall Street, greed, it appears, is still good, and
business degeneracy is on the rise.
If investor credulity and the dotcom "bubble" defined the end of
the 20th century, trust is an early casualty of the 21st century.
Trust in governments and trust in institutions, such as Andersen,
which were once recognised as pillars of professionalism and
integrity, now appear to be riddled by conflicts of interest.
Theoretically, technology should offer a company tighter control of
its decision-making and accountability functions than before in
human history but, quite demonstrably, it doesn't. Why is
this?
My own theory is that the management theories of the 1980s and
1990s, re-engineering, downsizing, upshifting and many more,
produced post-modern businesses with a single profit-driven
purpose.
Anything else was "streamlined" and viewed as irrelevant. But I
believe that these days business is so streamlined and downsized
that management spends much of its time reading e-mail and hoping
that all the spinning plates don't stop at once.
In a flat corporation, nobody really owns the responsibility until,
like Barings before or Deloittes or Andersen and Enron today, it's
too late. The technology at our disposal should offer the means of
facilitating a wider sense of corporate responsibility and of
tightening the governance that is so obviously failing.
As a global business community, we need to start concentrating a
little less frantically on creative management theories that drive
profitability and rather more on measures and systems that
encourage trust, responsibility and good management. Integrity for
a business of any size is a currency that once lost, can never be
recovered.
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Zentelligence: Setting the world to rights with the collected
thoughts and ramblings of the futurist writer, broadcaster and
Computer Weekly columnist Simon Moores.