Author: JP

I’m not a particularly jingoistic person. I’ve heard and seen too much damage done in the name of “national pride”. I’m not a particular lover of passports either, believing that they’ve become bureaucratic barriers over the years, rather than the leave-to-wander-unfettered that they originally represented.

Notwithstanding all that, I’ve held on to my passport and nationality of birth; I’d prefer to think of my stance as dignity rather than jingoism.

When I was growing up, I’d hear the national anthem regularly; every film I watched ended, for some reason, with the national anthem. I loved the tune and the words, probably even more so in knowing that it had been written by Tagore. I felt we’d lost something when the tradition died.

There are still some places where I hear national anthems, usually at sporting events. Too often, many in the audience don’t appear to know the words for their own national anthem, and tend to trivialise the occasions, especially when it’s the opponents’ anthem.

With all this in mind, I was strangely touched by this video, probably released to coincide with India turning 60 last week.

More than anything else, what the video did for me is to remind me that we can be dignified without being overly jingoistic. And for that I am grateful to the makers of the video, and to my sister for pointing it out to me.

…this video by Simon Willison is a good place to start.

Incidentally, the way I got to the video is probably the way I’m going to get to many things in the future. I was in Facebook, used Blog Friends to get to Chris Messina’s Ma.gnolia, read a very interesting article on Identitu.de by Dan York, and while reading that saw the reference to the Simon Willison screencast (something I missed because I was recuperating in hospital when it came out).

While doing all this, I also found Aswath Rao’s blog, somewhere I intend to spend a little time. Soon.

We need to get used to this process. Some place in cyberspace you go to regularly, a place that supports your reading the blogs of people you trust and like, your friends. A way of following the recommendations that your friends make, particularly about things you’re interested in. A way of selecting from those recommendations those which you intend to do something about.

Lower search and discovery costs. Persistent and shareable processes. Patterns I can study and learn from. I like what I see.

There was a time when I was happy with enterprise budgeting processes and their underlying technology support. That time was thirty years ago, before I ever worked for an enterprise. [And that’s probably why I have so much time for Sig and Thingamy. Disclosure: I have no stock in Thingamy. Or any other company for that matter, save the ones I have worked for or am working for.]

So many places have nothing that approximates to project accounting yet they try and account for projects. So many places have nothing that approximates to multi-year planning, yet they try and account for multiple years and across year boundaries. So many places operate in multiple timezones and jurisdictions with multiple accounting standards and conventions, even if they claim to be using the same one. So many places have a habit of nesting cost centre charges, creating this monstrous concept called allocation cycles. So many places have people arguing till the cows come home about the allocation process, allocation keys, the amount allocated….. while all the time being completely unable to isolate the costs being allocated.

Sometimes I think that many people avoid getting into any form of management in order to avoid becoming spreadsheet jockeys; spreadsheet jockeys riding blindfolded through treacle while mounted on imaginary horses. I can’t blame them.

I’m no accountant, I want to keep things simple. Tell me how much money I can spend, as if it’s a credit limit on a card. Let me spend it on the people, things and processes I need, in order that I can keep the promises I make. At the end of each month, send me a statement of expenditure for that “card”. If I run more than one cost centre, then give me more than one “card”. If I run a P/L, then let me receive money into that “card” account as well. If I have the right to an overdraft, then let me know how much, and by when I need to pay it off. What’s frontloaded, what’s not. What the early termination penalties are.

And don’t let me charge one card account with another. No smoke. No mirrors. No nesting of allocations.

And all cash. No mumbo jumbo. No enterprise kiting.

That’s what I’ve always wanted. That’s what I’ve never had.

So, when I saw justgiving as an application on Facebook, it made me think. Shouldn’t that be how budgets work in an enterprise? Let the P/L holder “justgive” money to the “causes” he or she wants to support. Constrained by their available balance. Let the “causeholder” run the cause, equivalent to a project at a time. When multiple P/Ls want to support a particular enterprise “cause”, they can.

Sure we have to solve for other problems, like how to deal with overheads. In fact we need to go further, we need to understand far more about how we fund shared infrastructure, shared within an enterprise and shared beyond the enterprise as well.

But we need to start somewhere, and one place that needs attention is the way projects get funded and accounted for.

Following a recent post, Stephen questioned:

how much power we have, as all-too-human individuals, to SET norms. (On the other hand I suspect we have all encountered bosses who felt they could, and should, set norms!) Finally, I continue to hold that the norms of the workplace do not always align with the norms of our leisure time

Sean riposted:

This is probably true with respect to the babyboom generation, and probably wrong with respect to the digital generation (or generation ‘Y’). I’m gen X so basically my norms are unclear!

And it made me think, what are the norms of my generation? And at least one emerged:
Norm Peterson.