20^th century management problems can only get worse and never get better

Dead-end 20^th century management structures will continue to conflict with the business

All 20^th century business schools and business management books teach us to contrive organization and management structures to manage the enterprise. No school or book teaches us how to organize and manage the actual business.

The enterprise is organized today by an organization structure that is laid over the business. The rigid organization structure hampers business change and creates unsolvable reorganization and change management problems. Since the business is not organized, the business cannot be managed. Additional structures are required to manage the enterprise. Corporate plans, strategy layouts, budgets, investment proposals, etc plan the enterprise. Business processes, information systems, administrative functions, HR levels and salary scales, IT architectures, etc direct the enterprise. Account charts, quality schemes, activities or centers for costing, etc control the enterprise. Financial statements, performance management scorecards and dashboards, information categories, etc report the enterprise.

These structures are created independently using different terminology and definitions. The enterprise has difficulty relating the organization, plans, directions, controls, and reports. Each structure requires information technology to process. Much enterprise effort is consumed in updating and maintaining all the overlaid structures.

The many structures laid over the business conflict with the business and with each other. The actual business “the activity of providing goods and services” is hidden under the structures and cannot be managed directly. Enterprise management is directed at departments, functions, objects, tasks, “performance”, and other entities defined by overlaid structures, rather than the actual business.

Alignment of structures and the business gets more difficult as structures are added

Every time there is a change in capital utilized or output results produced by the business, the fixed overlaid structures go out of alignment with the business creating conflicts between the organization and the business, IT and the business, outsourcing and the business, intangible and tangible assets and the business, and other structures and the business. The enterprise now recognizes many unsolvable 20^th century management problems with alignment, unknown costs, unknown value, unknown enterprise and capital worth, unknown return on capital investments, business complexity, information complexity, business change, project management, business collaboration, corporate governance, and on and on.

The dead-end 20^th century management solution is to lay more structures over the business. Every day new structures are contrived and management books are written showing us how to solve 20^th century management problems with more 20^th century management structures. The unsolvable problems are never solved and enterprise management just gets more complicated and difficult.

More IT architectures and IT management structures can never align IT and the business

A major 20^th century management problem is the utilization of information technology. Early on, IT was used to computerize 20^th century management structures laid over the business, rather than directly organizing the actual business as one structure to integrate planning, direction, control, and reporting. 20^th century management produces a proliferation of IT systems to manage structures laid over the business, instead of one simple Result-performance Management System to manage the actual business. In spite of all these overlaid systems, much actual business data in capital worth, performance costs, result value, result value-added, investment returns, performance effectiveness, result quality, etc is never captured.

Overlaid IT systems conflict with each other and conflict with the business causing IT and business alignment problems. Vendors contrive a myriad of other structures to lay over the business to “solve” the problem. Various IT architectures are laid over the business for system portfolios, IT services, transaction management, network and equipment facilities, etc. Additional IT management structures are contrived to “solve” information system and business management conflicts. These additional structures compound the problems and increase enterprise IT overheads.

More overlaid structures can never solve information complexity problems

Information complexity is another serious 20^th century management problem. The proliferation of information systems, using a wide variety of data entities to describe the enterprise, produces massive amounts of information. But very little of the information is related directly to the business. The information complexity problem has been addressed by more structures laid over the business to categorize information for data reconciliation, enterprise information management, decision-support drill down, etc.

Now the enterprise is faced with the proliferation of information in website content, emails, Internet searches and downloads, and file transfers. This information cannot be managed as part of the business, causing many management problems. Now there is a push to segregate information to separate management systems for records, reports, content, knowledge, images, etc. This also just aggravates the problems by segmenting information management separate from the business and creating more unnecessary IT investments.

We cannot continue to compound the problems of 20^th century management by laying more structures over the business

How long will we continue to waste massive amounts of money on dead-end 20^th century management, before we wake up to the problems? 20^th century management problems are unsolvable, because they can never be solved by new or improved structures laid over the business. Throughout the 20^th century, enterprises invested massive amounts in purported solutions, and managers have read the thousands of books providing 20^th century management solutions. But, despite all this, 20^th century management problems remain unsolved today. All the purported solutions have just compounded the problems and have never solved the problems. All new future “solutions” will continue to make dead-end 20^th century management problems worse.

Eventually, we must organize the business for 21^st Century Management and leave 20^th century management behind

The only solution is to use R-pM to organize the actual business for 21^st Century Management and leave 20^th century management problems behind. Eventually all businesses will have to use R-pM and R-pM will become routine business management. The competitive advantages of R-pM go the enterprises that are the first to organize and manage their actual business. The use and advantages of R-pM grow over time creating a gap between the R-pM leaders and the R-pM followers. Download the R-pM Toolkit at Result-performance-Management.com for complete guidance and instructions and continual updates as R-pM advances.