2008/10/27 Alexander Johannesen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 13:18, Steve Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> The problem is that they added agility to finance, where it shouldn't >> be, and hence the reason it collapsed. Plain old boring finance with >> don't lend what you don't have and don't borrow more than you can pay >> back wouldn't have cause the challenges. > > I cannot agree with that. Let's review "agile" for a second ; > > http://agilemanifesto.org/ > > Or, from WikiPedia ; > > "In sports, agility is described in terms of response to an opposing > player, moving target, as seen in field sports and racket sports. > Sheppard and Young (2006) define agility as "a rapid whole body > movement with change of velocity or direction in response to a > stimulus. [...] In business, agility means the capability of rapidly > and cost efficiently adapting to changes. Recently agility has been > applied e.g. in the context of agile software development and agile > enterprise" > > No where does it say "do stupid things" (slightly paraphrased) or > "lend out what you haven't got." Agile is about responding to micro > changes as opposed to do what you've planned with your macro scenario, > getting closer to the real issues as opposed to think you've got it > all figured out. Given the crunch there is *nothing* that tastes of > agility about it; more like deer staring into the incoming truck > lights. Thump!
Clearly a bit OT here. But what I mean is that all of the Toxic TLAs and FLAs were very "agile" products, they were created specifically because there was flexibility where there shouldn't be. Put it this way. A train isn't agile, it goes from A to B. Adding "Agility" by letting it leave the rails and go onto the road (while not actually changing the train so its just an unguided missile) is a different example of adding Agility to "rapidly" cope with the competition from the roads. The end result is a massive train wreck that is explicitly caused by the breakdown of oversight and governance and the unchecked addition of "agility" to the system. This is exactly what has happened with the credit crunch. Banks rapidly added more "agile" products that responded quickly to market demands and enabled them to deal more flexibility with things like lending money to people who couldn't pay it back (What else are those CDO things?). The stimulus was both market demand and the perception that property prices would continue to rise, the reaction was very agile and very rapid. The problem was a lack of governance and oversight that _prevented_ this agility being added to the system (that is what regulation is there for). So I'd say that banks did everything they could in terms of responding to stimulus very quickly and very cost efficiently adapted to change, hence they acted in a very agile way. This is what I mean by appropriate agility and is what Governance is about, making sure that agility is appropriate and doesn't fundamentally undermine the principles of the organisation and result in excessive risk. So in summary: Agility isn't always a good thing. Making things be agile that shouldn't be causes problems and risk and is a stupid thing to do. Sometimes rigidity is the right way to go about it and saying no and having a set way to work is the right thing. Steve > > Regards, > > Alexander > -- > ---------------------------------------------------------- > Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps > ------------------------------------------ http://shelter.nu/blog/ -------- >
