Cатсн²² (in)sесuяitу / ChrisJohnRiley

Information (and hopefully soon, the slides) for the presentation can be found on the HAR2009 Wiki.

This talk is about working within large organizations (both for profit and non-profit). Any large organization has it’s issues whether or not it’s a government or a large corporate.

Sometimes it’s hard to get a large organization moving. However once it gets going, it’s hard to make it stop.

Alone you go quicker, together you can go further.

Power holds organizations together.

• Power is about allocating resources
• Power is about allocating risk
• In the extreme, power can be about imposing a view of the world

Power struggles are inherent in large organizations – They resolve the necessary diversity of views. When carried to completion they lead to more balanced decisions. When not resolved the paralyze the progress.

Risk is a fact of life – Organizations hate risk, it is a threat to their existence. Organizations love risk, it allows them to be unique.

Once a large company has a stable IT infrastructure, they are adverse to taking risks with newer technologies.

“There is nothing more dangerous than to initiate a new order of things” – Machiavelli

It was discovered that the size of the organization had little effect on the speed of a project. The smaller organizations had the flexibility to simple “do” the work. The larger organizations had distinct “processes” in place to make sure that the project got completed. The slowest were found to be medium size organizations, as they were stuck between just doing it, and having processes to make it happen.

Over half of organizations have trouble planning change controls – Cannot give a date, lack of process