You cannot copy Lean nor DataOps
"One General Motors vice president even ordered one of his managers to take pictures of every inch of the NUMMI plant so they could copy it precisely. The result was a factory with andon cords but with nobody pulling them because managers (following the principle of extrinsic motivation) were incentivized by the rate at which automobiles — of any quality — came off the line."
- Lean Enterprise (2014) by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly.
The NUMMI plant was a joint venture between Toyota and GM, operated together. It was the only GM factory where they succeeded to implement the Toyota production system, in spite of many attempts to replicate it. It was not sufficient, and GM filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009.
The quote above appropriately describes adoption of data engineering, DataOps, and the whole process of getting business value from data. The IT industry is full of this GM mentality; companies copy technology stacks, concepts, language, job titles, and the "Spotify model." But the culture, organisation dynamics, and incentives remain. As a freelance consultant, I helped many companies modernise their data processes, and in one case even implement the Spotify model, albeit by accident. At the end of the day, they are always puzzled why they don't achieve the same results as the technical elite.
Scling's business model is the joint operation data factory. It is our mission to bring the power of data and AI to companies beyond big tech, and a joint operation is the only model we believe can achieve efficiency comparable to the most data mature companies. The GM mentality is a difficult obstacle for our model, however — companies that we meet think that they can take pictures, replicate, and quickly build a lean, state of the art data factory. If anyone has ideas how to address this obstacle, I am all ears.
"The US division of GM took about 15 years to decide they needed to seriously prioritize implementing the Toyota production system, and a further 10 years to actually implement it. By this time any competitive advantage they could have gained was lost."
We seek the companies that think 25 years is too long. So far, they have been surprisingly difficult to find.
Program Manager at Medtronic
3 年That NUMMI plant was eventually closed and sold for pennies on the dollar to an electric car startup called Tesla.
?????? Founder at Scling
3 年On Twitter, I received a link to this interesting podcast on NUMMI: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015 . It is worth a listen. In addition to the organisational aspect, the human aspect and quality of life impact is fascinating.
?????? Founder at Scling
3 年The quote above is from Lean Enterprise, by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, and Barry O'Reilly