Risky Business

I’ve often thought about how to explain the differences between working for small/medium businesses and an “Enterprise”. Well, Ian Miell breaks it down better than I could in his article Why Are Enterprises So Slow?

I would sum it up thusly:

The priority of the Enterprise is risk avoidance. They have a huge, successful business and don't want to screw it up. A startup is the opposite. They have a tiny, fledgling business and must take risks constantly to be successful.

A huge, old company has seen just about every way someone can screw something up, and they’ve written a rule that applies to everyone that intends to prevent it from ever happening again.

It’s very important to the Enterprise that when something goes wrong there’s “One Throat to Choke.” As Ian explains..

From ownership comes responsibility. A lot of the political footwork in an enterprise revolves around trying to not own technologies. Who wants to be responsible for Java usage across a technology function of dozens of thousands of staff, any of whom might be doing crazy stuff? You first, mate.

The ability to always have some specific person within the organization to blame for something leads to the laborious “Change Management” in the Enterprise. As Ian explains..

In order to ensure that changes to systems can be attributed to responsible individuals, there is usually some kind of system that tracks and audits changes. One person will raise a ‘change record’, which will usually involve filling out an enormous form, and then this change must be ‘signed off’ by one or more other person to ensure that changes don’t happen without due oversight.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with preferring working for an Enterprise over a smaller company…in fact there are many advantages depending on one’s point of view.

Just realize that the Enterprise is above all else risk-averse, and hence, slow.

Read the whole of Ian’s article for more wisdom:

Why Are Enterprises So Slow?