In sticking with our lean and mean theme of late I encountered this interesting piece today that shows that this philosophy applies to big organisations too. Lean is not only for the Start-Ups in todays world.
This time one of the biggest organizations of them all, non other than the USA military (US Air Force) to be exact, is planning on applying lean principles to its future weapons deployment and development strategies.
Faced with the cripling effects of budget cuts amid harsh economic realities juxtaposed to the exponential costs of big ticket weapons programmes that have limit capabilities and flexibility. The world's largest military spender is moving towards developing future weapons in incremental fashion using agile procedures and frameworks.
We must transform into a more agile enterprise to maintain our edge in the emerging environment and leverage the full innovative potential resident in all our Airmen.
Which will avoid...
suboptimal decisions that are difficult to reverse. Huge, long-term programs limit our options
I must say that in my opinion this just makes economic and practical sense. Wonder why it took the F35 crisis to realize that this was an essential doctrine and policy position that needed to be implemented. Then again maybe its not such a bad thing that the tools of mass destruction and pain have costed so much and taken long to come to fruition.
However, if this is a predicator of the future it means that the pace of bringing new killing machines into existence may accelerate. Killing on the cheap? Faster and less risky? All good as long as your not on the business end of these bombs.
Read the full article over at Arstechnica
Written by
Nneko Branche.