Post Mortem Analysis of Strategic Initiatives

Today's Internet and Web technologies address basic communication requirements, but do not provide uniform mechanisms for such critical tasks as creating and managing services on remote computers; supporting “single sign-on” to distributed resources; transferring large datasets at high speeds; or forming large, distributed virtual communities and maintaining information about the existence, state, and usage policies of community resources. Grid technologies address these and other related needs, providing simple infrastructure elements that can be broadly deployed and then used to develop advanced computing applications, much as today's Internet and Web protocols provide the substrate for communication applications.

The ERP software market has been growing at a very fast pace from the year 1993 to 1997, and it has been predicted that the current growth rates of 35% to 40% will be sustained in the long term (www.cio.com). Many large enterprises have already utilized ERP systems to support their business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) activities. According to an ARC Advisory Group (Business Wire, 2004) study, the large ERP system vendors are SAP, BaaN, and ORACLE, and the worldwide market for ERP was US$9.10 billion in 2003 and is forecast to be over US$12 billion in 2008, growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.7% over the next 5 years. In parallel to using ERP, some enterprises have also used other and more advanced scheduling tools to support their planning activities—for example, advanced production scheduling—and added a decision support system to ease reuse of standard software components.

The authors of both articles, Sawhney and Worthen agree that the best learning experience for crisis management is a real crisis (www.cio.com). Therefore, an organization must do all it can to learn from its own crisis experience. To learn from a crisis, the crisis management efforts must be carefully evaluated. The careful post-crisis analysis is called a postmortem. A postmortem is a systematic study of what the crisis management team did and the effectiveness of those actions—it assesses what was done well or poorly. Postmortems are stressful because people fear management is looking for a scapegoat (www.cio.com). It is critical that postmortems are not a search for blame but a search for information. Once evaluated, the crisis team is briefed on its performance. The team learns what it is doing right and what it should change for future crisis management efforts. The next crisis practice should focus on the points the team ...