Friday, 28 January 2011

The End is never The End

So, my company has announced a complete end-to-end restructure which will result in a large number of job-losses, particularly in central services such as IT that are being merged from their multiple existences in to one. It all makes perfect sense, actually I'm a little surprised it's taken this long to happen but there we go, one of those things.

Why would any company want more than one department doing the same thing for a sub-set of the whole company? It would appear careless to end up in a situation where there are multiple departments doing similar things, but when you consider that my company is made up of a number of seperate companies that have all been acquired and brought together in a very short space of time, it is perhaps less surprising. What may be surprising to some though is that even with all this internal duplication, we still made a decent profit!

Anyway, now that a lot of consolidation has happened with the technology, it is a convenient moment for departments and companies to be merged together in to one company, one set of departments and one culture. Out of all this, by far the culture is going to be the hardest to change, particularly when one part of the company is dominant and has an entrenched culture that does not fit in with the proposed new culture. Sadly, in my opinion, unless it does change the new culture will fail as well and it will cause significant issues for the future of the company.

We will see. What I do know is that it's highly unlikely I'll be inside helping, I think I'll be outside watching. That's because I think I'm going to move on and find something else to do somewhere else. Sometimes it's good to get a prod that enforces a review and a change in direction. I'm hoping I'll have a bit of padding that will help me be a bit more adventurous than I might otherwise be. 2011 is going to be an incredibly interesting year. Watch this space! :)

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