Back to one's roots

Background: I've been playing futurist for the last few months. Not the 
left-field management consulting sort (who I tend to pigeonhole 
somewhere alongside Rael and Wormtongue), but simply the fellow who 
identifies and summarizes trends in engineering over the next 5-20 
years. Most recently I've been working in the manufacturing sector.

Premise: It's pretty clear that agile manufacturing is poised to go 
over the next couple of decades. Besides infrastructure improvements 
that are creeping into factories, the synchronized cohort of big WWII 
and '70s capital investments that are getting rickety, and intense 
pressure from customers in this "time of trouble" for agility from 
their suppliers, they also have a handy two-line hook:

"Leanness is optimality in those aspects of the business process you 
can control; agility is being optimally capable of handling what you 
can't control." [my consolidation of many authors]

This tagline invariably gets a nod from any manager in the 
manufacturing sector, including quite a few who are in charge of 
software and IT divisions in their companies. I've observed this, 
though: presented with the same argument for agile software 
development, in the same exact setting, there is much less enthusiasm. 
Indeed, several folks (C-level and elsewhere) have pointed out that 
they don't believe agility has much business value for their 
IT/development operations. (These are OEM-level and Tier 1 companies 
I'm talking about, so there are 2000+ people in their in-house IT 
divisions.)

But this is even weirder: XP and other agile software development 
methods will have arrived (and maybe gone) well before agile 
manufacturing does. It's going to take a decade or two before we see 
anywhere near the *real* level of agility in manufacturing that we see 
now in software development. So in XP we have a clear example of one 
way to proceed towards agility, and yet it's unlike anything anybody is 
talking about in the manufacturing sector. There's a very deep 
disconnect.

I think that's interesting.

In making a firm more agile, it seems to me that you can choose to 
address a lot of different aspects of the business process, which I've 
broadly categorized into: technological solutions (networks, "smarter" 
machines on the factory floor, &c), infrastructure solutions (formal 
processes, better forecasting, knowledgebases, and other operations 
stuff like that there), and cultural solutions (changing the social 
network, changing the workplace layout, eliminating silos, formal 
communication channels and barriers, &c).

For agile manufacturing, the focus of ongoing R&D is firmly entrenched 
in the tech and infrastructure categories, with very little mention 
ever made of the cultural side. Walk down the hall at a Big Three or 
European car manufacturer's research facility, and you'll see a lot of 
"rapidly reconfigurable tooling rigs" and "networked agent-based 
market-directed factory layouts." (the case is qualitatively different 
in Japan, but I won't be going into that here ;-)

On the other hand, agile software development R&D is focused on 
infrastructure and culture, and right this second I confess I can't 
think of a single author who has suggested a technological "gadgety" 
approach to software agility that has become popular (anybody?).

I confess that I'd like to see more cross-talk between the agile 
manufacturing and agile software development efforts. Or an explanation 
of why there shouldn't be. It strikes me that there are more than 
analogies and metaphors linking them: there is a kernel of business 
strategy that can be shared both ways.

So to summarize, we have:
- the same simple business case for adaptability in manufacturing and 
software
- very different perceptions of the need in those two aspects of 
business
- very different focus in R&D supporting agility in those two aspects 
of business

What's driving the split?
Might it be a good thing to reunite these efforts?
Might it benefit the promotion of XP to re-emphasize the link to agile 
manufacturing?
-----
Bill Tozier
[email protected]

"Comedians and politicians each tell the audience what it wants to 
hear. The difference is that the audience laughs at the comedian and 
the politician laughs at the audience."
   -- Alexis A. Gilliland


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