As an immigrant to the US, it took a while before I got comfortable using the bathrooms in the gas stations on long drives. In most other countries, the bathrooms tend to be unusable. In Britain you have to deposit money to use them and the auto-clean can be interesting experiences.
My wife and I always talked about how they managed to keep those things clean. And it occurred to us one day that it was all because of the long unwieldy things the key is attached to. You can’t loose the key or leave it in the lock.
As I sit in a lot of these ITIL conversations around change management, I find myself smiling. Only if we could maintain the same process around our infrastructure, like the gas stations have around their bathrooms, availability would jump another 9 atleast. Keep the infrastructure locked, till there is an approved change (like the guy who bought gas at your station) and then give them the key with a really long handle, so they can’t loose it or forget it or pass it to someone else
There are some great ideas and parallels in the book by Suellen Hoy
Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Paperback)
Enjoy! 
October 30th, 2006
IT Change Management can learn from what has been learnt about change management more from a people and organizational perspective. Here is an excerpt from “Change Management 101: A Primer” available at http://home.att.net/~nickols/change.htm
Section III: The Change Process
The Change Process as “Unfreezing, Changing and Refreezing”
The process of change has been characterized as having three basic stages: unfreezing, changing, and re-freezing. This view draws heavily on Kurt Lewin’s adoption of the systems concept of homeostasis or dynamic stability.
What is useful about this framework is that it gives rise to thinking about a staged approach to changing things. Looking before you leap is usually sound practice.
What is not useful about this framework is that it does not allow for change efforts that begin with the organization in extremis (i.e., already “unfrozen”), nor does it allow for organizations faced with the prospect of having to “hang loose” for extended periods of time (i.e., staying “unfrozen”).
In other words, the beginning and ending point of the unfreeze-change-refreeze model is stability — which, for some people and some organizations, is a luxury. For others, internal stability spells disaster. A tortoise on the move can overtake even the fastest hare if that hare stands still.It gets more interesting for organizations if the people doing the unfreezing and refreezing are different than those making change. Then this is very powerful insight.
October 30th, 2006
