Moe's SOA & BPM Blog

I suspect many of you are facing issues with your SOA projects and business cases currently with unexplained delays and budget being decimated. Given that decimate originally meant to kill every tenth person, this seems an accurate description of the current climate of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).

For many people this will feel like the worst of times with no signs of a recovery leading to a spiral of lower revenues and cost cutting until there will be two people left in work, and no one will fancy either Gordon’s or Alistair’s jobs by then.

Well I have a solution for this current calamity, and it’s not one I want to keep secret. It is proven to succeed in difficult times, always brings positive results and furthermore is completely free! Don’t believe me? Read on…

We need to delve into economic and political theory to understand the problem and the resolution. Western capitalism has been around for several hundred years, but it has a significant flaw in its structure. Unlike planned economies, capitalism depends on confidence to work. How else could one company (a bank) lend other people’s money to companies and individuals who cannot pay it back quickly, if required? It only works because people have confidence that they will get their money back if they need to. The big flaw here is that if all the savers ask for their money back at the same time, the borrowers will have to liquidate their businesses or assets to pay back their loans, effectively putting them out of business or home. This will force more people to withdraw their savings causing more debt recovery, and so on.

Many of you will have spotted this behaviour over the last year or so and will almost certainly have been affected by it – some of you must have been queuing outside of Northern Rock last year! As the doom-mongers predict an eternity in the Ninth Circle of Hell we would do well to reflect on the converse of this behaviour. If we all stopped worrying and started spending modestly (in line with our earnings growth, not asset growth) companies could afford to take on and pay staff modestly who in turn could spend modestly, and so on. This spending leads to growth which creates more wealth for all of us to spend or save as we choose. This not only gets us out of recession, but also provides a strong platform to lend and borrow confidently again.

So the solution is confidence. Not big government spending or cost cutting, but a sensible and measured approach to living life either just within or just above our means. There, that’s not very painful or scary, is it? We just need to get about a billion people in the West to do the same and the crisis would disappear virtually overnight. Oh, and you then get your budget back for your pet project.

Now if someone could explain the Blur lyrics – “Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as (Parklife)”…