China and Information Systems: Culture vs. Chaos
During my trip to Beijing I had an interesting discussion with a Chinese collegue concerning ERP software in China (and IS in general). He claimed the unsatisfactory success of ERP packages in China is rooted in a different understanding of management in China:
According to him management is considered an art in China rather than a science as it is in the west. In consequence it is less standardized, less rule-based, and less data driven. He contrasted this with Germany which he saw as a natural origin of large ERP packages.
After reflecting this I became somewhat sceptical about the root-cause-relationships in this theory. I suspect that the notion of management as an art is not the origin of discrepancis but rather one of their natural results: In an unstable business environment, balancing on a brittle legal ground, and embedded in person-dependent social networks where loyality is not oriented towards ideas and organizations but towards friends and family, management needs to become art.
But what are the consequences of all this besides software design? Lack of standardization also means a lack of efficiency. Where you cannot standardize and harvest data you have no possibility to reap the fruits of economies of scale, professionalization, and optimization-loops. This is not a quesiton of software - the applipicability of standard software is rather an indicator of weak cost-efficiency. This again goes in line with my scepticism of the actual state of the economy in the booming mainland.
Just a dim suscpicion, though, not a fact-based theory.
According to him management is considered an art in China rather than a science as it is in the west. In consequence it is less standardized, less rule-based, and less data driven. He contrasted this with Germany which he saw as a natural origin of large ERP packages.
After reflecting this I became somewhat sceptical about the root-cause-relationships in this theory. I suspect that the notion of management as an art is not the origin of discrepancis but rather one of their natural results: In an unstable business environment, balancing on a brittle legal ground, and embedded in person-dependent social networks where loyality is not oriented towards ideas and organizations but towards friends and family, management needs to become art.
But what are the consequences of all this besides software design? Lack of standardization also means a lack of efficiency. Where you cannot standardize and harvest data you have no possibility to reap the fruits of economies of scale, professionalization, and optimization-loops. This is not a quesiton of software - the applipicability of standard software is rather an indicator of weak cost-efficiency. This again goes in line with my scepticism of the actual state of the economy in the booming mainland.
Just a dim suscpicion, though, not a fact-based theory.
posted by Henning at
8:52 AM
2 Comments:
That might arise the question, what is the substantial difference between 'science' and 'art'? It is not apriori a contradiction. Some might even say something like 'science is an art', or 'art is an science'. That feels strange but might be valid to some extend. I do wonder if management is to be considered as a science at all (even in the west). Maybe you want to say: 'system design follows the (busines) process not vice versa. And these processes differ fundamentally between china and america/europe.'. I'd say design and maintenance of such processes is considered an art in the east (meaning complexity is intended and considered as beauty) while in the west it is science (meaning efficiency, structure and simplicity is intended).
By
kringel, at 12:37 AM
Kringel: However you put it - efficieny remains as an issue.
By
Henning, at 7:38 PM
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