Why Traditional Ownership Strategies Often Fail And What To Do About It

Picture source here. Traditionally, ownership is a key theme in many organizations. For many Business related “problems” we often tend to think that ownership will be the way to solve them. And that is ofcourse very true. Without ownership, noone feels “responsible” and we tend to let things go. So ownership helps. But what do we often see: in larger organizations there is a natural tendency to centralize things. We tend to centralize, integrate, uniform, standardize or (out)source on several topics: processes, organizational roles, functionalities, job descriptions, tasks, components, services, ICT etc. And from efficiency point of view there seems at first sight nothing wrong with that. But it can and often will also introduce new problems. By centralizing something which before was decentralized we need to rethink the ownership problem. And centralization will seem to make certain problems less complex but that is not allways true. Sometimes we only redistribute the complexity by centralisation and move the problem into another area. The total complexity remains or might even get worse. So what should we do instead? If we want to make people responsible for something, we must design architectures that are optimized for decentralization as much as possible to the personal level. The more personal ownership can be pinpointed, the better. What do we loose by this approach? We loose some efficiency because we add redundancy. But we gain effectiveness, we reduce the total complexity (because it is now distributed) and we have also spread riscs enourmously by decentralization. So in my opinion, in a human-centrically designed distributed architecture there can be,  on an overall (enterprise) level, more advantages than disadvantages. What is your opinion?