Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi wrote about The End of Analytic Science:
Chemistry that shrugs at pollution is foolishness, Economics that discounts politics and sociology is just as ignorant as are politics and sociology that discount economics.
I would like to apply this way of thinking to the business of IT – software implementation without development of best practices and adoption management strategy is a waste of resources.
As a consultant, I often witnessed IT executives taking a role of enablers rather than game changers, shying away from leading organizational transformation to the position of junior partner in the process. Some of the reasons for such attitude are career path and professional background of individuals involved, and subsequently their perception of risk/reward probabilities. I would suggest that primary skill of most CIO is an operational risk management, not organizational transformation management.
Many years ago I have lost a lot of my political capital as a CIO because of massive hardware failure caused loss of email services for over 24 hours. Nobody was interested in details, reasons, and excuses. Since then I did not become any better in hardware or networking operations, but I did learn to demand building multiple redundancies and periodic fail over testing for all critical services. And most importantly, management processes to control that my demands are actually acted on.
So why do we think that it is sufficient to deliver projects on time and within the budgets? Why are we often not treated as an equal partner by the business community? Because true partners do not stop half the way, and take more risk. They act as principals, not as agents.
Charlie Rose touched on a very raw nerve in his interview with Andrew McAfee
Charlie is not a time-waster; his first questions were around the big issue of IT’s impact on competition. And he immediately hit on an apparent paradox: how can universally available technology contribute to competitive differentiation? Doesn’t something have to be scarce in order for it to be competitively valuable?
Andrew has provided a reasonably good answer to this question in the context of Enterprise Software, but I have been struggling with it in a somewhat larger scope – what makes companies different? Michael Hammer of Business Process Re-Engineering fame, not to be confused with Mickey Spillane character, believed that business processes defined the uniqueness of an enterprise. I cannot point to an actual reference expressing this idea this way, but that was how I understood it.
I am a very big fan and a student of Michael Hammer, but it is very hard for me to accept that it is a set of business processes around product design and marketing, that differentiate Apple from Dell or Creative Labs. All three are in the business of consumer electronics, among other things, and manufacture products of similar functionality, but that is where the similarities end. I would love to have an opportunity to study the processes of these very different companies to come to a well documented and definite conclusion, but before that happens I would like to suggest that perhaps the respective leadership of these companies have much more defining influence on their uniqueness. In fact the effective business processes landscape is the reflection of effective leadership.
I have been very uncomfortable with a liberal use of term “Tsar” lately by people who are elected to protect our freedom and democracy. Barry Eisler’s “Heart of the matter” blog post helped me to understand the roots of my discomfort.
I first started ruminating on this when various pundits and politicians began calling for a bailout and restructuring of Detroit’s Big Three, a process that sounded to me remarkably like Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. Restructuring and refocusing a company while eliminating unsustainable obligations is the purpose of Chapter 11. So why reinvent the wheel? Why isn’t the existing system adequate?
All the war on drugs duplication and the war’s concomitant ongoing success (insert sarcasm emoticon here) makes me wonder: how high is the correlation between the severity of a policy failure and the amount of governmental duplication dedicated to it? Pretty high, I’ll bet. Whether the correlation is also causal is debatable, but I have a theory: the more certain a policy is to fail, the more politically imperative it is for politicians to appear to assault the underlying problem with czars and commissions and special overseers. Then, when the inevitable failure occurs, the politician can say, "But look how much I was doing! No one could have done more."
If Barry is correct in his assessment, we may be for a very difficult, expensive and long period of “construction without blueprints”, when previously learned lessons are discarded and written off as mistakes, rather then used for analysis, even post-mortem if necessary. Unfortunately the decision makers are too busy to point fingers at each other to conduct meaningful inquiry, and ideology is a very poor substitute for economics.
In a microcosm of corporate IT organizations you can see these situations arise when the company getting a shock like unexpected quarterly loss or accounting scandal. The executives are thrown out (with the golden parachute) or thrown to jail, auditors are fired, projects are abandoned at the great cost, and after awhile everybody settles down into the same systems and practices. As my former partner used to say – “Shit is the same, just the flies are changing”.
Personally, I prefer much more evolutionary approach to development of solutions. In my experience it works much better if you prefer workable, scalable solutions to a lot of noise and waste.
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