Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 48, by Joe Podolsky:
From: uunet!HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com!JOE_PODOLSKY
Date: Tue, 16 Jan 96 17:42:10 -0800
Subject: New Year's Wishes
James I. Cash, Jr. is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a columnist for InformationWeek magazine. In his January 8, 1996 column, Cash lists seven wishes that he gleaned from a conference of information systems executives at Harvard last summer. He says that "granting these (wishes) would help systems professionals keep users happy." I wonder. Here is his list: * "A better methodology for aligning the IS strategy with business strategy in a proactive, value-added way...They (CIOs) have to learn to recognize the technologies that offer new capabilities that can lead to a change in the organization's strategic focus (by enabling new products or redesigned business processes), and they need to learn to communicate the implications of adopting such technologies." I'd give that wish about a 8 on the 10 point business/IT scale I just invented. We need more than just alignment; alignment implies separation. What I'd wish for here is true integration with the business. That's probably too much to wish for, so I'd settle for _commitment_ on the part of the IT people, commitment not to the technology, but commitment to the business. Even before the days of "career self-reliance," many IT people saw themselves as gypsies, moving from one company to another, with more loyalty to the headhunter who got them their next job than to their current employer. That's a really dangerous attitude. It not only emotionally isolates us IT people from our business colleagues, but it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's different in HP. Here, we tend to stay within the company, but also within the IT function as we roam among assignments (See Jottings 47). That's OK, but wherever we work, we have to learn the business _from the viewpoint of the business_! We should take time to actually work on the business side for a few weeks or a few months, to use the systems we support, to meet external customers, to build the products. We must feel like part of the business we serve, not like just smart consultants to business clients. * "Guidance on how to plan and oversee client-server implementations." This isn't much of a problem here at HP; Client-Server-R-Us. But Cash is right. This is a problem for most IT shops, but it's not an IT problem. Again it's a business/IT integration problem. By definition, true client-server requires decentralized organizations, not merely distributed organizations where units are spread over the map but control is still in one place. Client-server requires that business (and, therefore IT) control be at the client end. HP is good at that, so client-server is a natural act. Not so in most other companies. Two-tiered, mainframe-centric architectures are _not_ client-server, even when our HP beige boxes replace the blue ones. * "A good book on outsourcing." Yep. That one gets a 10. His wish, though reminds me of a Broom Hilda cartoon where Gaylord hollers into a cave asking Irwin what he's doing. "Can't talk now," says Irwin. "I'm busy with a good book called _The Idiot's Guide to Life and Love_. "I've never heard of it," says Gaylord, "but it sounds like a perfect book for you to read." "Read?" replies Irwin, emerging from the cave. "I'm writing it!" And while we IT people write the book on outsourcing, I hope we include two crucial chapters: 1) On how to apply what we know about quality to outsourcing, and 2) on how to integrate the outsourced software and services with legacy systems and processes. * The next wish is for Internet security standards. I guess that's a big deal to a lot of people, but I'm not involved in this right now, so I'll move on. * "Every IS professional wishes for a glimpse of the systems in their organization's future...CIOs are trying to develop coherent IT architectures, but they are having trouble separating vendor hype from realistic hope." Since I'm already thinking of cartoons, this wish reminds me of the famous Pogo statement, "We have met the enemy, and it is us." As most futurists say, the best way to foretell the future is to invent it. The wish implies that we are at the mercy of vendors. That's only true if we let it be so. We need to understand our business and deal with vendors from the strength of that knowledge. That doesn't mean we should be rigid in our requirements, but it does mean that we should know what compromises are business-sensitive and which are less crucial, and we must be able to earn the respect of both our business partners and our vendors as we broker cost-effective _business process_ solutions. Cash's last two wishes come from the same cloth, the fabric of continuous learning. Wish 6 is for "the gift of education," for "time away from corporate firefighting to catch up on the latest management notes and compare notes with their peers." Wish 7 is for "increases to staff training budgets, so they (the CIOs) can upgrade employee's skills." Let me take the last one first. Training, in my mind, is not something you separate from a budget. Training has to be an inherent part of your projects. Training has to be justified based on the time and cost it will save the project. Training must shrink learning curves. Training must improve quality by reducing rework and lowering support costs. And, if you think you can't justify training from these viewpoints, you are probably ignoring the crucial human elements in your systems design and user implementations. Education is a somewhat different matter, since, by definition, it deals with issues that are much less specific to a given piece of defined work. But education need not be expensive in either money or time. Education can come from books and magazines, from video and audio tapes. Expensive seminars and conferences are social events that may spark an educational flame but the feeding of the fire has to come from daily choices to read a business book instead of watching "ER", to listening to a tape of a well known speaker instead of commuting to the beat of the top 40 tunes. But even these choices can be sugar-coated. A bunch of us have been enjoying a very successful bi-weekly book group over in Building 4L, fueled by Friday morning goodies supplied by our host, Product Generation Information Systems. Brown-bag lunches are equally successful in many areas. The formula is simple: a champion to lightly facilitate things + an e-mail list of interested folks + food. I thank James Cash for jogging my thoughts. But, if I do any special planning at New Year's, I like the idea of resolutions rather than of wishes. Especially in these areas of IT and business management, we should not and need not wish for a genie; rather we should resolve to take charge of our destiny ourselves. We have the skills. All we need is the will-power and the persistence. What are your resolutions for 1996? Regards, Joe