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160 years ago we were a nation of farms and small merchants, in which both people and information traveled no faster than when Julius Caesar overthrew the Roman republic.

A mere 45 years later, the trip from the east coast to California, formerly a half-year ordeal, was a routine two week journey; information traveled coast-to-coast in seconds; and giant corporations were considered persons by the law.

And you thought the Internet transformed the world? Compared to the transcontinental railroad, the agent of these transformational changes, the Internet hasn’t come close.

Take time to read Stephen Ambrose’s Nothing Like It in the World, which chronicles the process through which Abraham Lincoln preserved the union from an east/west division just as surely, if less dramatically, as his leadership of the Civil War preserved it from secession by the southern states.

Whenever you read history you learn something useful about the present. Among the many instances here are foreshadowings of both Enron and a current IT controversy.

The Enron foreshadowing? Both the Union Pacific Railroad and Southern Pacific Railroad companies created separate construction companies. The construction companies, owned by the railroad company board members, siphoned off huge amounts of capital from the railroad companies, enriching their owners while leaving both the employees and other railroad shareholders holding the bag. Sound vaguely familiar?

But that doesn’t directly affect you as a working leader of information technology. This does, as a metaphor for problems you deal with every day:

For the Southern Pacific Railroad, hardwood railroad ties were in short supply. To avoid construction delays, it used cottonwood ties in much of its initial construction instead, even though they would last only a few years. Bad engineering? The company desperately needed cash flow. Had it waited until it could acquire enough of the “right” railroad ties, it would have run out of money before finishing construction.

This philosophy explains a lot of what we’ve experienced with Microsoft operating systems over the years. Time-to-market has usually trumped internal engineering, to the despair of many in our profession. Was this decision wise? The question is, for whom? Certainly, the earlier Microsoft is able to ship product the earlier it makes a profit. What — you thought Microsoft was an altruistic enterprise, putting your best interests ahead of its own? That isn’t how business works. From its perspective, generating revenues earlier was worth the impact on its image with respect to quality.

Sometimes bad engineering is the best engineering — a valuable lesson. An example even closer to home:

Quite a few readers griped about my endorsement of Fire Controlman Derrick Thomas’s homegrown database, which reduced the time needed by the U.S.S. Benfold for each Persian Gulf ship inspection by two and a half hours. Thomas should have worked with an IT professional to build it right, I was told … after all, it was probably an undocumented mess, and who supported the system once he left the ship?

Had Thomas had taken this advice, he’d have waited until the Benfold returned to port, then submitted his request. Had it ever emerged from the priority queue the Benfold would have received the system a year or two later.

It’s cottonwood now or hardwood too late: A fleet of destroyers’ worth of capital and wages, times 2.5 hours per ship inspection, times a few hundred inspections, all spent because end-users shouldn’t build systems by themselves?

The quality of Thomas’s code is unknown. But the quality of his business judgment?

Outstanding.

ManagementSpeak: This change has already been signed off on.
Translation: No one bothered to study how the work is really done.

Correspondent L.T. has no questions as to why the actual customer in the trenches is confused.

Hitting a pitched baseball is the most difficult job in professional sports, or so I’m told. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, only about 1% of the strike zone yields a solidly struck ball, and the batter has less than a half second to get his bat there, swung hard enough so the ball at least clears the infield.

It isn’t easy, which is why anyone who can do so a third of the time receives a lot of money to play a game.

A recent column likened this task to customer relationship management (CRM) or supply chain management (SCM) projects, suggesting that the 30% success rates reported for them aren’t all that bad. Quite a few readers objected to the comparison. They’re right, too: CRM and SCM make hitting a baseball seem easy.

CRM and SCM require strategic change. As I use the terms, tactical change results in business improvement — your measures get better — while strategic change redefines your goals, and as a result changes what you measure.

Strategic change is much, much harder. Why?

Tactical change involves three organizational dimensions: Process, technology, and employee skills. Typically, you begin with process redesign, then design the technology the new process will need, and finish with a training program for all affected employees.

That’s hard enough. But it’s far simpler than strategic change, which may involve as many as seven other dimensions of change as well — all interconnected and interdependent.

Strategic change looks outside the company as well as inside. Looking out, you may need to redefine relationships with customers and vendors, along with your products, and pricing. You need to anticipate how the marketplace you operate in will evolve, and you need to pay careful attention to your “messages” — communication through all media, from advertising to conversations between customers and your call centers.

Internal change gains complexity, too, because you can’t stop with process, technology and skills. Usually, strategic change leads to structural change as well — how you’re organized, your compensation system, and the criteria and paths by which you advance employees. Nor can you ignore the corporate culture.

Some companies say they’re implementing CRM when what they’re really doing is installing a contact management system. That’s a tactical change, and isn’t really all that difficult. True CRM, or SCM, or any other strategic change is a whole lot harder.

In fact, it’s a whole new ball game.