I love golf.

I wandered through a golf show a few weeks ago, looking at gadgets, daydreaming of long, straight drives, and pondering the game as a metaphor for managing IS (not for the first time, either — see my July 8, 1996, column on the subject).

The obsession so many of us have with long tee shots is a good example. Just as most of us would be better off playing a five iron off the tee and practicing our putting, so many CIOs worry about aligning IS strategy with the company’s goals and vision while ignoring the real big-money issue — poor project execution.

So it was that I visited a booth selling custom woods (actually metals, good persimmon being unavailable these days). The purveyors of these fine clubs had a killer sales pitch: Rather than fix my slice-prone swing, they would sell me clubs that compensate for my deficiencies.

For a significant price, of course.

These clubs provide us with a lovely two-sided metaphor. On the one side we have executives who think nothing of spending a sizable fraction of their annual bonuses on these very same custom golf clubs and a supply of titanium balls, but who cheap out when it comes to providing a reasonable set of tools for IS. They believe better tools will help their golf games, but not their businesses.

On the other side we have IS weenies who are convinced that if they just had better tools, they’d suddenly become the ultimate code warriors, able to create magical applications in periods of time so brief that quantum effects predominate.

Examples of the former are easy to find: Data center managers who lack funds to implement network management, developers whose request for source management software is denied, even project managers who aren’t given basic project management software.

Examples of the latter are just as readily found: A friend of mine bought a PC-based Cobol compiler a few years back expecting to develop and unit test mainframe applications on it. A few minor problems cropped up after the money was spent: The systems it was purchased to support ran on top of a proprietary transaction manager and used a proprietary data compression system, neither of which would run on anything other than an MVS mainframe. Oops.

Then there are the fifty-buck tools that solve five-buck problems. In the early days of Unicenter, for example, Computer Associates boasted of its ability to stop batch jobs if available storage filled up, roll off some files to tape, restart the job, and restore the files at the end of the process. The sole design flaw: For the price of the software, you could have bought enough scratch storage to run any batch job you could imagine. Sometimes, brute force can be more appealing than elegance.

Business executives often complain about our buying technology for technology’s sake. The complaints are, for the most part, groundless. The applications IS deploys and manages invariably have a business purpose.

Except for tools, that is. Let’s face it: A lot of us have a yen for the latest and greatest software tools, just like some stereotypical husband with a workshop who wants a table saw or drill press.

How to make sense of requests for expensive tools? The answer is to eschew (gesundheit!) the use of broad principles. They won’t help. The only way you get a handle on this issue is to figure out your core processes first. These usually are (in order of importance): data center operations; applications maintenance; end-user support; system selection, customization, and integration; software testing; and application development. Understand your processes first and you’ll quickly understand which tools you need and which ones may be wonderful, but just don’t fit.

Oh yeah, just one more thing: While you’re busily giving your developers killer workstations with dual overhead cams, fuel injection, and turbochargers, also give them Pentium 133s with 32 MB of RAM to test their works of art. The P-133 is an important developer’s tool.

You’ll be amazed at how much having to use one will improve a typical developer’s code.