Pentagonalitil

When you have a flat tire, do you:

A. Keep driving, complaining about how bumpy the road is?

B. Pump air into the tire and hope it won’t leak out this time?

C. Bolt on a new axle?

D. Repair or replace the tire?

In far too many companies the answer is, for some reason, “Anything but D.”

Take, for example, the ITIL-v3-endorsed “best” practice of IT governance through internal charge-backs — an integral part of its run-IT-as-a-business/internal-customer worldview. It’s a classic case of bolting on another axle so as to avoid repairing or replacing a flat tire.

In this case the flat tire is ineffective business governance, and the nail that made it go flat is an absence of leadership.

Charge-backs are, in some situations, unavoidable, such as when contractual requirements demand them. That’s okay – customers are customers, revenue is revenue, and if the cost of revenue is engaging in a pointless waste of time, so what? If a customer wants to pay me to waste my time, no worries.

But otherwise …

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. In it we institute charge-backs to help the U.S. military run better. After all, if charge-backs are best practice and we want the best military in the world, we’d better get cracking.

And so …

An Army brigade commander has money left in his budget, and decides he should attack something. He’ll need advance intelligence, air cover, and because it will be an amphibious assault, help from the Navy.

He contacts the relevant parties, and it starts to go bad. First, the Defense Intelligence Agency can’t provide the real-time updates he needs, explaining that the satellite they rely on isn’t geosynchronous and has other monitoring responsibilities. The best they can do is every other hour, as they make clear in their published service levels.

“I don’t care what the SLA says,” roars the general. “I’m your customer and you have to take care of me!” When they can’t reach a satisfactory agreement, the general shops his requirements around and finally, after exhausting the domestic possibilities, reaches agreement with the Latvian Foreign State Intelligence Service … and at a better price as well.

His negotiations with the Air Force are just as aggravating. “I’m your customer, and I want F-22s,” he explains impatiently. “Your maintenance problems aren’t my responsibility, and I don’t agree that F-16s will do the job. Get with the program or I’ll outsource this to the Brits. They’ve promised me Harriers!”

At least the Navy doesn’t give him a hard time on the landing craft, but the Army Supply System makes up for it by refusing to honor his request for Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifles. “We’ve standardized on the M-16,” they tell him. “Do you know how much flak we’d get from Congress if we bought foreign-manufactured rifles?”

But finally, after an aggravating few months, he has all of his suppliers organized, and finds a week when everyone can fit the assault into their schedule. He makes it happen, successfully, and the GAO journals over the funds from his cost center to theirs (adding a 12.5% transaction fee, on which the CBO adds a 3% audit charge).

And let me just tell you, the Portuguese ambassador was mighty miffed about the whole thing.

Of course this scenario is ridiculous. Even with plenty of budget in reserve, no brigade commander would attack Portugal.

Unless, that is, Belgium was closed for a holiday that weekend.

Much as I’d like to continue this little satire, I can’t. I lack sufficient imagination to properly envision the military operating according to ITIL’s so-called “best practice.”

The U.S. military, in apparent contrast to ITIL, embraces a concept called “leadership.” Its governance comes, I trust, not from charge-backs, but from integrated planning and coordination. Initiative at all levels, far from being independent, is focused on clearly understood goals and missions.

Internal charge-backs turn organizations into marketplaces, where shared-services departments like IT and Human Resources sell to their internal customers. Marketplaces have their uses, the most important of which is to maintain a finely tuned balance between supply and demand.

Companies that have management but not leadership, drowning in political positioning, value these internal marketplaces, because every now-autonomous business unit can get what it needs, when it needs it. Nobody has to waste time and energy achieving consensus about priorities.

Organizations that rely on such niceties as strategy and focused action in the marketplace, in contrast, have no need for an internal marketplace.

Instead, they plan.

* * *

True confessions time: My one direct exposure to military IT governance took place twenty years ago, and wasn’t promising. My hope is that its combat governance provides more useful guidance.

I’m sure lots of subscribers have up-to-the-minute experience. If you’re among them, please share your knowledge by posting Comments on the subject.