An executive friend’s complaint: “Why can’t IT get its act together and stop being the Wild West?”
“First it was structured programming,” he continued. “Then it was objects. Now it’s services, and The Cloud. We used to have feasibility, requirements, external design, internal design, construction, testing and roll-out. Now we have Agile, and I can’t keep track of all the kinds of Agile that are all supposed to be the Next Big Thing.” (You could hear the capital letters.)”
“Isn’t it time for IT to figure it out, and be like Accounting where everyone knows how things are supposed to get done?”
What’s a self-important pundit to do? So, socially awkward or not, I answered. “I sure hope not,” is what I said.
It’s time for one of those relevant-but-distracting digressions that are a whole lot more fun to write than they are to read (the price you pay for not having to pay): A parallel and common complaint that sets my teeth on edge every time I hear it. Call it the Adipose Fallacy:
“These scientists keep changing their story! First we weren’t supposed to eat anything with cholesterol. Then cholesterol was okay to eat, but fat was bad. Then it was just saturated fats. Now it’s trans fats. Meanwhile, serum cholesterol used to be the problem. Now it’s only LDLs … HDLs are good. And I just read that it might not be that … it’s the size of the cholesterol particles in the blood.”
“By the time I die they’ll have decided I should have been eating steak and avoiding vegetables.”
I blame McDonald’s. No, not because of what it puts in its food, and not because I think it contributes to the Know-Nothing Propaganda Machine, if there is one.
No, it’s because McDonald’s was what first got society headed down the what-do-you-mean-I-have-to-wait? road to perdition. (Yes, I know, White Castle came first, but there’s a difference between precedence and impact.)
Most of us now expect results instantly … just add water … without accepting that instantly has its limits.
Take scientific knowledge. While our ability to figure things out has certainly benefited from modern communication technologies, not to mention a larger population of researchers than at any time in history, there are still limits to how fast the process can go and still get things right.
And so, back in the 1960s, researchers first noticed a correlation between serum cholesterol and heart attacks. I suppose they could have kept this knowledge to themselves, but that isn’t how science is done. Science relies on what we’ve come to call, annoyingly enough, transparency: Until results are published in a peer-reviewed journal, and then reproduced in other labs, they don’t count.
Or, scientists could have decided that, having spotted the correlation, they were done. That also isn’t how science is done. There’s always more to figure out.
Which is why a small army of researchers — people whose intelligence ranges from merely very smart to utterly brilliant — have been painstakingly peeling the onion to understand how diet affects the cardiovascular system. Unsurprisingly, the more they learn the more complicated the picture becomes.
And because the process is transparent, we’re exposed to every step. But instead of thanking these folks for spending their lives figuring out what kills us instead of using their intelligence to invent new financial derivatives, we gripe.
Which is why I hope IT never “figures it out.”
Accounting hasn’t changed all that much since Pacioli invented it 500 years ago. Debits on the left, credits on the right, close the books every month, and really close them every year. This is the, what, 21st century? Shouldn’t Accounting be keeping track in real time? Or is Accounting scientific publishing, with external audit serving as peer reviewers? Just askin’.
Anyway, IT has changed all that much since Babbage, Turing, Von Neumann, and a few other smart folks first got us pointed in the right direction. The changes haven’t been small or cosmetic, either. They’ve been profound.
An example among dozens: In the 1960s, when business computing got seriously rolling, “design the user interface” meant designing a better card-punch machine. Now it’s a very large fraction of the total system design.
Another example, mentioned incessantly in this space: We’ve moved the goalposts — we don’t design systems anymore. We design business change. The move from objects to services embeds this notion in technology. Think that might change things just a bit?
So this is just me: The day we in IT really do figure it out is the day I leave the field and find something else to do.
Something that hasn’t just become boring.
I could not disagree more about your comparison with accounting. You must not have not been paying attention. When I graduated from College in 1965, there were 7 APBs. Now there are many many pronouncements by the FASB. The tax code has new rules and pronouncements every day. The Arthur Anderson debacle is akin to the W3C going out of business. Michael Milken and his ilk changed the accounting rules forever. New standards are continually evolving in codes like SAS, ISO 9000, SOX. Auditing has become a matter of statistical sampling.
Saying accounting has not changed because the debits are still on the right is like saying computing has not changed because 0 is still off and 1 is still on.
It isn’t that I wasn’t paying attention. And I don’t claim to know the trade deeply enough to be certain (hence the “just askin'” at the end).
Seems to me as an interested outsider that the changes you describe are more a matter of additional complexity in the details than in the fundamentals. More examples: IT moved from primarily batch processing to primarily real-time/near-real-time interactive processing in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s a fundamental change in how systems are designed, organized, and interconnected. IT used to support only transactional data. Now it supports systems for creating, managing, storing and analyzing unstructured data as well … documents, presentations, spreadsheets and so on.
Then there’s the Internet, which redefined the boundaries of the trade in profound ways.
Please understand – I’m not saying Accounting is easy, and I’m not saying you can learn it once and work until retirement on that knowledge. I’m saying that to the best of my knowledge, the sorts of transformational changes we’ve seen in IT have no parallels in the world of accounting.
I could, of course, be wrong … As I said, I don’t know Accounting in enough depth to claim certainty on the point.
Hey Bob,
I hope IT change does not stop, at least in my lifetime. I want to keep reading your wisdom, and wit. Your thoughts about managing the IT function are very valuable in my “non-IT, but conventional” management life. Change just for change’s sake may be bad, but change that produces improvement, while sometimes painful, is good.
Another “you hit a home run” article…..
>”By the time I die they’ll have decided I should have been eating steak and avoiding vegetables.”
Make that, “Eating steak and avoiding bread,” and you’d be a touch closer to probably true.
Someone once said: “The problem with instant gratification is that it takes too long,”
“This is the, what, 21st century? Shouldn’t Accounting be keeping track in real time?”
Actually, it HAS been keeping track in real time, for a long time — thanks to computers and networking. And that IS a big change.
In 1989, I personally set up an accounting system for a start-up company in the business of owning and operating apartment buildings. This company had a grand total of 5 employees (including me), with a computer on every desk and all computers on the same network. Billing, cash receipts, accounts payable invoices, accounts payable checks, and other financial transactions would be entered (or generated) at one computer, and were visible at all the other computers less than one minute later. The paperwork Work-In-Process, waiting to be entered, fit into a stack of manila folders that was rarely over an inch thick and was deliberately COMPLETELY empty at the end of every month. For the accounting manager, who had graduated from college not long before, it was a revelation that the printouts when put together constituted COMPLETELY textbook-perfect books: an important part of his training involved coping with huge volumes of data (in partially manual systems) by batching and summarizing, and he was surprised that the start-up’s standard computer reports (including General Ledger reports) actually contained ALL the same detail as shown in toy-sized examples in textbooks, but in the full real-world quantities of an actual real-world business. It’s easier to audit things, and a lot harder to hide errors and frauds, when every single detail is RIGHT THERE — and computer-searchable, so you can go on automated fishing expeditions looking for things that might be suspicious (which is something ELSE that I did, for a different company).
All this occurred at the same time as “pegboard” a.k.a. “one-write” systems were still standard for small businesses of this size and complexity, and anywhere up to perhaps 10 times larger. These were systems that were operating with manual handwriting, written with ball-point pens onto paper forms with carbon-paper gunk on the back. These “pegboard” accounting systems were STILL COMPETITIVE with computer-based accounting systems at that time.
The simple fact that at any time, a computer-based accounting system can print out (or print-to-screen) a complete Monthly General Ledger or a Year-To-Date General Ledger, is all by itself a massive improvement over what came before. It’s comparable, in its area, to word processing in ITS area; the whole concept of retyping everything in order to get a “fair copy” to work with is a thing of the past, and has been for a long time. Remember, all this has occurred — specifically at a price that can be afforded by ANY small business, including a “one-employee enterprise” / sole-proprietership — EXTREMELY recently on the time-scale of accounting’s history, 30 years at the most.
The way I see it, most of those accounting changes, and especially those to allow real-time accounting, have much more to do with computers and software than actual changes in accounting. The changes are made possible by the technology advancements and are implemented by people designing and writing code.
RIGHT ON !!!