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Let’s play telephone. You know the game – it’s the one where each person at a party whispers a message in the ear of the next person, until the message has gone full circle. By the time the message returns to the original speaker, it’s completely distorted.

Only we’re going to play it the IS way. We’re going to have only two people in the room – a CEO and a CIO. And instead of whispering, they’ll speak in loud voices. Let’s listen in:

CEO: “We always seem to be one year away from achieving high value. The high cost of undelivered promises is a continuing and increasing problem.”

CIO, trying to repeat the CEO’s message verbatim: “IS isn’t very well aligned with the business and we need to do a better job of getting involved in setting the company’s strategic direction.”

The CEO quotation comes from quotes in a recent InfoWorld article reporting on a census conducted by the London School of Economics. The CIO quotation paraphrases conversations I’ve had with CIOs and articles I’ve read by various pundits describing what they think the big problems are with IS.

I guess we weren’t paying attention during all those seminars where they taught good listening skills.

Why do we keep getting this wrong? The answer, I’m afraid, is simple: Strategy is fun and easy. Done the usual way, it requires neither deep thought nor intellectual rigor. Not only that, it’s prestigious, and provides a wonderful boost for our egos: We’re involved in setting the company strategy!

Delivery, in contrast, is hard work.

Pick up the clue phone, folks. If you want to be involved in the fun stuff you have to earn the right. Do you know why the directors of manufacturing, customer service, accounting, and sales and marketing all get to play? Because manufacturing gets product out the door, sales and marketing gets it sold, customer service keeps ’em coming back for more, and accounting makes sure the bills are paid and taxes are kept as low as possible.

Meanwhile, IS projects have a failure rate worse than the Cubs’ infamous shortstop, André “Double-play” Rogers (so-called because when he batted with a man on first, you could count on his hitting a grounder to the second baseman). With projects of any size, we bat about .100 – about 10 percent get done with some semblance of success.

In the data center, our servers go up and down like yo-yos. Sometimes it’s deliberate, too – I know of some data centers that still take down servers in the middle of the business day because that’s a more convenient time to do it … for the data center staff. Sometimes servers crash a lot because the data center manager expects servers to be unreliable. Trying to make an NT (or Novell, or whatever) server reliable, to these mainframe jockeys, has about as much point as Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills.

Never mind that lots of data centers run reliable NT environments (hint: reboot the server every Sunday night) – these fossils subconsciously want the servers to crash, because that will justify their dislike of the new technology.

Then there’s the Help Desk. Many CIOs staff it with the lowest-paid, most poorly trained people in IS, and use it largely as a dispatch center. Then they complain when end-users try to bypass it. Run an actual information center, staffed with experts in PC applications who actually enjoy helping end-users succeed?

Bring up that sorry subject and you’ll hear the same explanation you’ll hear when you ask for a raise: “It isn’t in the budget.” What a sorry excuse that is, too – if you want to be the CIO, you’d better learn how to justify important expenditures, even those whose benefits are hard to quantify.

The funny thing is, CEOs aren’t complaining about lack of quantifiable return on investment. That’s our hang-up.

The CEOs are complaining about broken promises and simple bad management.

Want to be involved in your company’s strategic planning?

If you want to get picked for the All Stars, first you have to succeed at the fundamentals.

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Steven Wright once asked if shaving cream does anything at all beyond helping you keep track.

It’s a good question.

It isn’t just shaving cream whose only role is helping you keep track. Sometimes, that’s the role of the “repeatable, predictable processes” that so many of us high falutin’ consultants promote as the solution to every business problem.

Before we had process redesign we had Taylor’s “scientific management” and its time-and-motion studies, which tried to turn industrial processes into precisely defined repetitive motions. Beginning with the assumption that business works best when human brains aren’t involved in running it, scientific management led inevitably to repetitive stress disorder. Oops.

We’ve replaced scientific management with process redesign. According to the process perspective, “everything is a process,” a phrase I’ve heard often enough to make me want to argue, just out of spite. “My desk isn’t a process,” I hear myself retort cleverly while I watch ’em fold like pawn-shop accordions. “Neither is my car. Or my …”

“No, no!” they sputter, nonplussed. “We meant to say, everything you do is a process, because everything you do is a series of steps that gets you to the end result.”

Which is absolutely, true — everything you do is a process. Everything you do isn’t, however, a Process, a distinction process design consultants often fail to make in their zeal to craft high-quality-producing methods for achieving results. There are three big differences between processes and Processes:

1. Most of the intelligence needed to create the desired results has been built into Processes. In contrast, most of the intelligence needed to successfully follow a process is in the minds of the individuals following it.

2. The products of Processes have well-defined specifications; quality is defined as adherence to those specifications and can be objectively measured. A Process generates either large numbers or a continuous flow of its product. A process also creates an output. That output may be unique or a custom item; often its specifications aren’t known in advance.

3. People fulfill roles in Processes — the Process is at the center. It’s the other way around with processes: People use them to make sure they do things in the right order without forgetting anything. Lower-case processes play a role in employees’ success.

Don’t buy it yet? Think of the difference between the Process of manufacturing a car and the process of creating advertising. You can specify the steps for building a car so precisely that industrial robots can handle it — all of the intelligence is in the Process. Every last detail of the product has exact specifications and tolerances. If you follow the Process exactly, you must end up with a high-quality car.

You can also specify the steps needed to create advertising — you may analyze the marketplace, determine the product’s tangible and emotional benefits for each market segment, and so on. When you’re done, you’ll never end up with a process that can be handled by industrial robots (although many advertisements certainly look as if they were authored by automata). There’s no tight specification for distinguishing good ads from bad ones until you test-market to find out which ones make the cash register ring.

In our quest to make systems development and integration repeatable, predictable, and most important an activity we can reliably budget, we keep trying to turn it into a Process.

Systems development should follow a well-defined process, if for no other reason than to make sure we don’t leave anything out.

But a Process? Nope.

A great system is a work of art, both internally and in use. The processes used to create it help programmers focus on getting the job done instead of figuring out what the job is. Following the methodology facilitates great results. Only talented designers and programmers can cause them.

Here’s the wonderful irony of it all: Process redesign consultants don’t follow a Process. Only a process.

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