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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Favorite themes from Keep the Joint Running in the news:

Zero Tolerance Policies: The use of process is the difference between effective management and bureaucracy. Effective managers keep the goal paramount. Processes guide action, help the organization learn, and are ignored whenever they don’t fit the situation.

For bureaucrats, the process is the point. Following the steps is all that matters, never mind the outcome.

In another example of zero tolerance being a synonym for bureaucracy, we have a six-year-old boy who swatted a schoolmate on the bottom.

The principal, citing the school’s zero tolerance policy for sexual touching, called the police. They, unlike the principal, showed good sense and dropped the matter. Sadly they did not show more good sense by arresting the principle on general principles.

Internal customers also made the news.

Well, not exactly. Misuse of the word “customer” is what made the news.

Customers are properly defined as the people who make buying decisions. Many business consultants define it, incorrectly, as those whose inboxes receive the contents of your outbox.

That use of “customer” is an analogy, and as the Economist points out, “Being an analogy … is not the same thing as being the same thing.” This particular analogy caused serious flight delays over the past couple of weeks.

A story brought to my attention by sharp-eyed subscriber J. MacKenzie (“Airline Safety Alarms Unheeded,” Washington Post, April 4, 2008), reports that FAA inspectors were told the airlines are … yes, that’s right … their customers.

More than told. When they tried to enforce the safety rules their supervisors sided with the carriers, threatening the inspectors (according to testimony before the House Transportation Committee).

The good news is, the FAA’s top safety inspector isn’t giving the usual “few bad apples” speech. He’s acknowledging a systemic problem. That’s an excellent first step in accomplishing a useful result.

The FAA episode reinforces the importance of industry regulation — a concept that has become unfashionable over the past few decades.

Industry regulation is needed when the results of pure, unfettered competition are not in the public interest. It fell out of fashion because its downsides — added expense, extra steps, lots and lots of paperwork, and entanglement in government bureaucracies — received excessive emphasis, while propagandists explained away its obvious successes (one example: The Cuyahoga River is no longer flammable).

Speaking of deregulation mania having resulted in even more inconvenience than the regulations themselves, the tipping-domino-like state of the world economy is also in the news. In one of the most insightful articles yet written on the subject (“Chaos on Wall Street,” Fortune, 3/31/2008), Allan Sloan dissects both the situation and what we can and should do about it.

Most past downturns were caused by a weak economy dragging down the markets. This one is different: Weak markets are dragging down the economy. The last time this happened? 1929.

As Sloan convincingly demonstrates, you can’t create a mess like this with just one mistake. It took several. One was, clearly, a too-weak regulatory environment.

Following the Great Depression came minimum capital ratio regulations for banks — basically, how much cash they must have to cover their risks. And only banks, even though brokerages and other financial institutions are now allowed to act in bank-like ways.

The result: The bank-like entities don’t even know their risks. Many of their “assets” are portfolios of portfolios of portfolios of loans, packaged as investment vehicles.

It’s the financial equivalent of spaghetti code. It works until it stops working, and once it does it’s very hard to repair.

What possible relevance does all of this have for a working CIO with a job to do? Quite a lot, as it happens.

  • The importance of eschewing (gesundheit!) zero-tolerance policies is, I hope, clear. Policy is a poor substitute for clear principles and good judgment, and should be reserved for situations where everyone must be treated exactly the same, always, rather than being treated fairly and well.
  • Treating those who use IT’s services with respect, without pretending they’re customers, is a key to the ongoing success of most 21st century CIOs. Those who work together in a business should collaborate as peers, not serve each other as suppliers and customers.
  • Recent KJRs have emphasized the desirability of deregulating PCs. As with business deregulation, PC deregulation has a number of benefits.

Also as with business deregulation, once a good thing starts to be too much of a good thing, it can become a bad thing.

Balance matters.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

The passionate middle wins.

I’m not talking about the presidential race, although we should all be so fortunate. I’m talking about PC policy. The consensus of my correspondence seems to be that to lock or unlock isn’t a binary choice. There are levels of openness. How open each system should be depends on a variety of factors, including how rigidly or openly defined the job is, the regulatory environment, and how much risk with how much impact a particular compromised system can create.

I’ve written columns about leadership, process, SOA, application methodologies, the late and unlamented network computer, and muscular client architectures vs the misnamed “thin-client” architectures.

Lots of other topics, too. Only a very few others generated as much correspondence as this series on whether to lock down or open up the desktop. Windows vs OS/2 vs Linux vs Macintosh was one (of course), religion in the workplace was another, although there are those who would say these are one subject, not two.

Certainly, how a CIO handles leadership, application architecture and methodology, and the nature of process in the enterprise has a much bigger impact on profitability. Why did PC policy generate so much more response?

The answer, I think, goes back to a point made by the column that opened this series, “The portal,” (2/25/2008): That we in IT … and many corporate executives of all stripes … have an obsolete, 1950s industrial view of employment. In this Leave It To Beaver world, work is a place people disappear to for awhile to earn a paycheck. Work/life balance means emulating the Cleavers.

Increasingly, though, work/life balance doesn’t just mean leaving the office on time so you can attend your daughter’s soccer match. It also means you experience a sense of fulfillment from achieving difficult and important accomplishments for your employer. It means you attach the same significance to friendships in the office that you attach to friendships outside of work.

Yes, that’s right. If your life is a 1950s sitcom, it’s more likely to be Dick Van Dyke, where Rob, Buddy and Sally’s work life was as real as their home lives, and got as much screen time as anything else on the show. Work/life balance? They had one life, not two. No partitions.

In 2008, you take care of personal business at the office just as you think about and solve business problems when you’re home, or out and about … and stay in touch with colleagues on these subjects during off hours. Blackberries, anyone?

Smart employers value this. It means having employees who are, to use the now-tired joke, pigs rather than chickens (the former have the bigger commitment to a bacon-and-eggs breakfast).

Employers want employees who are committed to their work. What they haven’t always done is to explore the consequences of having them.

The TANSTaaFL rule applies: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Want committed employees? Show some commitment to them. Recognize that in 2008, much more than in 1958, if you want someone to sleep in hotel rooms half the nights of the year, then maybe you should let them download music into their laptops and sync it to their MP3 players, not to mention letting them check personal e-mail.

The big work of IT … the work of implementing and supporting enterprise applications … is about supporting the company’s efforts to be more productive and efficient. It’s where profits live.

PC support is different. It is, as the name of the device implies, personal. That means it’s where IT defines its relationship with employees at all levels throughout the enterprise.

In companies that practice blanket PC lockdown neither your intentions nor the business logic matter one bit. IT runs the orphanage; employees are Oliver asking, “Please, might I have some more?”

There are, for that matter, companies where the IT staff provide no training, actively dislike power users, and prefer employees who “leave IT to the professionals.” Some advice: Arrogance isn’t a sound foundation for productive working relationships.

IT at the other extreme isn’t any better. While employees might like a wide-open environment, they won’t respect IT that provides no protection, ignores widespread software piracy, and in general shows no professionalism.

Professional IT provides training, education (not the same thing), support and encouragement. It protects the enterprise while respecting its employees and understanding their circumstances.

Why is the PC so important? Employees work in the enterprise applications you manage.

But they live in their PCs.

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