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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Flotsam and jetsam:

I owe Dan Quayle an apology.

While he said any number of strange things during his career as vice president, he didn’t say, “It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”

In my defense, I didn’t get the quote off the Internet. I got it from a book of Quaylisms, bought in the days when book publishers usually employed fact checkers to prevent that sort of thing.

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Speaking of politicians, we no longer live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We live in the land of ever-dopier statistics.

Case in point: According to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, “The American people have spoken clearly and decisively in favor of Democrats leading the country in a new direction.” In the Senate? Allen lost to Webb by fewer than 8,000 votes in Virginia and Tester beat Burns by 3,000 votes in Montana, so I’m pretty sure “clearly and decisively” is … an exaggeration. The connection to business? Business pundits publish equally inane statistics all the time. Often, people pay good money to buy it.

Oh, okay, I lied. There’s no connection. I just couldn’t resist taking a potshot at something this worthy of ridicule.

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Speaking of ridicule, last week in Advice Line I succumbed to temptation and posted a rant — a bunch of cheap shots directed at a subject about which I know nothing more than anyone else: Voting machines. It was fun. It was satisfying. The only intellectually honest part of the whole thing, though, was my making it clear I know nothing about the subject and was just enjoying myself.

Understand, there’s plenty wrong with the current crop of electronic voting machines, as any number of experts in the field have testified. There is also a lot of commentary out there — about electronic voting machines and any number of other subjects — that comes from the species Punditocratus illiterati. Much of it poses as informed commentary; often its authors just make up their “facts.” Beware of it, especially if you agree with its conclusions. That’s where the greatest danger lies, because due diligence depends on objectivity, not on affection for the subject.

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On a related subject, regular correspondent Leo Heska brought an article from The Wall Street Journal to my attention. The piece, “Some Managers Make It Easy on Themselves With a Ready ‘No'” (Jared Sandberg, October 17, 2006), included an account of research by Professor Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School. Professor Amabile discovered that for most people, relatively dumb criticism sounds smarter than well-informed, well-reasoned praise. Maybe that’s why so many business managers have a hard time delivering a compliment. They don’t want to sound stupid.

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Naysaying usually is the result of a low tolerance for risk. Since saying no prevents anything from happening, it prevents most risk … and, of course, most success. Which might lead you to think that the formula for success is confidence, as extolled in the truly awful book, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End (Rosabeth Moss Kanter, 2004). Confidence is aggravating, as only something whose conclusion I like (confidence breeds success) but whose evidence and logic are so … what’s the word I’m looking for? … bad … can be.

While written confidently, it’s also probably wrong. Evidence: An article supplied by another regular correspondent, Arthur Leavitt, “The Problem With Confidence,” by Adam Hanft (Inc. Magazine, September 2005). Hanft reported on research by the Cranfield School of Management in the U.K, about what leads to successful entrepreneurship. The researchers looked at risk tolerance and confidence, and discovered that confidence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Interviewing 50 entrepreneurs, the researchers discovered that the winning combination was high risk tolerance and low self-confidence. Less sure they’re right, these entrepreneurs double check their ideas before investing in them. Low risk tolerance and low confidence did okay, if you’re wondering, but high risk tolerance coupled with high confidence did not. It resulted in sales, but not in profits.

You might not agree with the definition of confidence used by the researchers, by the way, or the metric they developed to assess it: To me, what they called confidence was closer to what I call arrogance. The book, Confidence, makes a similar distinction, although there, Confidence is what results in success while Arrogance is what doesn’t, the proof being that when the result is success, those causing it must have been confident rather than arrogant.

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I sure do enjoy criticizing books written by other people. I’m confident it makes me sound smart, too.

Am I right?

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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

The Anasazi of Chaco Canyon thrived for a thousand years. Their economy depended on wood harvested from the extensive forests that grew in the canyon and the surrounding hillsides.

The population grew, they cleared, first the local forests, then an expanding radius. The soil, without trees to hold it in place, eroded. Chaco Canyon became a desert, and the Anasazi were gone.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse is about sustainability, and about societies whose customs and habits — the behaviors that seemed to be the sources of their success — were, without their knowing it, creating damage that accumulated until it became irreparable. It led me to wonder what practices CIOs commonly engage in that might, in some analogous fashion, make their IT organizations unsustainable. To categorize the possibilities, I turned to IT Catalysts’ IT Effectiveness Framework, which divides the factors needed to sustain IT organizations into business alignment, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance. In order:

Business Alignment

IT aligns with its business collaborators through both formal governance and informal relationships. Correct governance is the centerpiece of IT sustainability, because that’s where the company decides its investments in information technology. Whether IT governance results in sustainability or decline depends on a key decision: Whether each project approval also approves the staffing increase needed to maintain the newly implemented functionality.

It’s a simple equation: Build or integrate a new application and you need staff to maintain it. If the CIO can’t hire them, IT will experience increased demand without increasing supply. And as even first-year students in economics know, the only possible outcomes are price increases or shortages, and price increases are politically unpalatable at best.

Eventually it does become clear that IT is seriously understaffed. By then, the staff increases needed to recover exceed what the business can afford, because businesses won’t stash these savings. They’ll spend the money that should be added to the IT budget elsewhere.

IT’s network of informal relationships can also result in unsustainable decisions — mostly by creating a governance bypass channel that approves favored projects while ignoring the requirements of good governance.

Process Maturity

Too little process breeds Chaos. It’s fun and imposes very little overhead, so it can create the impression of very high productivity. Among its many drawbacks is that when work becomes idiosyncratic, the loss of a single employee can be crippling. Another, very popular one is that with chaos generally comes poor testing and worse change control, leading to occasionally serious business disruption.

The damage from chaos, though, is generally small in scale — it isn’t wonderful, but is sustainable. Even better, chaos usually leads to overstaffing, creating an opportunity to compensate for bad governance by instituting stronger processes.

Too much process breeds the opposite of chaos — stifling, choking bureaucracy. Bureaucracy reproduces mitotically — once you have any, you’ll inevitably end up with more. It can turn IT into an environment where productive employees have to wade through a vastly larger population of approvers and reviewers whose sole purpose is to prevent anything creative from ever taking place. Too much process quickly leads to unsustainable IT.

Technical Architecture

Bad architecture is easily achieved and difficult to repair. It can include reliance on obsolete platforms, undisciplined data design that doesn’t clearly establish a single “source of truth,” and a failure to decommission old applications following implementation of their replacements … so now you have two of them.

The single biggest architectural cause of unsustainability, though, is bad integration — the sloppy creation of ad hoc interfaces between overlapping applications and databases. The result: Not a mere spiderweb, but (as one client described it) a hairball. Once you’ve built a hairball you have to maintain it, leading to an ever-decreasing portion of project effort going to anything useful.

Human Performance

Put the right people with the right skills and the right attitudes in the right roles. Give them flexible processes to help get their work done when they fit the situation, and to ignore or improve when they don’t. Make decisions quickly and remove whatever barriers management has accidentally imposed. The results: Amazing. Also, rare.

More often, non-performers accumulate, mediocre managers hire worse supervisors, training counts as expense rather than investment, and employees are locked away in “job jail,” where they either Retire In Place or leave for better opportunities. Ineffective employees and bad habits accumulate, and your best employees depart. The results: Crippling.

Collapse is always the story of chain reactions — of bad situations making themselves worse at an accelerating pace. Smart CIOs are constantly on the lookout for the factors that lead to it, for the same reason as your loyal author:

They’re the enemy of our shared goal — to keep the joint running.

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