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We organized the KJR Conference on the theory that Keep the Joint Running is as much a community as it is a weekly column. The theory proved out: At our reception the first evening it was clear we didn’t have attendees. We had a bunch of old friends who were meeting for the first time.

Our most adventurous effort was to start work on the KJR Manifesto. Among the challenges: Nobody at the conference, including me, was sure exactly what the KJR Manifesto would turn out to be. We still aren’t certain, but we made a start.

The concept is simple: Provide an alternative to what’s usually bandied about as “best practice,” in a form that’s immediately useful to working IT managers, because much of what the industry calls “best practices” are nothing of the sort.

Many are descriptions of what one or two large corporations do and like, applied as prescriptions for every company regardless of whether they fit the circumstances or not. They’re one-size-fits-nobody recommendations. Other best practices aren’t practices at all. ITIL, for example, is more of a classification scheme, describing what rather than how. Then there’s a point that emerged from our Sarbanes-Oxley discussions: In many cases, “best practice” really means “basic professionalism.”

Lest any reader be uncertain: Keep the Joint Running is in favor of basic professionalism.

We started creating the KJR Manifesto with a set of core principles for IT, ending up with a Codd and Date dozen (although like the Pirates Code in Pirates of the Caribbean, they’re really more guidelines than principles). They are:

0. There is no best practice. There are practices that fit best. Different situations call for different solutions — form follows function.

1. To optimize the whole you must sub-optimize the parts. Being clear about where your company wants to optimize is critical to organizational design. Doing so doesn’t absolve managers from their responsibility to make their organizations as effective as possible. It redefines “effective” to prevent organizational silos from competing with each other instead of the company’s competitors.

2. Big solutions that work great generally start as small solutions that work acceptably. In general, putting something into place and iterating is a more certain route to success than trying to “get it right the first time.”

3. Relationships Precede Process. Process is often important. But it doesn’t come first, since no process can succeed until its participants trust each other.

4. Relationships Outlive Transactions. Conflict is natural. Conflict is good — it means employees actively and openly explore new and different ideas, consciously deciding among them. It’s when conflicting parties view each other as enemies instead of opponents that the organization becomes dysfunctional. You might win today; you might lose tomorrow … but when you lose your ability to work together, everyone loses.

5. There are no IT projects. Projects are about changing and improving the business or what’s the point?

6. Measure carefully, because bad metrics are worse than no metrics. You get what you measure. If you measure the wrong thing, or measure the right thing wrong, you’ll get wrong results.

7. Incomplete metrics create organizational dysfunction. If four factors combine to drive success, and you only measure two of them, employees will ignore the other two. Your metrics will have prevented success.

8. Governance must be value-based, not cost-based. Value is the difference between (or ratio of) benefit and cost — cost by itself is an incomplete metric. If you can’t connect cost and benefit, or only measure cost, you’ll reduce the value you deliver, while creating organizational dysfunction.

9. Benefit has three core components: revenue enhancement, cost reduction, and risk mitigation. Everything else fits into one of those three categories.

10. Benefit belongs to the business. When IT focuses on reducing its own costs or headaches, it stops enabling solutions, becoming a barrier instead.

11. IT is an integral part of the business. Run IT in a businesslike way, not as a separate business. Running IT as a separate business violates Guideline #1.

12. Every part of the company, including IT, has the same customers. These are the people who make buying decisions about the company’s products and services. When IT (or anyone else) has internal customers, very few employees have a stake in making sure the people who decide to buy from the company have any reason to do so.

These principles (okay, guidelines) are, like the rest of the manifesto, a work in progress. I welcome your comments, and will use them to refine things.

I have to. Otherwise I’d be violating Guideline #2.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

When I was a lad, no self-respecting male ever relied on intuition. Many considered it half a word, “feminineintuition” being the complete, seven-syllable utterance. This, very likely, is why the phrase “trust my gut” was coined. Males were allowed to have abdominal organs, but not a feminine style of cognition. Real men all knew, of course, that intuition was the only thought process available to the double-X contingent.

Decades of feminism have left us more enlightened now, and men are encouraged to use their intuition without feeling embarrassed or emasculated. Except, worry some correspondents, yours truly. I’ve burned a lot of time, energy and electrons in Keep the Joint Running and its predecessors promoting rational, linear, evidence-driven thinking as the preferred way for managers to make decisions. Don’t I see any value at all in intuition and gut feeling?

Sure I do. And if popular and business culture ever overemphasize the value of rationality, I’ll be right there on the ramparts, advocating the value of spatial, non-linear, “integrative” thinking. Intuition is a vital part of how we humans think.

I’m not a cognitive scientist, so what follows is a personal, rather than research-driven perspective. Among its other limitations, this means I’m not going to provide a taxonomy of different types of non-linear thinking. I’m sure someone has done so, differentiating between intuition, pattern recognition, subconscious alarm and another half-dozen distinct ways humans can be aware without involving rational, linguistic processes. It’s even possible that if you learn the taxonomy and properly exercise each one separately you can achieve the brainpower equivalent of isolating muscles and exercising them individually. Mental washboard abs.

It’s possible. I’m skeptical, but then, I’m a rationalist. Still, there’s plenty of value in non-rational thought processes. I’ll call the whole schmear intuition and claim that it provides two irreplaceable services in human thinking.

The first is that it’s the most important source of new ideas. Rationality is the best way to assess the value of an idea, but it’s worthless for creativity. In the absence of intuition, we’d all be left to mentally trudge through the same old ruts. Scientists and engineers are as aware of this as anyone — probably more so. They all recognize that unless they’re capable of an Archimedes-style “eureka moment” they’ll never win the Nobel Prize, the contract to build a new bridge, or tenure. Except for intuition, the only way I know of for anyone can get to a new idea is through misunderstandings.

Yes, misunderstandings. They’re the other source of “meme mutation” (memes being Richard Dawkins’ postulated unit of cultural transmission). You say one thing, I think you said something different and like what I thought I heard, so I pursue that line of thinking to its logical conclusion.

Anyway, intuition is an incredibly important part of how we think, pointing out new conceptual avenues to explore.

It’s also highly valuable in helping us recognize when something “doesn’t fit.” Visually, this is the old square peg/round hole situation. Our brains are superb pattern recognizers. Very likely, the circuits got their start helping animals turn visual stimuli into a mental map of the world in front of them. Whatever the origin, we’re very good at turning a bunch of disconnected information into patterns, and at remembering and comparing patterns. When a pattern doesn’t fit what we expect, alarm bells ring in our heads, even if we aren’t consciously aware of exactly what’s bothering us.

And so, we apply the brakes, thereby missing the pickup that runs the red light and otherwise would have t-boned our car. And so, an insurance underwriter recognizes that something is wrong with the application in front of her and flags it for further investigation.

What intuition doesn’t do is give us any reason to rely on what it puts in front of us. In the 1950s, intuition informed most pale Americans that the dark-skinned American in front of them was likely to violently assault them. In the 1300s it informed most of the world’s population that the earth is flat. As mentioned last week, it leads people to expect that a ball whirled on a string will follow a curved path when released.

Intuition — gut feelings — are just the ticket when you need new perspectives that might be worth exploring, or a warning that things aren’t as they should be. Rational thinking is what you need to find out whether those new perspectives are anything more than the result of indigestion.

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