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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

“I don’t want to know the larger context. Just tell me what the program has to do, and I’ll write the code that does it.”

A programmer said this during an IT Effectiveness Assessment my company, IT Catalysts, performed for one of our clients. Or, to be more accurate, at least one programmer has said something along these lines in every IT Effectiveness Assessment we’ve performed. It’s an awful way to approach the job of programming, and in particular it’s an awful way to approach a career in programming, assuming you don’t want to see your job moved offshore.

It isn’t only programmers who think this way. So do many managers, at all levels of any organization. Only instead of resulting in good code that yields pointless results, managers who focus solely on their own responsibilities lead business functions that are highly effective internally, but thoroughly disruptive to the company as a whole.

You can’t optimize the whole by optimizing the parts, whether you’re designing a car, a software system, or an IT organization. Don’t believe me? Let’s look at yours.

Being an optimizing kind of person, you tell your managers to focus on their areas of responsibility, optimizing every aspect of their operation. If they each run their area at maximum efficiency, you explain, the whole organization will run at maximum efficiency.

The Help Desk manager takes your advice to heart, and immediately starts optimizing. “I want productivity to increase,” she tells her analysts. “That means shorter calls. If you can’t resolve a user’s issue within three minutes, escalate it and get onto the next call.”

Help Desk productivity soars — every analyst handles more calls per hour. As a fringe benefit, unexpectedly lower call volumes result in time-in-queue statistics improving as well.

Of course, the only reason the Help Desk is doing so well is that it has shifted the difficult work to other areas. Many end-users, not willing to call the Helpless Desk (as they now call it since it escalates any problem that can’t be solved with a reboot) call their favorite analyst directly, interrupting project work to ask an expensive developer to solve what had previously been taken care of by Help Desk staff. Help Desk optimization has reduced productivity throughout the rest of IT.

And those end-users who do still call the Help Desk now wait a day or more for their problems to be resolved, as the analysts to whom problems are dispatched squeeze the unexpected work into their schedules. Here, Help Desk optimization has reduced productivity throughout the company.

Think you can solve this by redefining “optimize” around some other measure … say, the percentage of calls resolved by the Help Desk staff? Think again. Gauged against this measure, no Help Desk analyst will ever escalate a problem, since every escalation is now defined as a failure.

The only measures that work are those that include areas external to the Help Desk: Total elapsed time for problem resolution, total effort needed for resolution, and total cost of resolution. Optimizing the process of helping end-users requires sub-optimizing both the Help Desk and the various organizations to which the Help Desk escalates problems.

And sometimes, when problem escalation would disrupt some other critical process, end-user support has to be sub-optimized, recognizing that an additional delay in resolving some complaint or other is outweighed by (for example) the need to allow key developers to focus on a time-sensitive project.

You can’t optimize the whole by optimizing the parts. When you try to do so, all that happens is that each part ends up optimizing itself at the expense of other areas, and of the whole organization.

Which is to say, “I got mine, Jack. You take care of your own problems,” is something less than the epitome of good design.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

When I was a wee laddie, my mother decided to take a driving trip to New York one summer, so off we went — my brother Mike, Grandma Claire and me, with Mom at the wheel of the family Studebaker.

Dad, wisely avoiding the drive, joined us in New York.

“It’s your trip too,” she told us kids. “What would you like to see?” I was nonplussed, and had no answer. Brother Mike, never afflicted with nonplussedness, did: “Let’s visit Mad Magazine!” Mad, the bible of bratty (or wish-they-had-the-courage-to-be bratty) boys everywhere. The universal icon of irreverence throughout the world. The address that could be reached simply by pasting postage and Alfred E. Neuman’s picture on an envelope (once achieved by a sender who lived someplace or other in Australia). Mad Magazine — brilliant! But would they even let us into the headquarters of this storied publishing empire?

I remember little of the visit itself — a nondescript red brick building, a picture of Alfred E. Neuman on the mailbox outside, and a semi-dingy interior with inexpensive linoleum-topped desks. What I do remember clearly was that everyone at Mad Magazine, from its legendary publisher William M. Gaines on down, treated us like visiting royalty, seemingly as excited by our being there as Mike and I were.

Mad has fallen on hard times. Before it disappears altogether, IT leaders can glean some important insights, both from its success and its eventual decline. For example:

Visions can make themselves irrelevant. While Gaines’ vision of a magazine distinguished by iconoclasm, impertinence, and outrageousness (“Humor in a jugular vein”) has become irrelevant in a society in which Bart Simpson is considered mainstream, Mad was a major force in making irreverence acceptable. Whatever your vision, be alert to one of the hazards of success — the need to establish a new vision, rather than becoming irrelevant in your company.

Some employees deliver unique value. Treat them accordingly. Once a year, William M. Gaines took his core team of writers and cartoonists on a vacation to some exotic locale or other, for no other reason than that they were the reason Mad was so hugely popular. (Dick DeBartolo’s hobby on these trips was to insert himself into as many group photos of Japanese tourists as he could. I just thought you’d like to know.) All of your employees deliver important value. Some, however, deliver unique value and would be uniquely hard to replace. Find ways to recognize that unique value that don’t cause resentment among the rest of your staff. It’s a tricky balance to achieve. It’s also well worth the effort.

Have the courage to stand up for yourself and your organization. In the 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Commission asked William M. Gaines to testify regarding Mad Magazine, and EC Comics which he also published. A member of the committee asked, ominously, how Gaines could justify his existence — he was encouraging the youth of America to read comic books instead of something worthwhile.

“Yes.” replied Gaines without flinching. “I’m encouraging them to read.” When, as often happens, other executives complain about investments in information technology whose value isn’t obvious, be just as clear and unflinching.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. The folks who wrote, drew, and published Mad were, in their own way, important, influential people. With millions of readers and international reputations, they could have been too busy for a family visiting from the Midwest. They weren’t. Instead, they were as excited to show us around as we were to be shown around, unaffectedly enthusiastic about what they did and how they did it.

To this day I’m convinced that attitude was a prerequisite to Mad‘s success, month after month. I’m equally convinced that the contagious attitude of self-importance that afflicts so many corporate executives is a major contributing factor to business failure.

Welcome visitors. You should be excited about what IT does. So should everyone else in IT. If someone is interested enough to ask for the nickel tour, shouldn’t everyone in IT be excited to show them around, explaining what goes on and who does it?

It’s a minor thing, but it does have value. Getting everyone in the habit of bragging about your organization is healthy. Not only that, but you never know.

Sometimes a simple tour can make an impression that lasts a lifetime.

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