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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

A CIO of my acquaintance once described his priorities for the new megasystem his developers were busily constructing. “What I want is the database,” he said. Waving his hands disparagingly, he added, “I don’t much care about the applications that feed it.” Guess what? His system never got built, and he didn’t last two years in his job.

We’re continuing to develop the technical architecture section of our integrated IS plan. This week we home in on the information layer. The techniques for managing this layer are well understood. Instead, let’s elevate the discussion (elevate in the sense that snipers like high places). Our goal this week is to place information in the proper context. We begin by avoiding the mistakes of the aforementioned CIO, realizing that although information is the center of our universe, applications drive the business.

We made a horrible mistake when we changed our name from electronic data processing (EDP) to management information systems (MIS) back in the early ‘80s.

When we were EDP, we did something valuable – we processed something, and as we did so, we automated manual processes.

MIS managed information. Even worse, we declared that our purpose is providing information to managers. Helping employees do useful work became a byproduct.

We would be much better off calling ourselves “process automation systems.” We got offtrack because of database management technology. With the advent of the DBMS, we changed how we designed systems. We put information in the center of design. Information, we realized, is more stable than the programs that make use of it.

Next we figured out that because information is the heart of our designs, it must be at the heart of the enterprise. So far so good, but then we left the halls of reason and jumped to the notion that it’s information, not processing, that delivers the most value.

Take a fresh, hard look at this. IS delivers the bulk of its value through process improvement: lower unit costs, reduced cycle time, and increased accuracy.

This is just as well. If we really do think information is the point of it all, our efforts are way out of whack with the company as a whole. About 80 percent of an average company’s information is unstructured. (I’ve run across this estimate several times, and it passes the “feels right” test, too.) It’s text, voice, and pictures. A simple-minded feller might figure that if information is the point of it all, and 80 percent of all information is unstructured, well then 80 percent of our efforts should be devoted to the management of unstructured information. They aren’t, of course. Eighty percent of our efforts go to managing alphanumeric data – the kind we know how to process. Telephone systems and personal computers – the technologies that handle unstructured information – have been the poor stepchildren of IS, not because we couldn’t manage the information, but because we couldn’t process it.

We’ve been able to get away with this so far. No longer, though. Maybe it’s the influence of e-mail and the World Wide Web, but companies are waking up to this deficiency.

Want to know your future? Look at a modern call center. It records every conversation digitally, along with every screen visited during the call. It’s indexed and ready for online retrieval to help call center management assess individual performance. It’s also available for computing sophisticated performance statistics.

Today these systems are closed and proprietary. Tomorrow they’ll store everything in the same document management system that will store scanned images and word processing documents, all linked through a common index. That’s just one example of how you will have to manage and process information in the near future.

Thought your information layer was in good shape? Maybe for today, but you have some serious planning to do.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Nearly two decades ago I presented an excruciatingly dull paper (“Quantitative Analysis of Electrical and Overt Behavior of the Electric Fish Brienomyrus niger,” if memory serves) at the Animal Behavior Society’s annual conference, held that year at Tulane University.

While there I met a researcher who claimed to have demonstrated rudimentary speech in parrots. Not “Polly want a cracker,” but real speech, with the parrot using rudimentary grammar and vocabulary.

I never heard anything more about the subject, so I guess nobody was able to repeat her results. It’s too bad. Given how much parroting some human beings do, finding parrots to be a bit more human would have been fun.

But parrot we do, as I found out while awash in e-mail following my proposal that we hold a National Boycott Stupidity Day (NBSD) and my suggestion that much of the concern over the use of foreign technical workers sounds suspiciously like bigotry. Quite a few readers parroted currently fashionable political rhetoric, equating neo-conservatism with intelligence, liberalism with stupidity, and my assertion of bigotry with “playing the race card.”

Parrots.

The response to NBSD was so overwhelming that I’m actually tempted to organize the event. We have an alternate name (Intellicom) and several volunteer projectionists (for our continuous showings of Forrest Gump, which we’re all going to not watch together).

We also have a program change. We will allow curling after all, since several readers persuaded me that this is a game of wit and strategy, not just sliding things on ice. My apologies to all you curlers. Instead, we’ll ban ice fishing, since I have to offend someone and sitting in a hut on the ice in winter, drinking beer, and waiting for a nibble seems a safe target.

Speaking of offending people, several of you took offense at my excluding Newt Gingrich from NBSD. Supposedly, he really does promote intelligence, despite his ethics violation, his insistence on buying a bunch of B1 bombers the Pentagon doesn’t want, and his pursuit of his own foreign policy. Oh, if only he hadn’t been named after an amphibian …

(I’d give equal time to offending Bill Clinton’s defenders, only there weren’t any. Sorry, Mr. President.)

NBSD was, of course, satire. Its point wasn’t that you should promote your opinion as “smart” and opposing views, for example liberalism, as “stupid.”

Now I personally think liberals see everyone except the wealthy as victims, while conservatives see no victims at all unless a criminal receives legal protection or Bill Clinton is involved. I think both fraudulently promote simplistic solutions to the complex issues we face as a nation. But that’s just my way of making unpleasant generalizations about groups I don’t like, an activity as American as wiener schnitzel and burritos.

If I actually held NBSD, those who disagree with me would be welcome. Those who parrot other people who disagree instead of troubling to formulate their own opinions wouldn’t make the cut, though, nor would people who equate disagreement with a lack of intelligence.

Take this thought about parrots into your office: I sometimes think there aren’t more than a dozen people in this industry who have actual ideas. A new thought ventures into the jungle, gets squawked back and forth, and eventually sounds like a trend. Actually, it’s just one person with chutzpah and a bunch of parrots. You hear the parrots and, mistaking them for authoritative sources, think something important is going on.

Take this thought, too: The glib, simplistic solutions for complex problems you so often hear parroted around rarely work, despite our collective preference for easily understood concepts. Both technology and public policy are complicated. While simplicity may reflect design elegance, below the surface a lot has to happen before anything works.

Take one last thought into your office and keep it there forever: That irritating employee with the cubicle you placed as far away from yours as possible because of how often he disagrees with you … is he really irritating, or are you wrong more often than you think?

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