Facts are hazardous in this business, and I do my best to avoid them. Opinions are much safer.

Occasionally, though, something tangible belongs in the dialog, so here’s what an InfoWorld reader has to say. I’ve done a bit of editing to ensure anonymity. Otherwise, the text reads pretty much as I received it.

“I run IT for the Acme Corporation (yes, the one Wiley Coyote orders from). We’re semi-autonomous from the corporate DP department. DP wants to correct this condition. We don’t.

“My area manages 120 PCs, and have a total budget of $1.3 million, so there’s your $11K per PC. ‘Grand total’ includes a $400K tithe to DP (they figure their costs and send a non-negotiable bill). Do I split it out as ‘mainframe’ costs, ‘network’ costs, ‘PC service’ costs? No way. DP pretends to, but admits the numbers are largely made up.

“(I sometimes wonder how much is going to pay for their middle managers sitting around talking about ‘architecting the meta-data in the Zachmann Framework’, but then, I’m sometimes overly pragmatic.)

“Even in my own area, how do I separate the costs of projects from the infrastructure to make the projects work? Not everybody really needs networking, yet everybody gets Banyan, TCP/IP, SQL*Net middleware, because it’s cheaper, smarter, and pro-active to make sure anybody can run anything.

“And besides, the Big Bosses don’t want to hear breakdowns into cost categories they don’t understand in the first place. They take the grand total IT budget including all salaries and divide by the number of seats.

“And now the real bottom line for the big cheese: HE DOESN’T CARE. He has a $100 million/year business to run, so I’m 1.5% of his budget. He’s being nice to give me about 3% of his time, and he only gives me that because my area is ‘strategic’ and rapidly growing. As a line-business person, he’s much more concerned about the benefits than the costs, and he can see with his eyes closed that the benefits are much greater.

“It’s the full-time DP types who aren’t even connected to the business world who care about the costs. Every new machine, every new application, every new layer of middleware is another chore to them, another cost, another problem. They want to hold these down and speak much of simplification, homogenization, and limiting numbers of tool sets. Users agree in principle, but principles drop to the bottom of the priority list when a useful new application for their machine appears.

“I restrain the most enthusiastic end-users, but basically I’m on their side – even though their new uses are also new problems for me. I’m out in the business area and can also see the benefits.

“Sorry for the rant. I’m just trying point out the complexity. The accounting is the least interesting and important part.”

When you put your mental graphs on your mental wall, which of these measures do you chart: corporate value, IS costs, or your migraine level?

Look, I sympathize. Your headaches are my headaches. I feel your pain. (For that matter, my knee hurts, but that’s another subject.) Unfortunately, you’re paid to have headaches, and a reduction in your headache load doesn’t automatically translate to corporate value.

Reducing your costs doesn’t translate to corporate value either. If it did you’d resign immediately, reducing the cost of you to zero. You’d get rid of your headaches, too.

IS typically represents between 1% and 3% of a company’s total budget. Now be realistic here – how much of that can you really save by reducing your PC cost of ownership? The guess from here: even if you replace all your PCs with NCs and work really hard, your savings won’t amount to even a blip on the radar screen.

You have to decide where you’re going to focus your attention. You get much more leverage out of value creation than cost reduction. As reported last week, I once generated a 4,000% ROI with a single spreadsheet. Think of how much return you can generate by providing really great support for all of your company’s spreadsheet users.

And that’s just the tip of the old iceberg.

Tired of Ebonics jokes?

Me too. I think heard a funny one once, but I’m not sure.

Most of you, like me, probably read a few news and op-ed pieces on the subject and formed an opinion. Par for the course in how we assess public policy.

And then I read one more item, telling me the Oakland School Board’s goal was to help teachers learn to understand their students, which they can’t right now because their students speak ghetto English … Ebonics.

I’m not attacking or defending. That’s neither my charter nor my inclination. My point: most of you, like me, formed your opinion based on an entirely different understanding of the controversy. We’ve been salingered.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the need for “Trusted Information Providers” and introduced the verb “to salinger”, taken from Pierre Salinger’s embarrassing advocacy of an Internet-driven rumor about the downing of TWA Flight 800.

Wrong facts can be either honest mistakes, or lies. Either way it’s easy to correct wrong facts. Things get far more complicated when you try to scrutinize spin doctoring. Here are two timely examples I found in Edupage (www.educom.edu), which I highly recommend.

The first item, sourced from the 2/10/97 St. Petersburg Times, reports that The Software Publishers Association and the Business Software Alliance have puffed up their piracy numbers. “We’ve been hyping the numbers that might or might not be true,” says a spokesman. “Look, all we can do is guess how many people who use computers in China or Bulgaria might actually be willing to pay for Microsoft Office or Doom. But larger numbers get more attention, so we go with the biggest estimate we can get away with.”

The other item, from the 1/18/97 Economist, questions the Network Computer’s (NC) benefits. It cites the Gartner Group’s well-publicized $13,200 annual cost number, breaking it down into about $2,800 per year for the PC and network, $4,800 per year for administration, and the rest – about $5,600 – for “end-user operations”. Most NC savings would come from reduced administrative costs, but would be lost again as companies have to beef up their networks and servers.

Now let me get this straight: almost half of the thirteen grand cost of a PC is the cost of people using the danged things? Puhlease! And let’s look at the other two numbers: $4,800/year for administration translates to about one analyst for every ten users. Sounds pretty luxurious to me. And how about $2,800/year for the PC and network resources? Try to tote up that number without counting your mainframe as part of the network.

The Gartner Group hasn’t shared its model with me in years, so I have to do what most of you do: draw inferences from what I do know. My guess: They took the total cost of IS and divided by the number of PCs. Ignore end-user operations and you get $7,600 per user as the cost of information systems. That sounds about right to me, and nothing to be concerned about.

So here’s my gripe: Subject the allegedly high costs of PCs, tallied by a company that sells advice on how to improve IS management, to any kind of scrutiny and they turn out to be grossly misleading. Shocking software piracy numbers, in similar vein, are the invention of an advocacy group that can’t back them up with much more than air.

When you receive information I suggest you ask, as the Romans did, “Cui bono? (for whose benefit?)”

A little-recognized side effect of the information explosion is the ease with which spinmeisters can introduce uncontested non-facts into the public dialog. Reporters on deadline grab high-impact quotes and, if nobody contests a bit of nonsense, it gets repeated as gospel. With all the information to digest, there’s just not time to independently verify everything.

Which leads you to more Latin: caveat emptor (buyer beware).