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|In: Office Politics|Last Updated:

This, of course, is an election year, so we’re subjected to the usual array of ridiculous, mutually contradictory promises, none of which will last beyond the inaugural ball. They must think we’re smoking something, and probably think we inhale, too.

Since this is an election year, you’ll also be subjected to commentators and columnists of all persuasions shamelessly exploiting the subject in their ongoing, desperate attempts to create “hooks” to draw you into the main subject.

So why should I be any exception?

Bill Clinton and Bob Dole aren’t the only ones to make promises in their jobs, of course. (And you thought connecting this lead to an IS management topic would be a stretch.) Haven’t you, in a tight spot, ever made a promise in a meeting, only to go back to your office wondering how you’re ever going to deliver on it?

This week we begin a series on interaction between IS and the end-user community. Let’s set the stage with some basic insights:

Insight #1: Visibility = Dissatisfaction

When the quality movement picked up steam we all heard about delighting, rather than just satisfying customers. Most of us in IS shook our heads sadly, knowing the futility of this goal (along with the unfortunate “internal customer” concept that goes with it). The problem? “Quality” lumps lots of completely dissimilar issues into a single amoeba-like lump. We can mitotically divide this lump into two smaller chunks by recognizing that some forms of quality are only recognized by their absence, while others really do delight customers.

Genuine Corinthian leather delights a certain group of automotive customers. We can call this kind of quality “positive quality” (PQ, for those of you who, James Martin-like, enjoy acronyms). We can focus ingenuity, creativity, and all those other right-brain attributes on generating PQ-enhancing ideas.

Telephone dial tone doesn’t generate customer delight. Absence of dial tone, though, generates quite a bit of high-decibel-level conversation. We’ll call this kind of quality, where you’re only visible when things go wrong, negative quality (NQ). A lot of what we do falls into the NQ category.

Insight #2: The Need for Stealth End-User Satisfaction

IS interacts with the end-user community at all levels. Executives want you to focus on big strategic projects. Middle managers want you to build enhancements to their core information systems. Secretaries need help recovering their trashed memos. These requirements compete for resources, of course, and while the executives may agree to some tradeoffs in principle, those agreements vanish like vacation money when exposed to the sunny disposition of a secretary with a damaged document. (Rule #37 of organizational behavior: executives are terrified of secretarial dissatisfaction.)

If you expend visible effort supporting day-to-day end-user computer use, executives and middle managers will wonder who’s taking care of their strategic initiatives and production system enhancements. If you don’t take care of the day-to-day sturm unt drang, they’ll wonder … aloud … if you’re competent to handle the big issues when you can’t even take care of their secretaries.

So you need stealth efforts for optimal NQ.

Insight #3: IS isn’t the expert when it comes to personal computers.

Personal computers are more than a way to reach the company’s business systems. They’re more than a universal information access utility. They’re more than a general-purpose tool for improving effectiveness.

For some employees, they’re a hobby.

A friend of mine earned a PhD from his hobby, which happened to be creating a stochastic model of international banking. (He showed it to a friend who happened to run a graduate program in industrial engineering over lunch one day, and had his PhD a week later.)

Some people put a lot of effort into their hobbies. They read a lot, experiment a lot, think a lot. Within their self-imposed boundaries, they know more than you do. Disparage their expertise at your peril.

These insights represent the landscape. You have to build on it. Next week we’ll start to explore ways you can do so.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

From the Los Angeles Times, reprinted in the Star Tribune: “As vast swaths of the Western United States recuperated from the second massive power failure in six weeks, federal energy officials called an emergency meeting for today to address whether the region’s energy grid has been overwhelmed by burgeoning demand.”

If we replaced “power” and “energy” with “Internet”, the Infobahn doomsayers would be going to town. “I told you so,” they would say. Those of us who had predicted the Internet’s continued survival would mill around shame-faced, looking for a place to hide.

As it happens, though, this was a power outage, and while the experts acknowledge a problem, nobody is predicting the collapse of the national power grid. When AT&T’s long distance service failed the east coast a few years back it caused some red faces but nobody used the term “collapse” then, either.

I don’t believe the Internet will collapse, as I’ve said before. I expect local outages, service slowdowns, and other annoyances. The dynamics of supply and demand will, in my naïve world-view, prevent catastrophic overload. (Not that I have a useful opinion on the subject – I know far too little about it.)

Regardless of what really happens, at year’s end we’ll see a spate of articles debating whether the Internet collapsed this year or not. The Cassandra contingent, having predicted collapse, will point to a long string of local service failures, lost e-mail messages, brownouts and other events to buttress its point of view.

The Panglossians, in their best of all possible worlds, will explain that these events were local outages not catastrophic collapses; that e-mail failures usually happen between the company firewall and e-mail server, and that lots of things suffer temporary outages without their being called collapses.

Eventually everyone will throw up their hands and chalk it up to semantics.

And that’s just not good enough.

Not because this subject matters the tiniest little bit. Except for figuring out who gets to gloat, deciding who was right and who was wrong has zero importance. No, it’s using “semantics” as a rhetorical escape hatch that bothers me. We all do it. That doesn’t make it a good alternative to resolving problems. In fact, it’s no better than “agreeing to disagree.”

How many times have you tried to wrestle a subject to the ground in a group setting, only to have some helpful soul say, “We’re just arguing semantics now, so why don’t we move on.” End of discussion, end of subject, matter closed.

Except it’s not closed. Semantics is the study of meaning, and when we argue semantics, we’re revealing differences in what we mean. Arguing about the “right” usage of a word may not be a productive use of time. Discovering that different members of a group have meant very different things when using the same words, though, reveals both lack of consensus and a communications breakdown. Closing discussion at this point ensures that nobody understands what anyone else means.

Making sure everyone understands what decision ended up getting made is important. So when you have an argument over semantics you should highlight it, decide on a common definition, and resolve the issue in question based on the newly agreed-to meaning.

And then you need to determine whether there’s a second issue that needs probing based on the alternative definition to whatever term or phrase was at the heart of a dispute.

Regardless, if you find yourself falling back on “it’s just semantics” very often, you ought to take a hard look at your decision process. Somewhere, you’ve missed a step.

* * *

On an entirely different subject, for those of you who felt I took cheap shot at Bob Dole a few weeks ago in my column on encouraging risk … I feel your pain.

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