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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

According to Mike Daisey in his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, he saw first-hand the appalling conditions in which employees work at Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner.

Also according to Mike Daisey, making stuff up and presenting it as fact is just fine when you’re presenting a “larger truth.” Or so he said when The American Life, which had broadcast The Agony in the first place on the understanding that it was factually accurate, revealed that, after further investigation, it wasn’t.

I’m not certain of much, but I’m certain of this: If you have to make stuff up to support your “truth,” you’re telling neither the truth nor a truth. Truth be told, none of us has access to the truth. The best any of us can achieve is some confidence that the evidence on which we base our opinions is reliable, the logic we’ve used is sound, and we’re honest in how we explain it.

And so, KJR hereby announces a moratorium on the word “truth” and its derivatives, because whoever lays claim to it is either deceiving themselves or lying to someone else.

Meanwhile, back in not-yet-offshored America, the latest trend in recruiting is requiring job applicants to provide their Facebook password. Or so the story goes.

Unlike Michael Daisey, the AP’s Manuel Valdes and Shannon McFarland reported actual events as they happened — a few factually accurate (or, at least, undisputed) anecdotes. But as someone once said, the plural of anecdote is not data. A few instances is hardly the same thing as a trend.

Which isn’t to say there’s no such trend. It’s to say that we have no more knowledge of whether this is a trend after reading the AP story than we did before reading it, just as was the case with Daisey.

Different reasons, same result.

In the case of Apple and Foxconn, thanks to an investigation by the Fair Labor Association (which despite the name is an industry-funded, not union-funded organization) it appears that Daisey notwithstanding, working conditions at Foxconn, while far from horrific, often violated even China’s lax standards.

Which brings us to a question that’s of personal interest to you.

You don’t have to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 corporation to be responsible for an offshore outsourcing contract. It’s easy to be self-righteous about Apple either (pick one) failing to properly audit its manufacturing partner or knowingly involving itself with a company that treats employees poorly.

It’s a lot harder to avoid being guilty of the exact same thing when the subject is your offshore outsourcer.

There’s a school of thought that says this isn’t your problem anyway. Your job is to contract for the best possible service at the best possible price. The company you’re contracting with is located in another country. It has different laws, different enforcement of the law, a different culture, and different expectations of what a work environment should be.

That makes it all Someone Else’s Problem, doesn’t it?

Legally, it probably does. Ethically? Probably not.

The reductio ad absurdum argument is all you need: Were you to learn that an offshore outsourcer used slaves rather than employees, chaining them to their desks and whipping them if they didn’t write your code while starving them to death because the supply of slave programmers is ample but food is expensive … legally, because that’s how it is in their country … were you to learn this, I sure hope you’d choose a different offshoring partner, even if it cost you more to do so.

If you agree, you agree you have some ethical responsibilities for setting minimum standards for workplace conditions. Now that this is settled, the question that remains is what they should be.

That’s a question that’s easier to ask than to answer. Applying U.S. standards to countries with lower standards of living and different expectations of the workplace truly doesn’t make sense. On the other hand, accepting whatever level of misery is the norm there as your standard is probably the wrong answer, too.

What’s probably the right answer is to spend some time there, talking with the people who do your work, to gain some sense of what they would find comfortable … not luxurious, not barely tolerable, but comfortable. You’re looking for, not physical equivalence to U.S. working conditions, but emotional equivalence.

That’s a complicated proposition. I’d love to offer a simple, clear solution instead, but as usual the world is too complicated for a simple solution to work.

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|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

A prediction: The business case for the Cloud will mirror the case for outsourcing.

That outsourcing is the right answer has been a constant. What it’s the answer to? That continues to evolve.

We’re already starting to see this with the Cloud. Makes sense, I guess, as the Cloud is the next generation of data-center outsourcing.

Now the Cloud does offer a couple of very major advantages over the previous versions. First, there’s the absence of opaque financial games. Cloud services come at standard prices. The popular practice of using lease/buy-back arrangements and other, even more financial-derivative-like complexities to front-end-load the benefits of a data-center outsource while back-end-loading the costs aren’t part of the Cloudiverse. Nor are expensive early termination penalties.

So Cloud computing does deliver the flexibility companies were supposed to get from data center outsources, but rarely did because these were, typically, ten-year contracts that were (and are) expensive to restructure once signed.

Nonetheless, Cloud Business Case v1.0 — that the Cloud will save money and lots of it — is nearing the end of its useful life. It won’t, and, as was the case with previous forms of outsourcing, the bigger the company the worse the financial case gets.

But that’s okay, because Cloud Business Case v2.0 is already shipping. Two different CIOs explained it to me. Even if they don’t save a dime … even if they have to pay more, in fact … putting their email into the Cloud (both used this example) is worth it because that means they don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Fair’s fair. Two isn’t exactly a statistically significant sample, and just because a couple of guys said something doesn’t make it a trend.

What makes it a trend is that these are the exact same words I’ve heard for decades when the subject was outsourcing: Put the responsibility in another company’s hands, sign a contract, and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

With traditional outsourcing, this expectation was simply absurd. You have fewer tools at your disposal when managing an account manager backed by a ten-year contract that spells out every in-scope responsibility than when you’re managing a data center manager who’s an employee reporting to you on the organizational chart.

With a Cloud service, you don’t even have an account manager, at least, not in the same up-close-and-personal sense you did with an outsource.

Instead you have a service level agreement with a penalty clause. Maybe you have tools to let you monitor service level conformance, too. Blunt instruments, even when compared to working with an account manager; much blunter than an employee who is on-site and taking responsibility.

Cloud Business Case 2.0, then, is that what the Cloud really gives you is professional management so you don’t have to worry about it. It’s a convincing-sounding case.

Until you scratch beneath the surface, because if something goes wrong and you staff the function internally, you have an employee responsible for troubleshooting your multi-vendor environment. If you take it to the Cloud, the opportunities for mutual finger-pointing and blame-avoidance are abundant. As in, “Our servers were up. The problem must be with either your ISP, your firewall, or your internal networks.”

CIOs don’t get paid big bucks for charming naiveté. Whether you go to the Cloud, sign an outsourcing contract, or hire an employee, you’re still accountable. It’s still your worry.

Maybe when Cloud Business Case 2.0 starts to lose popularity we’ll finally hear the business case that should have been v0.9: What you can do with the Cloud that’s new, interesting, and seriously cool.

Compare:

When PCs first started leaking into the enterprise, an enormous wave of innovation leaked in with them, in the form of new, cheap software that did things nobody thought of doing before, and in the form of new, cheap tools that let employees figure out things they could do for themselves that nobody had been able to do before.

The World Wide Web brought the same thing — an enormous wave of innovation, this time in the form of tools, means and styles of communicating with customers, and whole new ways of doing business that had never existed before.

We’ve added smartphones and tablets. Browse the App Stores. Look at everything you can buy for ten bucks or less. Sure, there’s a lot that’s well worth ignoring. But there are also plenty of cheap, innovative apps that let people do nifty stuff.

The Cloud? It’s all about doing pretty much the same things, in pretty much the same way, only this way you pay by the drink.

It’s like the Dos Equis guy, but in reverse — the least interesting sales pitch in the world.

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