All Posts in Policies and Procedures

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That members of the Bush administration used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts instead of their official government accounts leads to troubling questions.

No, not the troubling legal and ethical questions. They aren’t KJR material. If you’re looking for self-righteous indignation on that subject, plenty of political blogs have already plowed that field.

Here at KJR we rarely indulge in self-righteous indignation. Our preferred vices are sarcasm and irony. With that in mind:

Many in the IT punditocracy have made much of the RNC’s amateurish systems management. It’s clear system security and recoverability went well beyond dreadful.

This is no academic concern. The RNC acknowledges it lost hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages and can’t get them back. Unless you interpret the loss as the result of malicious intent, it’s difficult to explain away the problem as anything other than total incompetence. (And can you imagine how frustrating it must for Karl Rove that he can’t retrieve his e-mail archives?)

But that isn’t a proper KJR subject either. Well, it is, actually, but not this week. You’ll have to wade through another few paragraphs for the point to emerge, though, because, elsewhere in the news:

Gloria Long Rollins, Town Manager of Walkersville, Maryland, removed the toilet paper from all restrooms in the town’s parks. Vandals, you see, had set some paper on fire in a men’s bathroom. And so, to combat vandalism, graffiti and drug use in the parks, visitors will henceforth have to bring their own, whether it’s toilet paper, spray paint, drugs or kindling.

Here’s the connection, and its relevance: Bush administration members aren’t alone in ignoring the official systems IT provides them, and Gloria Rollins isn’t alone in overreacting to irritating infractions of the rules. The combination is, to coin a phrase, a vicious cycle.

Okay, I didn’t really coin the phrase. Still, it is a cycle and it is vicious. Please make allowances.

The Bush-league question for KJR readers is how many business users in your company make use of Gmail, Yahoo! Mail!, or Hotmail for business use, and why. The Walkersville question is how you respond when they do.

Here’s the usual response. I’m sure someone somewhere calls it a best practice:

1. IT writes a policy making the use of private e-mail accounts illegal.

2. IT explains to all managers and staff that this is the policy, and that failing to adhere to it will result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

3. Someone actually enforces the policy, including termination, proving that in more than one small village, the local idiot has gone missing.

It isn’t that the use of private e-mail accounts is a good idea. Of course it isn’t, as the RNC was kind enough to demonstrate.

It’s that the proper response isn’t to remove the metaphorical toilet paper. It’s better to ask the offending parties, in a friendly, engaging, and entirely unthreatening tone of voice, “So … er … when you compare Gmail to our corporate e-mail system, why do you like Gmail better?”

And then, when they tell you (“Gmail gives me gigabytes of storage. You don’t.”), take what they say seriously.

E-mail is just one example of this common phenomenon: If end-users don’t like the systems you provide, many will find alternatives they like better. If they hate your BPM (business process management) system they’ll put together their own tracking sheets in Excel. If they detest your locked-down PCs they’ll buy their own Macintoshes.

And if they hate your CRM system (“customer relationship management,” but it’s a poor use of the term) they’ll use Salesforce.com, or install Act!

(Not that it matters, but if Yahoo! was to host Act!, where would it put the exclamation points? Oh, never mind.)

For some unaccountable reason, instead of assuming these employees come to the office wanting to succeed at their jobs, many in IT assume they’re malicious vandals who in other circumstances would set fire to the toilet paper in Walkersville’s public restrooms.

I don’t want to push the metaphor too far. I’m not saying Gloria Rollins should have asked her vandals whether they were mad because she didn’t buy Charmin. Even if she had, I’m guessing the vandals would have been too drunk to answer.

So let’s leave it at this: When the employees in your company try to avoid the systems you provide to make them more effective, find out why.

They have a reason. You need to know what it is. Then you can figure out what to do about it.

Other than firing them.

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There are days I curse Disraeli.

Benjamin Disraeli, one of Great Britain’s most distinguished prime ministers, uttered the over-quoted “lies, damned lies and statistics” more than a century ago. It’s been used as an excuse to ignore statistical evidence ever since.

I guess it’s time for dueling quotations, so here’s another: “A witty saying proves nothing” (Voltaire).

The ability to see the world in statistical terms is part of every good manager’s mental toolkit. To understand why, start with the strange case of Judge Roy Pearson. Pearson, a Washington, DC administrative law judge, sued Custom Cleaners two years ago for losing a pair of his pants. For more than $65 million in damages.

To be fair, Custom Cleaners did post signs saying, “Same Day Service” and “Satisfaction Guaranteed.”

Judge Pearson doesn’t, it appears, understand statistical concepts — like, for example, service levels. You’ll recall that these are two part measures, describing a service standard and how often a service provider meets that standard.

If Judge Pearson thought in statistical terms, he would recognize that every time a dry cleaner handles a garment it represents a statistical sample. The probability of it being properly handled is a number between 0 and 1. Were a dry cleaner to run its operations as IT does, it would define the percentage of garments per day it must handle properly — maybe 99.9%. It would next define how many days a year it must meet or exceed that standard — maybe all but two (99.5%).

The dry cleaner would then post that service level as its commitment to its customers. Assuming enough IT professionals frequented the shop to keep it in business (or that customers like Judge Pearson understood statistical concepts), everything would be great.

In business, no matter what you do, the only accurate description of your results is, in some way or another, statistical. If you manufacture, each item varies a bit from every other item. The important question is how often they vary beyond acceptable limits.

If you manage customer service, you’ll never make every customer happy, or even satisfy them. You can’t. Your influence over customer states of mind is less than your influence over manufacturing tolerances, so once again outcomes are statistical events.

The challenge when you don’t think statistically is the risk that you’ll invest in goals that are no more achievable than perpetual motion machines, and complain when others don’t achieve them.

Think you’re the exception? If you’re a baseball fan, have you never griped when a high-dollar batter failed to make a clutch hit? Statistically speaking, even the best hitters will fail in the clutch two out of three at bats.

But thinking statistically is a mixed blessing: It can turn into complacency in no time flat. After all, if perfection is unattainable, what are a few errors here and there after all? Nothing to worry about — they’re inevitable.

The statistical nature of things doesn’t have to make you a helpless spectator, trapped in the randomness of things. What it does is provide a more useful framework for making decisions than thinking perfection is possible.

The statistical nature of things is why business decisions must be framed in terms of the law of diminishing returns rather than the desire for invariant outcomes. It’s the law that tells you each additional increment of improvement will be more expensive than the last one. It’s a statistical thing: You can only predict events in terms of probabilities, not certainties. The closer you are to perfection, the more variable are the errors that remain.

So if you currently backorder 20% of all customer purchases and want to improve that to 15% (a 25% improvement), it will cost you less than if you want to improve from 15% to 10% (a 33% improvement).

Looked at through the other end of the telescope, if improving from 20% to 15% costs a million dollars in additional inventory, the next million dollars of inventory will only improve backorders from 15% to 11.25%. And if you keep on spending until you only backorder 1% of the time, the next million dollars of investment in inventory will only reduce your backorder rate to 0.75% — a barely perceptible nudge.

Does all this mean a business can’t post “Satisfaction Guaranteed” and “Same Day Service” signs without prevaricating? If the law fails to take statistics into account it could happen. We’ll all have to replace simple declarative sentences with elaborate contractual phrasing filled with weasel words, and the world will be the worse for it.

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