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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Travel is supposed to broaden the mind. Regrettably, after more than 21 years of writing this column, my mental ruts seem to resist travel’s broadening impacts: Everything I see turns into guidance for running businesses, IT organizations, and all points in between.

And so, following a couple of weeks touring in Rome and exploring bits and pieces of Sicily …

> The Romans built the Colosseum in eight years, with no project management or CAD software to help them. It’s about 2,000 years old and still standing. That should worry us.

> The Colosseum’s construction depended on two innovations: concrete, and interchangeable parts built to standard specifications. If any Roman architects, artists, or engineers suffered from change resistance, those who embraced the innovations apparently drowned them out.

> The Colosseum’s standard program was executions in the morning, followed by slaughtering exotic animals, followed in turn by gladiators trying to hack each other to bits.

I think this means we have to give the Romans credit for inventing standing meetings with standard agendas.

It also suggests they were early victims of the consequences of bad metrics. Because every day started out with executions, the Roman courts had to convict enough suspects of capital crimes to fill out the program, whether or not a sufficient number of capital crimes had been committed. I presume the parallels are obvious.

In any event, combining the morning executions and gladiators who got the old thumbs down, a million corpses exited the Colosseum’s fabled arches during the years it was in session, although the pace slowed a bit when Rome became Christian and did away with the gladiators.

I guess that was progress. Speaking of which, for the Roman Empire, conquest was what you did if you could. Now, it’s frowned upon. That’s progress, too, I guess.

> While walking through the Pantheon our guide pointed out a row of headless statues. They weren’t, he assured us, early examples of Dr. Guillotine’s work products.

It was due to Roman parsimony. Coming from a practical society, Roman artists figured out the average statue would greatly outlive the person it had been carved to honor. And so, they designed their statues to have replaceable heads.

In IT we call this “modular design.”

> We didn’t spend all of our time in the Colosseum (and Pantheon and Forum). We also toured the Vatican, where, in the Basilica, we saw evidence of St. Peter’s tribulations. As it happens, visitors rub St. Peter’s feet for luck. No, not St. Peter himself but a bronze statue thereof. Bad luck for St. Peter. After centuries of this his feet are being rubbed right off, toes first.

I’m pretty sure we in IT have parallels to muster. If not, elsewhere in technology land I’ve read we’re running out of helium, one birthday balloon at a time.

Sicily has been more relaxing, at least from the perspective of spotting IT parallels. I’m hopeful this might mean I haven’t completely lost my ability to disconnect from the world of information technology. But there is Mount Etna, an awesome and awe-inspiring site.

> On the not-a-parallel-at-all front, shortly before its recent eruption, data integrated from a variety of sensors reported a 10 centimeter increase in the mountain’s elevation (about 3 inches if the metric system isn’t your bag; also about 3 inches if it is your bag only you don’t need me to handle the conversion for you).

Where was I? Oh, that’s right, 10 centimeters, and I hope you aren’t so blasé that you aren’t awed by our ability as a species to measure such things with such precision — a precision that allowed geologists to warn everyone potentially in harm’s way so they could get out of harm’s way.

> On the back-to-parallels front, Mount Etna doesn’t have just one crater, although the main caldera is enormous.

It has hundreds of craters. That’s because, when pressure increases and the old eruption paths are plugged, the magma doesn’t metaphorically say to itself, oh, gee, I guess I’d better calm down and head back to the earth’s mantle.

Nope. The pressure is there, the result of physical forces that can’t be eliminated and physical laws that can’t be repealed.

The result: The magma has to go somewhere, and where it goes is the path of least resistance, culminating in it pushing through the side of the mountain, resulting in a new eruption and new crater from which it spews out.

The business/IT parallel is, I trust, clear: Good luck trying to stamp out shadow IT, which is also the result of pressures that won’t go away just because you want them to.

It’s time for me to head back to the beach. The IT parallel? None.

Ahhhhhhh.

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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

Three threads, one conclusion:

Thread #1: In a recent advertorial (“Stop Using Excel, Finance Chiefs Tell Staffs,” Tatyana Shumsky, 3/31/2018), The Wall Street Journal proved once again that, as someone once said, if you ignore the lessons of history you’re doomed to repeat the 7th grade.

Dan Bricklin first invented the electronic spreadsheet back in 1979. It was immediately and wildly popular, for some very simple reasons: It was incredibly versatile; you could use it to think something through by literally visualizing it; and, when IT responded as it usually does to requests for small solutions — not a good enough business case — users could ignore IT and solve their own problems, right now.

The Wall Street Journal’s story tells the usual tales of spreadsheets gone wild, with their high error rates and difficulties in consolidating information. What were those fools thinking, using Excel for <insert Excel-nightmare-case here>!?!

I was nowhere near the place and I can tell you exactly what they were thinking. They were thinking they had a job to do and the alternatives were (1) Excel, and (2) … uh, Excel.

The business case for the solutions extolled in The Wall Street Journal story was that the Excel-based solutions caused problems. Had users not solved their problems with Excel first, they’d still have no business case.

When Excel is the problem you can be sure the pre-Excel problem was much bigger.

Thread #2: One of my current consulting areas is application portfolio rationalization. It’s usually about enterprise applications that number in the hundreds, but sometimes clients want to consolidate desktop applications that, in large enterprises, easily number in the thousands, not including all of the applications masquerading as Excel spreadsheets.

It’s a shocking statistic, and a support nightmare!

Only it isn’t a shocking statistic at all. A typical Fortune 500 corporation might have 50,000 or more employees. With 50,000 employees, what are the odds there aren’t at least a couple of thousand different processes that might be improved through automation IT will never get around to?

It isn’t a support nightmare either. For the most part the applications in question are used by a dozen or fewer employees who are almost entirely self-supporting.

Support isn’t the problem. Lack of control is the problem. And, in highly regulated industries, lack of control is a real problem corporate compliance needs to solve. It needs to document not only that a given business function’s outputs are correct, but that its processes and supporting tools ensure they’re correct.

On top of which, information security needs to ensure applications with gaping holes are kept off the network, and that applications stay properly patched so that as new vulnerabilities are detected, new vulnerabilities are addressed.

All of this is certainly harder when each business function solves its own problems, but it’s hardly impossible.

And it’s much easier when IT is an active partner that helps business functions solve their own problems.

Thread #3: Once upon a time I was part of a team that redesigned our company’s CapEx governance process. We hit upon a novel idea: that our job wasn’t to prevent bad ideas from leaking through. It was to recognize good ideas and help them succeed.

It turned out we were on target. What we found was that bad ideas that needed screening out were few and far between. Good ideas explained badly? We saw plenty of those.

Tying the threads together: Large enterprises have lots of moving parts, which means small problems are real, worth solving, and too numerous for IT to handle on its own. Users engage in “rogue IT” to make their part of the business more effective, because they can and they should. IT ought to find a way to help their good ideas succeed instead of assuming they’re all pursuing bad ideas that have to be stopped.

The KJR solution: create a Certified Power User program (CPU — catchy, isn’t it?). Certified Power Users will understand the basics of normalized design so they can use MS Access instead of spreadsheets when they have a database problem to solve. They’ll know how to evaluate solutions professionally, so they don’t buy whatever looked flashy at a trade show. They’ll also know how to keep solutions patched, to minimize vulnerabilities.

And, they’ll keep an inventory of the small solutions they create and share it with IT.

In exchange, they’ll have administrative privileges for their PCs, and those of the users they support.

When you’re trying to persuade, “Let us help” is a more powerful message than “No you can’t.”

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