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Service levels, you’ll recall, are two-part measures. They define a minimum threshold of acceptable performance and tally how often a service provider meets or exceeds it.

Enter the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. In an excellent example of service levels in action, it defined a minimum threshold of acceptable knowledge of current events –getting two thirds of a questionnaire right (sample question: Who is the current Vice President of the United States of America?).

Then it tallied how many of those surveyed met the threshold.

Pew found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that those who watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on the Comedy Channel tied regular newspaper readers for top honors (54%). Those who watch Fox News met the standard 33% of the time, outperforming only watchers of network morning programs. Draw your own conclusions.

It’s tempting to blame this mess on intellectually lazy Americans, Katie Couric, Roger Ailes, or all of the above. Temptation being what it is, I will.

Underneath the symptoms, though, is a challenge you and I face every day as we deal with vendors, staff, managers, vendors, information outlets, colleagues, and vendors in the workaday world of information technology: The challenge of seeing what isn’t there.

To illustrate the point, go back to last week’s column, which described Factcheck.org’s critique of a current U.S. Chamber of Commerce ad. The ad provides an alarming statistic — that lawsuit abuse costs your family $3,500 per year.

I received quite a few e-mails challenging my statement that the U.S. Chamber … well, I said it was lying. The e-mails pointed out that the Chamber’s math was perfect. Lawsuits did cost $235 billion in 2005 and that this does come out to $3,500 per family, if you assume an average headcount of four (bad assumption, by the way).

The problem with the ad isn’t what it said. It’s what it left out — what isn’t there. It left out:

  • How the Chamber defines “lawsuit abuse” (apparently, it’s “filing a lawsuit for any reason at all”).
  • What fraction of all lawsuits falls into the “lawsuit abuse” category (close to 100%).
  • How those who paid the legal fees and fines managed to transfer their costs to your family (and wouldn’t that make for a popular seminar?).

It’s far easier to deceive through omission than through falsification. Omission is far harder to spot.

In your professional capacity you’re inundated with product specifications and performance statistics, staff reports and recommendations, project proposals and justifications, all trying to persuade you to do something or other. If you’re like me you’ve become adept at skimming them to get the gist of what they’re trying to tell you.

Gist is a useful substance, right up there with beef jerky and Maxalt. It has its limitations, though, and top among them is that gist doesn’t help you spot what isn’t there. Quite the opposite. Gist is for understanding what someone is trying to tell you. As a result, it helps them conceal much more than it helps you reveal.

If there’s a magic formula for spotting what isn’t there I’m not aware of it. I do have favorite examples. Here’s one:

Imagine you asked a vendor if HP supports Vista for its 2840 color laser multifunction device (to take an example at random — that I happen to own one is sheer coincidence). Imagine the vendor answered in the affirmative.

The answer would be true. It would also be seriously deceptive. You can get a 2840 driver on HP’s website … which works for USB-attached devices but not network-attached ones. You can also download HP’s admirably conceived Universal Print Driver (UPD). It lets you print to the 2840 through either a USB or a network connection.

But only in black and white, and it doesn’t support the scanning function.

Phrasing your question to be in a position to accurately evaluate the product is something of a challenge.

How do you spot what’s missing? First, don’t skim — read carefully. Second, apply your experience. Think about all the ways you’ve been deceived in the past, look for parallels, and ask about them.

And third, don’t try to be clever. This question isn’t at all clever: “Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish. How will your products help me do it? Tell me step by step.” It might not be clever, but it gets the job done.

Of course, to ask this you do have to know what you’re trying to accomplish.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Everyone knows the rampaging cost of lawsuits is killing American commerce.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a recent television ad, points out that lawsuit abuse costs your family $3,500 per year. It’s a pretty shocking statistic.

It also happens to be entirely untrue.

FactCheck.org — which I consider to be the single most reliable journalistic source on the planet — took a closer look and found that the Towers-Perrin Tillinghast study cited by the Chamber reached a very different conclusion. What it said was that the sum of all torts in 2005 totaled $235 billion, or $880 per person.

That’s all torts, both legitimate and abusive. The study didn’t separate the two. It did find, by the way, that tort filings actually shrank in 2005 as a percentage of GDP.

What everyone knows about the rampaging cost of lawsuits is, it appears, wrong. One reason everyone knows it is that groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce tell them so. But the Chamber apparently considers every single tort filed in 2005 to be an example of lawsuit abuse, and considers shrinkage to be growth.

Or else it’s just lying.

A lot of what everyone knows is wrong. Why is that?

One reason is sympathetic vibration (“The mathematics of organizational dysfunction,” KJR, 2/22/2007). It happens when a superficially attractive idea creates good vibes. Someone picks up on it and repeats it, making it louder — and therefore better-able to induce sympathetic vibrations in yet more people who pick up on it and repeat it. With enough repetition it sounds just like an informed consensus.

But really, it’s just something that’s been repeated a lot.

Another example, closer to home: IT’s central role in life is to manage the company’s information assets (you wondered when I’d get to the point, didn’t you?).

Everyone knows this — not just Chief Information Officers, but just about everyone who knows anything about computers.

Not to burst anyone’s bubble or nuthin’ but while not exactly wrong (defined as completely lacking in validity), it’s nowhere close to right.

That our job is to manage the company’s information assets is one of the four faulty assumptions of the information technology trade (the other three: that we’re supposed to satisfy our internal customers; that the goal of our IT projects is to deliver software that meets requirements; and that we measure success through achievement of service levels.)

What’s wrong with this assumption? Among its difficulties are these two small challenges:

  • Everyone also knows that projects should deliver a positive ROI.
  • Your business continuity plan.

Start with the ROI (return on investment for the acronym-challenged). The most popular R in the ROI is increased productivity. That means business decision-makers expect our projects to help them streamline their processes. Very few projects promise financial return from “managing information assets better.”

Then there’s the IT chapter of the business continuity plan. It starts with a list, in order of descending priority, of which systems are most important to bring back online. Here’s a bet: The systems that support core business processes come first. Business Intelligence comes dead last.

Information is, of course, central to what IT does. It is, in fact, the heart of the architecture. Platforms come and go, applications change or are replaced altogether. The data might be massaged, restructured, cleansed and transformed, but it doesn’t go away.

The information layer is even more important than this might seem to imply: Companies with a clean data architecture can accomplish through modest enhancements what other companies with an ugly data architecture need large projects to achieve.

So yes, information is central to what we do. It isn’t, however, the point. Centrality and purpose are separate and independent concepts. The point of what we do hasn’t changed since the first EDP department wrote its first accounting program.

We help streamline business processes through automation.

Here’s the strange part:

One of my standard stump speeches is titled Everything You Know is Wrong (also available as a white paper. Click here to download it). It makes this point quite forcefully. I’ve delivered it at least a dozen times. It’s rare than anyone disagrees, and it’s rare anyone considers the point to be a blinding insight.

And yet, official industry thinking is that our job is to manage the company’s information assets.

So it really isn’t true that everything everyone knows is wrong.

What they say is a different matter.

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