All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Maybe it’s just semantics.

A bunch of readers commented on my recent column asserting that CIOs and CTOs should spend most of their energy dealing with strategic and tactical matters, delegating infrastructure, (which I equated to the military concept of logistics), to others.

Among the comments: “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals discuss logistics.” This correspondent, along with quite a few others, mentioned a number of examples in which bad logistics lost battles. I agree: Bad logistics can lose battles, as when the Spanish Armada literally ran out of ammunition fighting the British fleet, which was able to re-supply since the entire engagement was fought in the English Channel. But this misses the point. Of course bad logistics can lose battles. That doesn’t mean great logistics can win them.

The lesson for you: Bad infrastructure can make even the best applications unavailable. Great infrastructure is invisible. Do you want to be invisible unless there’s a problem? I didn’t think so. Delegate infrastructure; focus your attention on strategy and tactics.

Or maybe on “Operations” in its military sense. IS Survivalist Ralph Hitchens informs me that military theorists have added this as a fourth level of military planning.

Above it all is the non-military concept of “policy.” “We’re going to stamp out terrorism,” is an example — a national goal which military action can help advance. “Strategy” determines the overall objectives of military action and identifies the major campaigns that should be fought to achieve them so as to help achieve policy. “Operations” decides which battles to fight and how to deploy forces to fight them to win campaigns.

Organizing business change has significant similarities. Enterprise-scale change corresponds to the strategic level of planning. Call the organized effort of achieving strategic change a “program.” Since “operations” would inevitably be confused with running a data center, let’s call the next-lower level of change “business outcomes” and call the organized effort of achieving them “initiatives.”

Then there’s tactics — the specific plan of action military officers create to win battles. What might that correspond to in IT terms?

Tactics corresponds to projects, in more ways than one. In terms of military action, it’s hard to be sure if you’re really achieving your strategy, or even if you’re attaining your operational goals. Likewise in business. Whether the topic is combat or project management, you can be very sure if you’ve won the battle.

It’s up to someone else to win the war.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

One of the more mystifying value propositions in recent memory was Wilford Brimley’s tag line in his series of Quaker Oats commercials. “It’s the right thing to do,” he explained. It was the first, and with any luck the last time I’ve heard anyone suggest that my breakfast menu might have moral, as well as nutritional content.

I’ve heard business professionals discuss customer service in moral terms as well, but providing quality customer support has no more to do with morality than oatmeal does. It’s a good thing, too, because “it’s the right thing to do” is a weak persuader in the business world. Businesses aren’t, after all, moral entities, and in evaluating the ethical content of business action, the only valid tests are whether (1) the business harmed anyone financially or physically; and (2) the business’s customers can take their business elsewhere.

In the absence of competition, regulating the quality of customer service is every bit as logical as regulating price and quality: For monopolies, regulation is a surrogate for the market forces that constrain other enterprises.

When businesses compete, though, customer service acts as a competitive differentiator. So when, for example, eBay chooses to provide no means for customers to contact live human beings by telephone, it isn’t acting immorally, no matter how much an outraged customer might want to talk to someone. eBay has made a calculated business decision. Some of its customers will leave; others will put up with the lack of telephone-based service. Some of the customer loss might translate to revenue loss, but tracking that loss is an uncertain exercise.

The cost of building and staffing a call center, in contrast, is completely trackable and falls directly to the bottom line. For eBay it presumably exceeds the benefits to be obtained from additional customer retention.

The point of this analysis isn’t that eBay’s service stinks. It’s that excellent customer service is just a business strategy. eBay is just a convenient example of a company whose size, growth, and profitability demonstrates that non-service-based strategies can succeed, just as Land’s End (to pick another high-profile example) which has achieved its size and profitability by providing superb service through every imaginable communications medium, demonstrates the viability of a high-service-based strategy. Paradoxical? Not at all. Confusing? No, not really.

It’s simply another example of the single most important rule of business: Never always; rarely never. There are few absolute rules.

Everything depends on context.

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