Strategy and Tactics – Page 35 – IS Survivor Publishing

Potholes on the road to IT management

Last week I enjoyed my freedom from political correctness by ridiculing New Jersey for the state of its roads (D+ grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers), its correlatively low gas tax, and the consensus among its governor, legislature and citizens that tax increases are off the table.

Who to ridicule this week? I know … most of the private sector, because if you think this sort of behavior is limited to public governance, you aren’t paying attention to your own backyard.

For example …

I know of an insurance company that’s grown through acquisition to the point that it now has eleven functionally equivalent underwriting/policy administration systems. And no, it isn’t run as a holding company.

Whenever there’s a change to business logic, it has to make that change eleven different times in eleven different ways.

From all reports, the company’s IT department has become quite good at coordinating and implementing business logic changes. As it should, because when it comes to deciding what capabilities your organization needs it’s good to concentrate on what the business is likely to need from you.

The only choice that would be better would be to retire ten of the eleven systems.

Except that by just about every reasonable measure, the company in question is extraordinarily successful.

This is the sort of thing that keeps management consultants awake at night. If you’re metaphorically inclined, it’s as if, by policy, a state limited road maintenance to dumping asphalt into potholes and still became one of the nation’s primary transportation hubs.

But that isn’t what this week’s column is about. This week it’s about planning for the obvious and how organizational dynamics so easily prevents it.

Planning for the obvious first: If you add something to your fund of stuff, whether it’s a house or car for your household, or a machine, information system or facility if you’re a business, you’re going to have to spend money in the future to maintain it.

Otherwise your fund of stuff (from here on in, FoS) will deteriorate, losing its value or performance over time.

It’s a simple, inarguable equation: FoS increases, maintenance costs increase too, or else FoS value steadily decreases.

As a nation, during the Eisenhower administration we built our interstate highway system, and, in 1956, created the Highway Trust Fund, supported by a penny per gallon federal gas tax increase (to 3 cents, which, in case you care, is equivalent to 24 cents today, compared to the current federal gas tax rate of 18.4 cents).

Meanwhile, I’d bet good money (enough to pay five gallons worth of New Jersey gas tax) most KJR readers work in companies that, when they implement new information systems, don’t increase the IT budget by enough to cover the easily predicted need for ongoing maintenance.

Why not, given that any meteorologist would kill to be able to make predictions with this level of confidence?

Based on my exposure to and experience in quite a few businesses over the course of my career, it’s because of:

ROI computation: Proposed projects are usually evaluated on their financials. Include the cost of maintenance and the financials look worse, making the business case less attractive. Better to conveniently forget about them.
Tradition: This isn’t just the opening number for Fiddler on the Roof. If nobody else had to include maintenance costs in the past, why should my pet project be burdened with them now?
No good deed going unpunished: We haven’t increased the IT budget to support maintenance yet, and yet IT has managed to maintain everything so far. What’s changed?
Wishful thinking: Maintenance is a separate spending bucket. If IT needs to maintain a system, the maintenance will have to be cost-justified on its own merits.
Baumal’s Cost Disease: Everyone else is expected to continuously improve. Instead of increasing IT’s budget, IT should continuously improve enough to cover the difference.
Reality Distortion Fields: We can’t increase IT’s maintenance budget because we’re going to need this money to invest in new strategic initiatives.
Distrust: If we increase IT’s budget by enough to cover maintenance of this system, how do we know IT will actually spend the money on this system? (Several correspondents from New Jersey explained their anti-gas-tax-increase position on this basis.)
Siloes: If we increase IT’s budget by x to cover the cost of maintenance for someone else’s system, that will leave less on the table to cover the cost of the new systems and system enhancements I’m going to want.

Against these forces, the CIO is armed with nothing beyond logic and maybe a Gartner study or two.

It’s time to buy more asphalt.

The Great KJR 2016 Election Real-time Fact Checking Challenge

Announcing the Great KJR 2016 Election Real-time Fact Checking Challenge!

But first an assurance: This won’t be a political column. And a disclaimer: What follows is probably a pipedream. Still …

A confession: I’m addicted to fact-checking websites. The granddaddy of them all is, to the best of my knowledge, factcheck.org, and it’s arguably the most thorough. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler runs its Fact Checker blog, which Kessler livens up by summarizing each fact-check with a rating that runs from Gepetto (completely accurate) through 4 Pinocchio’s.

My favorite is PolitiFact, with a rating scale of True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and for truly egregious falsehoods, Pants on Fire.

What I most appreciate about all of these is that they are (1) entirely non-partisan (or, more accurately, they’re partisans for accuracy and against fictional accounts of events, not for a political party or philosophy); and (2) sufficiently explanatory that their scoring rationales are clear and clearly reliable.

But … their value suffers from a limitation familiar to IT professionals, namely, data latency. In the world of IT, data latency is the result of overnight batch processing. That is, transactions come in throughout the course of a day, but the information available from the databases they post to isn’t an accurate reflection of the state of things until the next morning.

In the case of the fact-checking sites, politicians and pundits make speeches or debate one day, but the fact checkers don’t catch up until the next morning at best. Even worse, many of those who listen to the speeches aren’t addicted to fact-checking sites as I am, and so, like managers who trust their guts so much they don’t bother reading computer-generated reports, they won’t ever read the fact checkers’ findings.

Which is why I’m announcing the Great KJR 2016 Election Real-Time Fact Checking Challenge.

What it will take — the winning entrant will listen to political speech, and, in near-real-time:

Recognize statements of purported fact (as opposed to opinions, which will not be scored).

Evaluate them using criteria similar to what human fact-checkers use.

Evaluate quickly enough to flash the phrase in question along with a red, yellow, or green indicator before the speaker is too far into the next subject.

Pass an accuracy test by matching or improving on the judgment of the current crop of human fact checkers, with “improving on” defined as the fact checkers reading the machine’s explanation and saying, “Gee, I never thought of that.”

I figure this isn’t all that different or more difficult than what it took for Watson to learn to play Jeopardy, let alone its having read and assimilated the meaning of ream upon ream of medical literature so as to become a premiere diagnostician.

Which means IBM is one logical entrant for our little contest. Meanwhile, Google is the undisputed master of Internet search, and has invested heavily in machine learning technology besides, so Google is another logical entrant.

Who else? Beats me. I don’t see Siri, Cortana, or Echo reaching this level any time soon, but I’m sure there are other potential entrants that would jump at the opportunity.

And while I’d be happy to adjudicate, KJR’s involvement isn’t really necessary. Any company that could win, place, or show in the Great KJR 2016 Election Real-Time Fact Checking Challenge could more easily market the result directly to whichever networks will carry the pre-election debates between (unless something seriously unexpected happens) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

What network wouldn’t want to include this feature, especially if all the others did?

Regrettably, while everyone reading these words can see the inevitability of this capability becoming reality, it probably won’t be in time for this presidential election. The next one, though, is likely, and if not then certainly the one after that.

When it is available, real-time fact-checking will be a complete game changer for electioneering. Even if some news networks prove so partisan that they create their own phony fact checking AIs, dual-screening is increasingly prevalent, so many voters would bring up an independent fact checking AI on their tablet or mobile device while watching a speech or debate.

Okay, fun’s fun. Imagining candidates who know that the moment they utter a false statement it would immediately be flagged Pants on Fire for all to see is a lovely day dream.

The larger point is that unlike previous tries at commercializing artificial intelligence technologies, which have proven useful but not transformational, we’re on the verge of capabilities whose impact will be nothing short of dramatic.

It isn’t too soon to start your strategic planning engines, to figure out how the new wave of artificial intelligence might affect your company’s marketplace, and its competitive position in it.