All Posts in Technology

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

We organized the KJR Conference on the theory that Keep the Joint Running is as much a community as it is a weekly column. The theory proved out: At our reception the first evening it was clear we didn’t have attendees. We had a bunch of old friends who were meeting for the first time.

Our most adventurous effort was to start work on the KJR Manifesto. Among the challenges: Nobody at the conference, including me, was sure exactly what the KJR Manifesto would turn out to be. We still aren’t certain, but we made a start.

The concept is simple: Provide an alternative to what’s usually bandied about as “best practice,” in a form that’s immediately useful to working IT managers, because much of what the industry calls “best practices” are nothing of the sort.

Many are descriptions of what one or two large corporations do and like, applied as prescriptions for every company regardless of whether they fit the circumstances or not. They’re one-size-fits-nobody recommendations. Other best practices aren’t practices at all. ITIL, for example, is more of a classification scheme, describing what rather than how. Then there’s a point that emerged from our Sarbanes-Oxley discussions: In many cases, “best practice” really means “basic professionalism.”

Lest any reader be uncertain: Keep the Joint Running is in favor of basic professionalism.

We started creating the KJR Manifesto with a set of core principles for IT, ending up with a Codd and Date dozen (although like the Pirates Code in Pirates of the Caribbean, they’re really more guidelines than principles). They are:

0. There is no best practice. There are practices that fit best. Different situations call for different solutions — form follows function.

1. To optimize the whole you must sub-optimize the parts. Being clear about where your company wants to optimize is critical to organizational design. Doing so doesn’t absolve managers from their responsibility to make their organizations as effective as possible. It redefines “effective” to prevent organizational silos from competing with each other instead of the company’s competitors.

2. Big solutions that work great generally start as small solutions that work acceptably. In general, putting something into place and iterating is a more certain route to success than trying to “get it right the first time.”

3. Relationships Precede Process. Process is often important. But it doesn’t come first, since no process can succeed until its participants trust each other.

4. Relationships Outlive Transactions. Conflict is natural. Conflict is good — it means employees actively and openly explore new and different ideas, consciously deciding among them. It’s when conflicting parties view each other as enemies instead of opponents that the organization becomes dysfunctional. You might win today; you might lose tomorrow … but when you lose your ability to work together, everyone loses.

5. There are no IT projects. Projects are about changing and improving the business or what’s the point?

6. Measure carefully, because bad metrics are worse than no metrics. You get what you measure. If you measure the wrong thing, or measure the right thing wrong, you’ll get wrong results.

7. Incomplete metrics create organizational dysfunction. If four factors combine to drive success, and you only measure two of them, employees will ignore the other two. Your metrics will have prevented success.

8. Governance must be value-based, not cost-based. Value is the difference between (or ratio of) benefit and cost — cost by itself is an incomplete metric. If you can’t connect cost and benefit, or only measure cost, you’ll reduce the value you deliver, while creating organizational dysfunction.

9. Benefit has three core components: revenue enhancement, cost reduction, and risk mitigation. Everything else fits into one of those three categories.

10. Benefit belongs to the business. When IT focuses on reducing its own costs or headaches, it stops enabling solutions, becoming a barrier instead.

11. IT is an integral part of the business. Run IT in a businesslike way, not as a separate business. Running IT as a separate business violates Guideline #1.

12. Every part of the company, including IT, has the same customers. These are the people who make buying decisions about the company’s products and services. When IT (or anyone else) has internal customers, very few employees have a stake in making sure the people who decide to buy from the company have any reason to do so.

These principles (okay, guidelines) are, like the rest of the manifesto, a work in progress. I welcome your comments, and will use them to refine things.

I have to. Otherwise I’d be violating Guideline #2.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Political speech is completely protected speech.

Politicians, advocacy groups, and, for example, purveyors of deodorants increasingly make use of the same marketing techniques. Of the three, only the purveyors of deodorant face legal limits to how far they may stretch either the capabilities of their product, or the dire consequences of choosing a competing one instead.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. But being allowed to say nearly anything doesn’t confer an obligation to do so. Take MoveOn.org’s current campaign against AOL‘s plan to offer a premium e-mail delivery service. I’m a bit surprised that Amnesty International hasn’t filed a complaint against MoveOn.org for torturing logic so cruelly.

In case you missed the announcement: For a quarter-cent per piece, AOL will let bulk e-mailers bypass its spam filters and guarantee delivery. MoveOn.org contends that providing a unit-priced premium e-mail service in addition to flat-rate delivery will end democracy as we know it.

It’s probably a waste of time deconstructing the argument (I hesitate to call it logic) behind MoveOn.org’s complaint. Regrettably, it’s an issue many IT managers need to pay attention to, because both AOL and MoveOn.org have it badly wrong. AOL’s flub is likely to cause you some headaches. MoveOn.org’s inept attempt at political diatribe is likely to cloud the situation badly enough to prevent the engineering discussions the industry needs to engage in so you can avoid the headaches.

I’ll keep it as brief as I can. MoveOn.org inaccurately describes AOL’s plan as an e-mail tax when it’s nothing more than a usage-based alternative to flat-rate pricing. It is vaguely amusing to see an organization on the political left use “tax” as a red-flag word, though. Grover Norquist must be pleased.

MoveOn.org contends that once this service exists, AOL will lose its financial incentive to maintain its spam filters. That’s nonsense. The quality of its spam filters and other consumer protection technologies is a major selling point for AOL. If it were to stop maintaining them, its customers would move to a different ISP that costs less or offers better protection.

Then there’s the funny bit: MovOn.org warns that once this nefarious billing scheme is in place, e-mail delivery would become unreliable for everyone else — unaware, I guess, that it’s unreliable right now — according to some estimates, the failure rate for legitimate commercial e-mail is about 10%.

My own initial concern was over the whole idea that by paying a fee, bulk e-mailers would be allowed to bypass spam filters — with the potential for children to start receiving unwelcome messages. But the folks selling various … ahem … unwholesome products are unlikely to spend the money. When you blast out 20 million e-mails expecting a .0001% response rate, you aren’t likely to pay AOL an extra $50,000 to get guaranteed delivery.

So what’s the problem? Chances are high your marketing department and sales force makes use of commercial e-mail as part of your company’s legitimate selling efforts. Chances are almost as high that your company would benefit from the kind of premium delivery service AOL is proposing. (So, by the way, would everyone else, since it would create a financial incentive for targeted marketing instead of random blitzes.)

But AOL hasn’t announced an industry-wide, coordinated, standards-based effort. Since your company doesn’t market exclusively to customers using AOL.com, you have to apply the Mom principle: What if everyone did it?

Consider the impact. Right now there’s just one service (AOL, and Yahoo as well, plan to resell Goodmail, which provides an “imprinting appliance”). Imagine, though, that other ISPs (MSN, perhaps?) don’t follow suit and develop their own systems. Do you really want to have to properly route each outbound e-mail to the right imprinting appliance?

I didn’t think so.

Oh … don’t forget the really fun part: Writing reconciliation reports to determine whether AOL, MSN, Earthlink and everyone else billed you correctly. You weren’t going to just trust them, were you?

Done right, AOL’s proposal would benefit everyone — even MoveOn.org, which could use it to more reliably solicit funds from its best donors. But doing it right means leading the industry, not acting unilaterally.

So here’s a suggestion: Do what MoveOn.org suggests. Contact AOL to express your concern — not that it’s about to bring about the end of freedom in the United States of America, but that it’s about to cause you unwanted headaches that will prevent you from using its service.

That’s a businesslike argument AOL and its competitors can relate to.

Comments