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|In: Technology|Last Updated:

Just in case you haven’t heard, the hot new buzzword (okay, buzz-phrase) is “generative AI.” It’s defined as “… algorithms (such as ChatGPT) that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos.”

By now we’ve all been inundated with alarming accounts of generative AI’s societal consequences (including this, from me). And there’s a lot to be alarmed about, from the erosion of reality I wrote about in the referenced KJR to the potential obsolescence of Homo sapiens. To which, let me add this thought, in the interest of being first to ring the bell: What’s the big deal? Thirty or more years ago, pedagogues worried that the advent of cheap 10-key calculators would be the end of mathematics education as we know it. Now, there no longer seems to be much of a point to memorizing the multiplication tables.

The question: In the future, will we look back and wonder what all the fuss was about? Because really, isn’t generative AI’s impact just like that of the 10-key calculator but for verbal skills instead of arithmetic?

As a writer, consultant, and IT industry wiseguy I take such things personally. So to discover whether I’m already obsolete or not, I decided to put generative AI – OpenAI version – through its KJR paces by askingsome questions thatare central to KJR’s mission, starting with this: What are the most important factors in making IT organizations effective?

ChatGPT responded with a 600-word essay. Its core points:

  • Leadership and Management
  • Skilled Workforce
  • Clear Goals and Objectives
  • Effective Communication and Collaboration
  • Agile and Adaptable Mindset
  • Robust IT Governance
  • Customer Focus
  • Efficient Resource Management

It followed each of these headlines with a concise, explanatory paragraph.

For contrast, here’s the framework I’ve relied on for just about forever – Effective IT masters:

  • Business integration
  • Process maturity
  • Technical architecture
  • Human performance

My first reaction to ChatGPT’s answer was dismay. ChatGPT’s essay was, I had to concede, quite good.

But then I compared the two more closely. I’m delighted to report that every element of the ChatGPT framework fits into the KJR framework. Leadership and Management, and a skilled workforce, for example, are two sub-factors among a half-dozen that are subsumed by Human Performance.

The reverse isn’t true – the ChatGPT framework ignores, for example, the impact of a strong technical architecture, not to mention the critical role process maturity plays in the effectiveness of not only IT, but all organizations.

Ready for another? I asked, “What are the eight tasks of leadership?”

The answer (again, just the headlines):

  1. Setting Vision and Direction.
  2. Communicating and Influencing.
  3. Building and Managing Teams
  4. Making Decisions
  5. Planning and Organizing
  6. Managing Change
  7. Developing Others
  8. Ensuring Accountability and Results

KJR’s eight tasks:

  1. Setting direction
  2. Delegating
  3. Staffing
  4. Decision-making
  5. Motivation
  6. Managing team dynamics
  7. Engineering culture
  8. Communicating

Again, ChatGPT’s response was impressive – well-written, concise, and plausible. But digging in, it misses quite a bit. For example, the closest it gets to delegating is “developing others,” but that inverts purpose and fringe benefit.

As for communicating – arguably the single most important of the eight leadership tasks, ChatGPT entirely ignored listening and facilitating.

So I decided to give ChatGPT one more chance: “Is ‘internal customer’ a good idea?”

Its answer was, I have to admit, quite good – how the winning applicant for an open CIO slot might have responded. Again, summarizing:

Positive aspects of internal customer concept:

  • Encourages collaboration
  • Enhances service mindset
  • Emphasizes employee satisfaction

Limitations of internal customer concept:

  • May promote silos
  • Can blur roles and responsibilities
  • May not reflect organizational dynamics

Not bad. Personally, I think it’s too kind, but then I’m heavily invested in the end of the internal customer concept, so I can’t claim to be unbiased.

Bob’s last word: So I asked ChatGPT one more question: Should CIOs consider Bob Lewis a trusted advisor?

Its answer: “As an AI language model, I cannot make specific recommendations about individuals or their trustworthiness. Whether a Chief Information Officer (CIO) should consider Bob Lewis, or any other individual, as a trusted advisor would depend on various factors, including the CIO’s specific needs, goals, and context, as well as Bob Lewis’s qualifications, experience, and reputation.”

“Bob Lewis is a well-known author and consultant in the field of IT management and organizational effectiveness. He has written books on IT leadership and management, and has provided consulting services to organizations on IT strategy, governance, and operations. His insights and perspectives may be valuable for some CIOs seeking guidance in these areas.”

I’ll give ChatGPT points for diplomacy, and I guess I should be pleased that I appear on its radar screen at all.

Bob’s sales pitch: Please don’t think I’m encouraging you to shift your loyalties from KJR to ChatGPT. The latter’s responses are certainly plausible, but that isn’t the same thing as standing up to scrutiny (I nearly said “close scrutiny,” but if it’s scrutiny it’s close by definition).

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|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

Running IT is hard enough when all the CIO has to contend with are changing business demands. But these are far from the only “condition fluxes” IT has to deal with.

Take an example: Imagine some aspects of the business you support depend on a reliable, predictable, and immutable definition of the second.

No, not the second what, as in what comes immediately after the first.

The second. The unit of time representing 1/60th of a minute. The unit of time defined by the frequency of cesium atoms oscillating between their two stable quantum states.

The unit of measure on which, the meter, lumen, gram, ampere, degree (Kelvin), and mole depend.

The unit of time that’s in the process of being redefined by the world’s metrologists, a job title I just know most KJR community members aspire to. And before I mosey on to the next point, a thank you to my now-retired business partner, Steve Nazian, for pointing out the coming temporal redefinition to me.

Okay, maybe I’m overstating its potential impact, given that the change in a second’s length will be, at most, about one part in nine billion. Or maybe not, depending on the future of quantum computing.

Anyway, the question to be answered this week isn’t about the second itself. It’s about the coming challenge of tracking down all of the change’s ripple effects. Physicists and engineers around the world might, that is, have a whole new Y2K-like challenge in front of them.

Which (at last!) almost brings us to the point of this week’s rhetorical random walk: How well-documented is your technical architecture?

One more step and we’re there. The point isn’t about your architecture. It’s about you technical architecture management practices, not about how complete and up to date the documentation of your technical infrastructure, platforms, information repositories, applications, interfaces and integration, is not to mention the many-to-many mappings connecting your applications and business capabilities.

Here’s the point

Technical architecture management includes the concept of what’s usually but erroneously called technical debt, to correct which error I’ve suggested the term “chronodebt.”

I’ve defined chronodebt as the accumulated cost of remediating all IT assets that aren’t what engineering standards say they should be. chronodebt is what your IT organization owes the god of time.

Which leads to the question of what we should call the accumulated cost of remediating incomplete and inaccurate documentation of your technical architecture.

It’s chronodebt applied to IT management. It’s a debt that doesn’t come due until it suddenly approaches knee-capping-level urgency.

It matters because there will come a time … there always comes a time … when you need this information Right Now, because you need to track down the ripple effects of a redefined second, a modified business process, the integration requirements of new or updated software, integration of a newly acquired business, the need to provide documentation for a divestiture … really any change imposed on IT by changing circumstances beyond its control or ability to influence.

It’s management chronodebt – the entirely predictable result of striking the wrong balance between those management practices that are most urgent and which are most important.

Bob’s last word: The first law of preventive maintenance is that while you always have a choice between paying now And paying later, paying later almost always costs more.

But in order to implement any program of preventive maintenance, whether it’s managing IT architecture’s chronodebt or a factory’s mechanical and electrical systems, company leadership first has to recognize the existence of what we might call “management chronodebt” – the cost of having failed to invest in the management practices needed to manage technical chronodebt.

New on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: The Edison Ratio: What business and IT leaders get wrong about innovation. Because when it comes to innovation, great ideas matter, But in the end, understanding the need to act on fewer great ideas matters more.

Completely inappropriate for KJR, but who can resist? I hereby nominate the distinguished judge J. Michael Luttig for membership in Bob and Ray’s “Slow Talkers of America.”

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