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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

What’s the future of information technology? Everything will be faster, development will be easier, and integration will be as simple as building something out of Tinkertoys. In fact, development and integration will converge into the same set of activities — finding the functionality you need and connecting it into a functioning application.

Sure it will. Of course, building something useful out of Tinkertoys still requires a design and a plan, and taking two somethings built out of Tinkertoys and sticking them together will still require consistent designs, but no matter. That isn’t what this column is about anyway.

This column is about the future of information technology organizations, not the technology itself. That future, as stated here many times before, is to be a collaborator with the rest of the enterprise in designing and achieving useful business change.

Imagine you’re convinced and ready to go. What happens next? Do you add an agenda item to the next executive staff meeting to make the announcement? Sure — you’ll stand up, say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the IT division has officially redefined its role in the enterprise. We’ve been a service provider that strove to exceed your expectations. Now we’re a collaborator in designing and achieving useful business change,” and sit down.

That will work. Not on this planet, mind you, but in an infinite universe there must be a world circling some other star where it would.

Here on earth you need to be a bit more subtle than that, because of three dark little secrets most in business don’t want to admit.

The first is that advocating change is a whole lot safer for a business manager’s career than actually implementing change. Advocating change is fine and noble, making it clear you’re firmly focused on achieving great things for the enterprise through visionary programs fraught with exciting opportunities. Actually implementing change, on the other hand, involves quite a bit of risk and more than quite a bit of roll-up-your-sleeves-and-sweat hard work.

Advocating change while avoiding its reality is, fortunately, quite simple: Blame IT. Business change requires new information technology. Most IT projects are less than successful, so the odds favor nothing happening. And if IT does deliver working software that meets the specifications, that doesn’t mean anything anyway — the software might run, but it’s always easy to find reasons it doesn’t support the business.

That’s the first secret — perhaps overstated, but present at some level more often than not. The second? IT likes advocating change more than it likes implementing it, too. Proclaiming that we’re change agents makes us sound like a potent force in the enterprise, and creates work for analysts and programmers besides. Building software that meets the specifications is hard but straightforward work. But if anyone tries to actually use it, we all might discover a flaw in the premise, and that’s even worse for our reputation than building software that never gets used. We can always blame the business for the bad specifications.

Okay, so I’m still overstating things. There’s enough truth in all of this to make everyone uncomfortable, as it should. The third secret, though, I’m not overstating at all: Most businesses have killed their ability to adapt to changing conditions. They call it “lean and mean.” If they’d called it emaciated and unpleasant — the more apt description — even Wall Street might have understood the fallacy.

The IT division you lead is embedded in an enterprise accustomed to treating IT as an internal supplier, and to IT treating everyone in the enterprise as internal customers. Most people like it that way. And there aren’t enough employees left in the business to work on a large business change initiative anyway — at best, there are barely enough to keep the place going. IT should collaborate with the business to achieve change? How’s that going to happen?

That’s a great question, which means, as everyone knows, that I don’t have a great answer.

I do have a half-decent one. It will have to wait until next week, though, because we’re out of space and I have to finish getting ready for our two upcoming seminars.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“Since you have now abused the trust I placed in you when I subscribed to your newsletter by using my address for unauthorized purposes (e.g. marketing), please unsubscribe me from your mailing list.” — From a now-former KJR subscriber, in response to the recent e-mail promoting our upcoming seminars.

Juxtapose it with “IS Survivor Publishing’s Complex Legalese Privacy Policy”:

By registering at ISSurvivor.com and providing your name and e-mail address, you give IS Survivor Publishing blanket permission to send you occasional e-mails describing new products, services or other offerings available from IS Survivor Publishing. That’s the price you pay for getting Keep the Joint Running for free. If you don’t like it … heck, tell us what you’re willing to pay to get KJR without our exercises in self-promotion. We’re open-minded about such matters.

In exchange, we commit to the following privacy policy: You’ll only hear from us (“us” is defined as IS Survivor Publishing and our parent company, IT Catalysts, Inc.), and not more than a couple of times each month.

We won’t sell or rent our list to anyone else. If we change our minds about this we’ll notify you and give you a chance to opt out.

I’m not feeling particularly apologetic, having sent a mere two promotional mailings in the past eleven months. Still, the half-dozen or so complaints I received got me thinking about spam, how it’s defined, and what to do about it.

The common definitions of spam include three characteristics: It’s e-mail that’s (1) unsolicited; (2) sent for commercial purposes; and (3) transmitted to a large distribution list. The common definitions are worthless. Here’s why:

If all unsolicited e-mail is spam then all e-mail is spam. What are you supposed to do — only send e-mail after a friend has spoken to you on the telephone requesting it? Every e-mail thread begins with an unsolicited message. That’s the nature of communication.

If all e-mail sent for commercial purposes is spam, then no vendor is ever allowed to send an e-mail to a client. That serves nobody’s interests.

Now about that mailing list bit. That doesn’t help either, or Keep the Joint Running, and every other e-mail newsletter received by people who chose to subscribe, would be considered spam.

So it’s a Boolean “and”: All three criteria must be present. Except for this: More recipients registered for my seminars than complained, even though it was unsolicited, commercial, and sent to a list. (There is, however, still room — feel free to register!)

If the standard definition is wrong, what’s right? When I talk about spam, it’s about the collected mass of all e-mails I receive that I don’t want, not the individual message. It’s the clutter that makes it spam, which is what makes this a hard problem to solve.

Spam is a bit like a bunch of men crowding around a beautiful woman, asking her for a date. She finds most to be drunk, obnoxious, and disgusting, and the group as a whole to be offensive. But she does date someone, and eventually most of these guys find a woman who wants to date them. Which is to say, no matter how obnoxious or disgusting each spam message you receive is to you, someone somewhere wants to buy what each seller has to offer. And it’s possible that among the mass of messages are one or two offering products and services that are of interest to you.

If ISPs charged by the byte — if there was a cost for the stamp — spammers would start targeting their lists. It can’t happen. Without legislation it would be collusion and a violation of the antitrust laws. Presumably, in these anti-regulatory times, nobody wants legislation requiring it. And even if Congress were to pass such a strange law, all that would happen would be that spammers would sign up with ISPs in Bulgaria or the Caymans that aren’t subject to U.S. laws.

The magical curative properties of the marketplace, too-often espoused as the panacea that will cure all ills, are what cause this problem. The marketplace can’t solve it. If that isn’t clear, read Garrett Hardin’s classic paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. Spam is a perfect example.

How about a legislative solution? The CAN-SPAM act, whose double entendre of a name is entirely apt, isn’t going to fix very much, although I hope it puts a dent in the now-popular practices of spoofing and system hijacking.

So if neither the marketplace nor legislation can fix the problem of spam, and unit pricing, which could, will never happen, what’s the solution?

Nothing. There is no solution. Spam is a problem that will be with us for a long, long time.

I hope you have a good spam filter.

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