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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

News flash!

In another case of psychologists proving what we’ve long suspected, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, publishing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, demonstrated the inverse correlation between actual ability and self-assessment.

The better employees think they are, the worse they actually are and vice versa.

Armed with this little factoid, I expect battalions of mediocre programmers to immediately try to improve their ability to write good code by adding humility to their conversation. While the humility, however insincere, will be a welcome change, it will start a tiresome variant of the decrepit “You only thought I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew” gag.

But I digress.

I just read another version of the “CIOs need to know the business” article. I think there’s just one article on the subject, and when a writer is feeling tired he pulls it out, shuffles some paragraphs around, e-mails it in, and goes back to sleep. They’re all the same, really. They make the hoary point that businesses don’t want technology for technology’s sake — technology must serve a business need, and successful CIOs will embrace this concept.

Some insights are more startling than others, I guess. But before we go on, let’s all hold hands and chant together: “Yes, CIOs must know the business, and never propose technology for technology’s sake.” Maybe if we say it loud and proud a few times, everyone in earshot will understand that we’ve fully grasped this concept, and we can all move on to the next one.

The next one, made many times in this space, is that “knowing the business” doesn’t begin and end with abstract notions like strategies and business models. The most important part of knowing the business is knowing the interests, hot-buttons (and cold-buttons), pet programs and pet peeves of every important decision-maker in the company. At least half of an average CIO’s time is spent selling. It’s internal selling … to the board of directors, CEO, senior executives, middle managers … but selling nonetheless.

If you don’t like the idea of having to sell internally, find a different word that describes the process of persuading others to adopt your concepts, in the process adding money to your budget.

If it looks, waddles, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. If it looks, smells, and tastes like selling, it’s selling.

To sell effectively, you need to understand your prospects on an empathic level. You need to understand the business, formally, politically, and personally.

Why, oh why do so many seemingly sensible people jump from here to the ridiculous notion that the CIO can delegate the “understanding technology” part of running IS to subordinates? Would anyone reach a similar conclusion down the hall a few doors, and figure the CFO doesn’t need to understand accounting, just “the business”?

Of course not. Of course, they’d probably reach the right conclusion for the wrong reason, explaining that at the end of the day … or at least the fiscal year … the money is the business. Robert McNamara, overconfident of his ability (sound familiar?) due to his business resume, used a similar thought process in pursuit of victory in Vietnam, running a metrics-driven war in which relative body counts (profits) mattered more than the formulation and execution of strategy and tactics.

CFOs need to understand finance and accounting because they run that part of the business and they need to understand the discipline. CIOs need to understand information technology because that’s what they’re responsible for. This isn’t a complex concept, nor should it be controversial.

Go back to the idea that CIOs spend a lot of their time selling. What do really great sales people do? They paint a persuasive vision of how great your world will be once you’ve incorporated what they’re selling into it.

What’s the first step? Understand what you’re selling. In the case of a CIOs, that’s information technology. Without that knowledge, no matter how good you are at step two — understanding your prospects’ world — you’ll have no way of progressing to step three: Putting that knowledge and your product together.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

And now, let’s observe a moment of silence for Personal Information Managers (PIMs) – an honorable category of software that’s gone to its eternal reward.

Software designers devoted more creativity to PIMs than to all other software categories combined, I think, and in this millennial year it’s all for naught. (And yes, of course the pun was intended.)

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. For those of you who can reach back that far, Sidekick, the first PIM, invented “terminate and stay resident” (TSR) techniques for DOS. Just as significantly, Sidekick and succeeding TSRs taught PC users the value of having access to more than one program at a time. What should have been Sidekick’s longest-lasting legacy, though, is how it helped end-users with the small stuff – the thirty-second tasks that fill the day. It was Sidekick, far more than WordStar and VisiCalc, that leveraged the PC to bust the old paradigm of IS apart. After Sidekick, end-users understood that computers could help them with everything, not just those official responsibilities, related to company “core processes”, that were written into their job descriptions.

It took IS a decade to catch up. In some companies, it never did. Sadly, in others it did once but forgot.

PIMs generated more enthusiasm … and partisanship … among end-users than any other software category. I loved a product called “Tornado Notes”, which popped up tiny windows all over the screen, into which you could type quick notes, which you could find instantly. It was very cool. You can’t buy anything like it anymore.

Then there’s the late, lamented Ecco Pro. Purchased and immediately discontinued by NetManage (a brilliant business strategy) it combined outlines, tabbed pages, and drag-and-drop to let you keep track of every scrap of information you ever collected and knew you’d need to find three months from now. More than any other program I’ve ever used, Ecco Pro demonstrated the validity of the concept of “personal” computing. It kept track of my information.

With Ecco Pro (among other products), if you wanted to log an appointment with someone, you dragged their contact record to the right date/time slot on its calendar. Need to note the need to call someone? Drag their record to a fresh line on the “Calls” page. Need to take notes about a call? Hit the tab key to indent the next line and start typing.

Now I have Outlook — an integrated enterprise system, not a PIM. While its interface is ghastly in comparison, my need to integrate contacts and calendar with corporate e-mail and my PDA have forced me to abandon the defunct Ecco Pro. Random notes? While Outlook’s Notes feature provides a few of the old Tornado Notes’ capabilities, it has replaced the instantaneous response I got from Tornado Notes on my old 286 with tedious delays on my Pentium 233, while what Tornado Notes did in four keystrokes takes about 37 keystrokes and mouse clicks in Outlook.

Why are there no PIMs anymore? One reason: “Personal” computing … using computers to empower individuals in everything they do … is waning. It’s waning everywhere, that is, except among the end-users who still need a personal effectiveness tool. They, in desperation, are buying PDAs by the zillion.

PDAs, of course, have their own limitations: Any application that synchronizes with the PC is limited to what the controlling PC application stores.

What’s ironic is why personal computing has fallen out of favor. Microsoft, the biggest purveyor of personal effectiveness tools on the planet, has done most of the damage by persistently designing “DLL hell” into its product line — it’s DLL hell (and inflated estimates of its impact by the big industry research firms) that’s motivated IS to depersonalize the PC.

What’s even more ironic is this: As the World Wide Web has made the idea of cross-linked, cross-indexed information commonplace, the tools we provide end-users to cross-link and cross-index their personal information have become worse, not better.

Figure that one out.

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