Friday, April 18, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
KJR themes in the news
4/7/2008
Favorite themes from Keep the Joint Running in the news:
Zero Tolerance Policies: The use of process is the difference between effective management and bureaucracy. Effective managers keep the goal paramount. Processes guide action, help the organization learn, and are ignored whenever they don't fit the situation.
For bureaucrats, the process is the point. Following the steps is all that matters, never mind the outcome.
In another example of zero tolerance being a synonym for bureaucracy, we have a six-year-old boy who swatted a schoolmate on the bottom.
The principal, citing the school's zero tolerance policy for sexual touching, called the police. They, unlike the principal, showed good sense and dropped the matter. Sadly they did not show more good sense by arresting the principle on general principles.
Internal customers also made the news. Well, not exactly. Misuse of the word "customer" is what made the news.
Customers are properly defined as the people who make buying decisions. Many business consultants define it, incorrectly, as those whose inboxes receive the contents of your outbox.
That use of "customer" is an analogy, and as the Economist points out, "Being an analogy ... is not the same thing as being the same thing."
This particular analogy caused serious flight delays over the past couple of weeks. A story brought to my attention by sharp-eyed subscriber J. MacKenzie (Airline Safety Alarms Unheeded Washington Post 2008Apr4), reports that FAA inspectors were told the airlines are ... yes, that's right ... their customers.
More than told. When they tried to enforce the safety rules their supervisors sided with the carriers, threatening the inspectors (according to testimony before the House Transportation Committee).
The good news is, the FAA's top safety inspector isn't giving the usual "few bad apples" speech. He's acknowledging a systemic problem. That's an excellent first step in accomplishing a useful result.
The FAA episode reinforces the importance of industry regulation -- a concept that has become unfashionable over the past few decades.
Industry regulation is needed when the results of pure, unfettered competition are not in the public interest. It fell out of fashion because its downsides -- added expense, extra steps, lots and lots of paperwork, and entanglement in government bureaucracies --received excessive emphasis, while propagandists explained away its obvious successes (one example: The Cuyahoga River is no longer flammable).
Speaking of deregulation mania having resulted in even more inconvenience than the regulations themselves, the tipping-domino-like state of the world economy is also in the news. In one of the most insightful articles yet written on the subject (Chaos on Wall Street Fortune 2008Mar31), Allan Sloan dissects both the situation and what we can and should do about it.
Most past downturns were caused by a weak economy dragging down the markets. This one is different: Weak markets are dragging down the economy. The last time this happened? 1929.
As Sloan convincingly demonstrates, you can't create a mess like this with just one mistake. It took several. One was, clearly, a too-weak regulatory environment.
Following the Great Depression came minimum capital ratio regulations for banks -- basically, how much cash they must have to cover their risks. And only banks, even though brokerages and other financial institutions are now allowed to act in bank-like ways.
The result: The bank-like entities don't even know their risks. Many of their "assets" are portfolios of portfolios of portfolios of loans, packaged as investment vehicles.
It's the financial equivalent of spaghetti code. It works until it stops working, and once it does it's very hard to repair.
What possible relevance does all of this have for a working CIO with a job to do? Quite a lot, as it happens.
Also as with business deregulation, once a good thing starts to be too much of a good thing, it can become a bad thing.
Balance matters.
Favorite themes from Keep the Joint Running in the news:
Zero Tolerance Policies: The use of process is the difference between effective management and bureaucracy. Effective managers keep the goal paramount. Processes guide action, help the organization learn, and are ignored whenever they don't fit the situation.
For bureaucrats, the process is the point. Following the steps is all that matters, never mind the outcome.
In another example of zero tolerance being a synonym for bureaucracy, we have a six-year-old boy who swatted a schoolmate on the bottom.
The principal, citing the school's zero tolerance policy for sexual touching, called the police. They, unlike the principal, showed good sense and dropped the matter. Sadly they did not show more good sense by arresting the principle on general principles.
Internal customers also made the news. Well, not exactly. Misuse of the word "customer" is what made the news.
Customers are properly defined as the people who make buying decisions. Many business consultants define it, incorrectly, as those whose inboxes receive the contents of your outbox.
That use of "customer" is an analogy, and as the Economist points out, "Being an analogy ... is not the same thing as being the same thing."
This particular analogy caused serious flight delays over the past couple of weeks. A story brought to my attention by sharp-eyed subscriber J. MacKenzie (Airline Safety Alarms Unheeded Washington Post 2008Apr4), reports that FAA inspectors were told the airlines are ... yes, that's right ... their customers.
More than told. When they tried to enforce the safety rules their supervisors sided with the carriers, threatening the inspectors (according to testimony before the House Transportation Committee).
The good news is, the FAA's top safety inspector isn't giving the usual "few bad apples" speech. He's acknowledging a systemic problem. That's an excellent first step in accomplishing a useful result.
The FAA episode reinforces the importance of industry regulation -- a concept that has become unfashionable over the past few decades.
Industry regulation is needed when the results of pure, unfettered competition are not in the public interest. It fell out of fashion because its downsides -- added expense, extra steps, lots and lots of paperwork, and entanglement in government bureaucracies --received excessive emphasis, while propagandists explained away its obvious successes (one example: The Cuyahoga River is no longer flammable).
Speaking of deregulation mania having resulted in even more inconvenience than the regulations themselves, the tipping-domino-like state of the world economy is also in the news. In one of the most insightful articles yet written on the subject (Chaos on Wall Street Fortune 2008Mar31), Allan Sloan dissects both the situation and what we can and should do about it.
Most past downturns were caused by a weak economy dragging down the markets. This one is different: Weak markets are dragging down the economy. The last time this happened? 1929.
As Sloan convincingly demonstrates, you can't create a mess like this with just one mistake. It took several. One was, clearly, a too-weak regulatory environment.
Following the Great Depression came minimum capital ratio regulations for banks -- basically, how much cash they must have to cover their risks. And only banks, even though brokerages and other financial institutions are now allowed to act in bank-like ways.
The result: The bank-like entities don't even know their risks. Many of their "assets" are portfolios of portfolios of portfolios of loans, packaged as investment vehicles.
It's the financial equivalent of spaghetti code. It works until it stops working, and once it does it's very hard to repair.
What possible relevance does all of this have for a working CIO with a job to do? Quite a lot, as it happens.
- The importance of eschewing (gesundheit!) zero-tolerance policies is, I hope, clear. Policy is a poor substitute for clear principles and good judgment, and should be reserved for situations where everyone must be treated exactly the same, always, rather than being treated fairly and well.
- Treating those who use IT's services with respect, without pretending they're customers, is a key to the ongoing success of most 21st century CIOs. Those who work together in a business should collaborate as peers, not serve each other as suppliers and customers.
- Recent KJRs have emphasized the desirability of deregulating PCs. As with business deregulation, PC deregulation has a number of benefits.
Also as with business deregulation, once a good thing starts to be too much of a good thing, it can become a bad thing.
Balance matters.
-----------------
Copyright and other stuff -- The great KJR link point
Sunday, April 6, 2008
I belong to a prayer group
Over the 8 weeks it has met, the number attending has dwindled by 1/2 for various reasons. I said tonight that we should call everyone who has ever attended or expressed interest to attend, and invite them next. Consensus was that we tried a couple of times and that is enough.
Well it isn't. The "new evangelization" is not a half-hearted try.
And while I'm on my high horse, having the group meet in upscale restaurants in the vicinity of the church is neither a good group maintenance practice nor even Christian. When Christ fed the people he neither charged nor met where people could not afford to meet.
Well it isn't. The "new evangelization" is not a half-hearted try.
And while I'm on my high horse, having the group meet in upscale restaurants in the vicinity of the church is neither a good group maintenance practice nor even Christian. When Christ fed the people he neither charged nor met where people could not afford to meet.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
To lock or not to lock - it's a deeper question than you thought
3/17/2008
I had a plan.
Last week's column listed three factors to take into account in deciding how far you should open up or lock down desktop PCs: The company's size, how heavily it is regulated, and the role of the individual employee. Bigger, more heavily regulated companies tend to need more tightly controlled PCs. The same is true of employee roles that are more regimented and less flexible.
I'd planned to continue this week with three more factors. One was going to be company strategy. Specifically, companies that sell strongly commoditized products -- products whose only differentiation is price -- have to focus heavily on cost control, meaning lockdown makes sense.
So much for planning: On reflection, I don't buy it.
I don't care if your company manufactures cinder blocks, or buys and sells lentils. It doesn't matter if the product itself is a commodity. Any company that wants to enjoy continued success needs to be on a constant lookout for new and better ways of getting things done.
There are two ways to go about finding these improvements. One is top-down planning. The other is bottom-up initiative. Since the business case for opening up PCs is built on the importance of bottom-up initiative, this is a subject we need to explore in depth.
Top-down planning has the advantage over bottom-up initiative when it comes to engineering elegance. Since the only way to optimize the whole is to sub-optimize the parts, business leaders should engineer the corporation from the top down, according to a carefully rendered program of progressive decomposition -- from core process to sub-processes to sub-sub-processes to activities to tasks to procedures, all carefully orchestrated and controlled.
It's the organization as machine. The gears mesh, the shafts turn, the subassemblies integrate, and everything hums. IT locks down the desktops because any variation from the grand design can only optimize a part at the expense of the whole.
Now imagine you're an employee who performs actual, for example, work. You know how the work gets done because you do it every day. You see an opportunity -- a way to do it better.
Which is too bad, because better people than you have already designed the whole company. There's no room for bottom-up initiative. How could there be? Change anywhere could unbalance the whole machine.
Sure sounds convincing, doesn't it? Well, no, it doesn't. Company processes aren't as carefully engineered as all that. They aren't perfectly optimized from a global, top-down perspective.
The situation is messier than that.
In a typical company, core processes ... the processes that form the heart of the business ... are well-engineered and well supported by the company's enterprise systems. It's hard to escape this conclusion because by definition, a company's core processes are what give it a competitive advantage. That being the case, they will have received the most attention, brainpower, and investment.
Move away from the core processes and you typically find solutions that are more ad hoc in nature. That makes sense. Company leaders should invest more time and attention in competitive differentiators than in business responsibilities that support business responsibilities that support business responsibilities that support competitive differentiators.
So we'd expect to find more opportunities for bottom-up innovation in non-core areas of responsibility than in core processes. This logic dictates a policy that locks down most rigidly the PCs of employees who play primary roles in core and near-core business functions and processes. The PCs of employees whose responsibilities are farther away from the core would be more open.
This makes for a neat, tidy little business paradigm, not too different from Geoffrey Moore's "Keep the core and outsource the rest."
Don't trust tidy little business paradigms. Too often they are on the wrong side of the line that separates the simple from the simplistic.
Here's one of the nasty little conundrums (conundra?) that get in the way. Imagine your company's core and supporting processes really are carefully engineered and perfectly balanced. If that's the case, then in addition to perfect optimization, the company will have achieved perfect stagnation and stasis.
Look at any large organization that's optimized from the top down and you'll find it almost has to discourage front-line innovation. How do you innovate in a world where, when Manufacturing sneezes, Marketing has to say "gesundheit"?
The price to be paid for tight integration is rigidity, and a powerful resistance to change. Today's efficiency almost guarantees tomorrow's obsolescence.
On the other hand, advocating inefficiency and poor business integration just doesn't sit very well.
Do you still think desktop policy is a simple matter?
Think again.
I had a plan.
Last week's column listed three factors to take into account in deciding how far you should open up or lock down desktop PCs: The company's size, how heavily it is regulated, and the role of the individual employee. Bigger, more heavily regulated companies tend to need more tightly controlled PCs. The same is true of employee roles that are more regimented and less flexible.
I'd planned to continue this week with three more factors. One was going to be company strategy. Specifically, companies that sell strongly commoditized products -- products whose only differentiation is price -- have to focus heavily on cost control, meaning lockdown makes sense.
So much for planning: On reflection, I don't buy it.
I don't care if your company manufactures cinder blocks, or buys and sells lentils. It doesn't matter if the product itself is a commodity. Any company that wants to enjoy continued success needs to be on a constant lookout for new and better ways of getting things done.
There are two ways to go about finding these improvements. One is top-down planning. The other is bottom-up initiative. Since the business case for opening up PCs is built on the importance of bottom-up initiative, this is a subject we need to explore in depth.
Top-down planning has the advantage over bottom-up initiative when it comes to engineering elegance. Since the only way to optimize the whole is to sub-optimize the parts, business leaders should engineer the corporation from the top down, according to a carefully rendered program of progressive decomposition -- from core process to sub-processes to sub-sub-processes to activities to tasks to procedures, all carefully orchestrated and controlled.
It's the organization as machine. The gears mesh, the shafts turn, the subassemblies integrate, and everything hums. IT locks down the desktops because any variation from the grand design can only optimize a part at the expense of the whole.
Now imagine you're an employee who performs actual, for example, work. You know how the work gets done because you do it every day. You see an opportunity -- a way to do it better.
Which is too bad, because better people than you have already designed the whole company. There's no room for bottom-up initiative. How could there be? Change anywhere could unbalance the whole machine.
Sure sounds convincing, doesn't it? Well, no, it doesn't. Company processes aren't as carefully engineered as all that. They aren't perfectly optimized from a global, top-down perspective.
The situation is messier than that.
In a typical company, core processes ... the processes that form the heart of the business ... are well-engineered and well supported by the company's enterprise systems. It's hard to escape this conclusion because by definition, a company's core processes are what give it a competitive advantage. That being the case, they will have received the most attention, brainpower, and investment.
Move away from the core processes and you typically find solutions that are more ad hoc in nature. That makes sense. Company leaders should invest more time and attention in competitive differentiators than in business responsibilities that support business responsibilities that support business responsibilities that support competitive differentiators.
So we'd expect to find more opportunities for bottom-up innovation in non-core areas of responsibility than in core processes. This logic dictates a policy that locks down most rigidly the PCs of employees who play primary roles in core and near-core business functions and processes. The PCs of employees whose responsibilities are farther away from the core would be more open.
This makes for a neat, tidy little business paradigm, not too different from Geoffrey Moore's "Keep the core and outsource the rest."
Don't trust tidy little business paradigms. Too often they are on the wrong side of the line that separates the simple from the simplistic.
Here's one of the nasty little conundrums (conundra?) that get in the way. Imagine your company's core and supporting processes really are carefully engineered and perfectly balanced. If that's the case, then in addition to perfect optimization, the company will have achieved perfect stagnation and stasis.
Look at any large organization that's optimized from the top down and you'll find it almost has to discourage front-line innovation. How do you innovate in a world where, when Manufacturing sneezes, Marketing has to say "gesundheit"?
The price to be paid for tight integration is rigidity, and a powerful resistance to change. Today's efficiency almost guarantees tomorrow's obsolescence.
On the other hand, advocating inefficiency and poor business integration just doesn't sit very well.
Do you still think desktop policy is a simple matter?
Think again.
-----------------
Copyright and other stuff -- The great KJR link point
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