Advice Line | Bob Lewis » Finding the balance between IT prudishness and permissiveness

July 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Finding the balance between IT prudishness and permissiveness

TAGS: General

Dear Bob ...

I liked your article ("The new prudes," Keep the Joint Running, 7/9/2007) and in theory agree.

What do you do with larger companies? I'm sure your tools are nice and work for you, but I want another set which makes me productive:

• I'd like a MySpace page to set up for my global team. It's the best way to gain consensus and keep everyone up to speed. It's controlled so only my team can view.

• I'd like to have Utube so I can show my presentation to my team, I want to use a video as it's cheaper than video conferencing and not each person who works remote has this functionality. Everyone with a phone can create a video.

And others want other application that make them productive.

So we have thousands of various versions of applications making us all more productive. Does this cause any extra costs (network, support, etc?) Does the productivity pay for this cost? I would argue it doesn’t. Unless productivity is reducing an expense or driving up revenue then the tools are just a convenience.

Yikes, maybe I'm a prude!

Stifling creativity is a problem, but it seems their should be some controls. I'm just trying to find the right balance.

- In the middle

Dear Middling ...

Large corporations can view themselves as monoliths, as collections of test labs, or as something in between (that would be the "balance" thing you described). I generally prefer to err on the side of test labs while avoiding the extreme of having no standards at all.

This model would say that a project team might decide to try using MySpace as a way to promote information sharing. If it works, the company, instead of punishing you for being successful, implements equivalent functionality on its intranet. Last I looked this sort of thing went under the name "online PMO," but I haven't looked recently and it might have changed.

Likewise UTube, and whatever other functionality you think would make your team more effective.

I agree that "productivity" by itself isn't likely to pay for expensive functionality … but a lot of what I'm talking about isn't expensive at all, especially when you unitize it by employee. That is to say, if a piece of software costs $29.95 per PC, it's cheap. If you have 2,000 employees who would benefit from it, you can either figure it now costs $60,000 (expensive in some circles) or $29.95 per employee - still cheap, assuming the business turns a profit from the work of its employees.

Yes, there are hidden costs associated with these experiments, such as the potential for requiring a more robust network.

There are also hidden costs for preventing these experiments, such as loss of competitiveness as other, more nimble competitors adopt the more advanced techniques.

I'd also point out that there are three basic business "goods," not two: Revenue enhancement, cost reduction, and risk management. I'd think your proposed use of MySpace would fit into the risk mitigation bucket: Promoting better team information sharing reduces the risk of project failure by reducing the potential for rework.

Make sense?

- Bob

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Posted by Bob Lewis on July 31, 2007 05:12 AM

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