MORE ENTRIES
- Zell and the art of employee management
- Balancing strategic and tactical improvements
- End-user-supplied metadata - problem or solution?
- How an Advice Line situation turned out
- Defining government's customers
- Continuing the Greater Good discussion
- Lessons from Lambeau
- A contrarian view of "A contrarian view of process"
- A greater good discussion
- Should disciplinary freezes carry over?
Advice Line | Bob Lewis »
January 2008
It always irritates me when this happens: Frank Hayes beat me to the punch (a sadly common occurrence; for my money Frank is the best columnist in IT). Take the time to read his excellent column about the Tribune company and its new owner/CEO, Sam Zell: "Frankly Speaking: Sam Zell's 'crazy' idea plugs content filters," Computerworld, 1/28/2008.
Zell plans to lead the Tribune based on the radical notion that he has talented employees who are also, coincidentally, grown-ups. He's going to run the company based on that assumption. That means no more use of web filtering and monitoring, e-mail tracking and so on as ways to make sure employees aren't wasting time on the job.
It isn't that I haven't written about this subject ... for example, see "Employee privacy - buck the trend," Keep the Joint Running, 11/13/2000, not to mention a very old IS Survival Guide, "Sam Kinison on management," (4/15/1996).
Still, it's one thing for a columnist and self-appointed pundit to talk about this. It's quite another for the billionaire owner of a media conglomerate to build the future of his business around it.
As further evidence, here is how the Tribune's new Employee Handbook begins:
- Bob
Dear Bob ...
My current boss has asked me to undertake an extensive review of organizational information practices, with an eye to (1) understanding how the business works, and (2) seeing what can be done to improve our practices.
So far, I've documented about 100 requests and suggestions for improvements from staff in the various business units, and to my mind, the next obvious step is to sit down, prioritize which tasks are most important, and just start addressing them.
Instead, my boss wants me to identify broader strategies, establish business drivers and benefits of pursuing these strategies, and them submit these to the next management level up for approval.
To my mind, this smacks of retrospective justification. If there are perceived problems out there, why do we need a strategy before we can fix them?
Or is this a case of me seeing the trees instead of the forest?
- Prioritizer
Dear Prioritizer ...
I think you and your boss are each about half right.
One reason to not just "do the list" is that even if every idea for improvement is a good idea taken in isolation, it's doubtful they will all mesh harmoniously if you're able to find a way to put them all into practice.
One of the basic, unexpected principles of design is that in order to optimize the whole you have to sub-optimize the parts. If you have a list of one hundred improvements it's just about certain that many of them ... probably most of them ... have a local focus. That means they are intended to improve a part, which will sometimes happen at the expense of the whole.
If this point isn't clear, read "Optimizing the organization," (Keep the Joint Running, 10/27/2003).
The other big reason for not just diving into the list is that when a company allocates too much of its available staff to work on a large list of small stuff, there might not be enough left to take care of what's most important.
One reason you are right is the Edison Ratio: Genius (and success in general) comes from one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. In context it means having big, strategic ideas is often less important than sweating the details.
The other reason you are right is that small, focused efforts have little risk of failure and deliver business value quickly. It's the big strategic ones that fail often and don't deliver any value for long periods of time.
There's a way out of this collision of incompatible rightnesses. It is (don't sneer!) a magic quadrant analysis.
The vertical axis represents cost and risk - the reasons why not. The horizontal axis represents benefit and impact - the reasons to proceed. Here's how you label and handle each quadrant:
* Upper left (high cost/risk, low benefit/impact): Kill. There's no point to something that costs a lot, has a high likelihood of failure, and won't accomplish much that is useful.
* Lower left (low cost/risk, low benefit/impact): Delegate or re-scope. Most of your items probably live in this quadrant. If they really are isolated, small efforts that are local in scope, beneficial in a minor way, but won't cost much and are pretty much sure things, delegate their execution to the area they effect and forget about them. The good news about these is that they accumulate. A few thousand small, seemingly unimportant improvements turn into a big deal after awhile.
Others in the same quadrant will turn out to be linked in some way to other items either in this quadrant or others. By consolidating them, you'll eliminate redundant work, avoid incompatible outcomes in related or linked efforts, and achieve more important results. This, more or less, is what your boss is telling you to do.
* Lower right (low cost/risk, high benefit/impact): Full steam ahead. There aren't a lot of these, and they're the best of all possible worlds. You spend little, risk little, and get a lot in return. It is possible you'll have some of these on your list. If so, get them started as fast as you can.
* Upper right (high cost/risk, high benefit/impact): Select and manage. Companies can't undertake too many high-cost, high-risk, high benefit/impact initiatives at the same time. They can't - companies can't absorb that much change all at once. And, each effort of this size and scope requires significant executive oversight or they will fail. Companies have only a limited supply of executive oversight.
My best advice, then, is to find the linkages that almost certainly connect many of the items on the list, and then to package them together in the form of strategic initiatives, so that when your company implements them the results will fit together.
Find a way to delegate the rest so they are handled quietly and locally.
That gives your company the best of both worlds.
- Bob
Dear Bob ...
Do you know of any cases where a large enterprise has used a Wiki for their metadata, allowing most people (after registering) with access to the intranet update the metadata?
The problem we are having is that IT does not want to own (seems they did not budget or schedule for it) the metadata, so now we have an entry for every database, schema, table, column, term and concept, but most of the entries simply contain the name, data type and when it was created. This was created using automated scripts from the various databases, and is not helping me as a downstream developer.
Most of the knowledge has been given out, but in so many PowerPoint slides and e-mails that no one person knows it all. Since the problem is that IT doesn't have the staff to fill in the metadata I figured we, the users could.
- Volunteer
Dear Volunteer
I don't know of any cases for metadata. My initial reaction is that there would be a significant loss of control. I think of metadata the way I think of the chart of accounts - something to be carefully planned and centrally managed.
But maybe I'm just getting old.
In any undertaking, when a business chooses an alternative, it's balancing risks. Compared to the risk of undocumented metadata, it's entirely possible the risk of having too many incorrect entries might be lower.
Or, it might not: Remember the wise words of Mark Twain, who said, "It ain't what we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's what we do know that ain't so."
- Bob
Dear Bob ...
So, awhile ago I wrote you about what to do when I found out my boss was looking to replace me ("When you hear you're going to be replaced," Advice Line, 12/15/2007). Well, I took Lewis' First Law of Business ("We are all capitalists") to heart and started looking for another job. I found a great opportunity to leverage my current skills while learning new ones, and I turned my notice in yesterday.
When I sat down with my boss and HR, they pressed me as to why I was leaving. Applying Lewis' Second Law of Business - actually an off-shoot of the First Law - ("Is it beneficial to me?") I declined to tell them the real reasons for my departure, relying instead on a current on-going personal crisis (divorce) to tell them that I "am looking for a clean start somewhere else." Which is not a lie.
I guess I am telling you all of this to get your approval, or consent at the very least, for not telling them what a bunch of yellow-bellied, lying, conniving, thieving, bastards they really are. After all, other than venting, what possible good would there be in that for me?
Just sign me,
- Venting
Dear Venting ...
Congratulations. You handled it perfectly. Other than the emotional gratification you'd have experienced, explaining the real reason for your departure would have nothing but downside in it for you.
I sympathize regarding your divorce. I've been through it. There's no such thing as an easy one. They start out hard and get worse. Good luck.
Thanks for letting me know, and for giving me permission to post your experience in Advice Line. It is valuable for readers to know this sort of thing works, and that the hardest part is to make the decision.
Much as I'd love to believe my advice by itself constitutes gospel, it isn't. I figure an ounce of fact is worth several pounds of opinion.
- Bob
Dear Bob ...
A long time ago people were calling everyone including the dog their customer. A lot of that is still going around and it gets in the way of clear thinking sometimes.
I liked your (now ancient) article [probably "Who defines value," InfoWorld's Survival Guide, 7/29/1996) positing that only paying customers are real customers and that HR, Facilities, Operations, etc are IT partners – not customers – in the job of meeting the needs of the real customers.
In that article you mentioned that government organizations are much the same but with a twist since the paying part is different for them. I work for DoD and sometimes find it useful to point out the advantages to an organization of the “paying customer” way of looking at things. However, the point gets a little lost when the discussion drifts off to taxpayers as the paying customer.
Since this is DoD the concept of the war fighter as the customer instead of everyone helps but I was hoping you could help me refine a useful stance for government in general.
- Gummint Guy
Dear GG ...
Personally, I'm sick to death of taxpayers thinking they're government's customers. We're the owners. Even that isn't quite the case - all adult citizens are government's owners, not just taxpayers - but it's a lot closer to the mark than all of us figuring that since we put money in, we should receive goods and services in return.
Customers are the people who make buying decisions. Smart businesses cater to them because in the world of commerce that's usually a better way to build revenue and profit than ticking them off.
Government doesn't have customers. When public officials try to please the people who "make a buying decision" it's called taking a bribe and is considered bad form (unless the funds are delivered in the form of campaign contributions, and what's received in exchange is access and influence, at which point it's the American Way … but that isn't relevant to this discussion).
Searching for the right metaphorical equivalent to "customer" in the conduct of government isn't a good use of mental energy. If we're going to spend a lot of time forcing a metaphor to fit where it doesn't belong, let's think of government as a tavern and try to figure out what it produces that's parallel to beer, cocktails, Irish stew, and free popcorn.
What's the point?
While it makes sense to run government in a businesslike way, it doesn't make sense to run government as a business. Government doesn't have customers in any meaningful sense, doesn't have competitors in any meaningful sense, and doesn't operate by exchanging products and services for enough money to pay for their production plus a margin of profit.
What government agencies do have is a mission - a reason for existence: Something they are supposed to do; people or organizations they are supposed to serve. My best advice is to stop worrying about who is the customer and instead focus everyone on what they are supposed to accomplish.
In your case, it sounds like your team exists to help the men and women who fight our wars to win their battles and live to fight the next one. I think you'll find that if you're able to keep everyone's eye on that ball, the need to identify a "customer" will go away.
What won't go away is one of the needs identifying customers does satisfy, and that's determining who has the expertise and experience to help your team figure out what the best results look like. If you build a minivan and want to improve it, understanding that parents with a few children are the most likely buyers means you know to ask a bunch of them what they want that your current products don't deliver. They are the experts in what they are willing to spend money for and the criteria they use to choose from among competing products.
If your team (for example) is responsible for the design and production of a weapon system, I imagine the equivalent experts are officers and soldiers - officers because a weapon's capabilities influence battlefield tactics; soldiers because the weapon has to operate under battlefield conditions.
Equivalent logic will serve to identify the expert you should listen to no matter what your team's mission.
- Bob
[More on "A greater good," Advice Line, 12/29/2007):
Normally, I am very impressed by Bob's insights and thinking outside or beyond the box views.
This one seems a little off the mark.
I think Bob missed the (perhaps unspoken) theme here that we, or at least some of us, are completely disgusted and fed up with corporations that are becoming increasingly arrogant, mean-spirited, and repulsive.
His response is to hide behind an examination of Capitalist and Marxist economic principles. This is the kind of answer I'd expect from Ken Lay, not the normally enlightened Mr. Lewis! :)
Of course economic systems are amoral - they can't have morals any more than they can be happy or sad.
But the extent to which "morality isn't part of the discussion [of business success]" isn't a consequence of which economic system we choose to (loosely) follow, it's a function of what we, as a society, define as success.
Bob has chosen the "bottom line" criteria espoused by Wall Street and BODs everywhere, where the ends justifies the means, and greed is good.
Bad Bob, bad. If I had a newspaper, I'd hit Bob on the nose.
------------------------------------------
Bob's reply:
Fed up or not, disgusted or not, here's the way things are: Businesses exist to provide value to shareholders; the managers of a business have a fiduciary responsibility to see that the shareholders get that value.
They have quite a bit of leeway in figuring out how to make that happen. That leeway extends to placing ethical boundaries beyond the legal boundaries of acceptable behavior, so long as doing so doesn't cause shareholders financial harm.
It also extends to ignoring all conventional ethical mores, so long as the behavior is legal, in the same pursuit.
That's a fact. I'm not responsible for it. I am responsible for not pretending that it isn't the case.
If the managers who run a business want it to run according to their idea of ethics, it's up to them to figure out how to do so in a way that makes the business at least as successful as any other choice. If they want employees to act for the greater good, they have to:
* Define in clear, appealing terms what that means.
* Build consensus that the greater good really is good.
* Structure the company so that employees who act for the greater good are more successful than those who don't.
If someone works for a company whose managers haven't done this, I'm not going to pretend that employees should act for the greater good anyway. That would be bad advice, for all the reasons I listed.
If you disapprove of how most companies are run, join the club.
It's a big club, which doesn't change my advice one bit.
- Bob
Maybe this is a bit of a stretch.
It's easy to over-use sports metaphors when writing about business. Among their many limitations: Sports is unambiguous. You either win or you lose. When you (for example) deploy a new IT application, assessing the success of the effort is just a wee bit more ambiguous than that.
Second limitation: Sports is defined by how well you make split-second decisions. Business is defined in large part by how well you avoid making split-second decisions.
On the other hand, my wife has a cousin who plays for the Green Bay Packers, and after yesterday's 42 to 20 victory over the Seahawks, it's hard to resist the temptation.
So I won't.
Some thoughts that might be relevant to running IT:
- Bob
A comment on this week's Keep the Joint Running, "A contrarian view of process," which suggests that too much emphasis has been placed on process, at the expense of more important matters, such as establishing what Jim Collins calls a "culture of discipline":
Dear Bob ...
Discipline and process are two sides of the same coin. Discipline and process are both structured, well thought out approaches to solving problems.
The biggest difference is that discipline is more individualistic or team based. Process attempts to extend that discipline into the broader organization. And so the shift is to move from disciplined people or teams, to process based organizations. It is a logical next step in the evolution of a dynamic organization. It isn’t one or the other. Or that one is better than the other.
By the way, I would think that amazon.com is a clear example where process is a key driver behind the success of the organization.
- Process driven
Dear Driven ...
There is a difference between discipline and having a culture of discipline. No question, in many circumstances "disciplined execution" means reliable execution of well-defined processes. That isn't the only expression of a culture of discipline, though.
For example, another hallmark is that business decision-makers rely on evidence and logic in their decision-making, preferring these to their personal biases and "gut feelings."
In spite of many attempts to make it so, decision-making isn't a process in any meaningful sense - it is a "practice." The difference is that when you follow the steps of a process, good results happen. When you follow the steps of a practice that's just the starting point.
Think of bowling as a process and hitting a pitched baseball as a practice. To be good at either you have to be disciplined about your approach to the sport.
But in bowling, it's pretty much true that if you can release the ball exactly the same way every time, you can get a strike every time. Variation in the output is due entirely to variation in the input.
When it comes to hitting a pitched ball, if you swing the bat exactly the same way every time any decent pitcher will easily strike you out. Practices require judgment, insight, inspired guesswork, sometimes the ability to anticipate an opponent … following the steps gets you in the game, but that's about it.
So far as Amazon.com is concerned, process is certainly important. Its customer-facing technology is far more important. The fact that Jeff Bezos thinks like a merchant, and constantly focuses on business strategies and tactics that will attract more customers and get him a greater share of their wallets, has nothing at all to do with process.
My opinion, at least.
- Bob
Two related Comments regarding my recent post, "Is looking out for the greater good reasonable?" (Advice Line, 12/29/2007), edited for length:
Just an opinion: Both commenters need to dig a little deeper on this subject. The bedrock assumption behind capitalist economics is that each individual "maximizes his or her own utility." Which is to say, each of us looks out for our own best interests, however we define them.
Marxist economics (and I'm stating this as a fact, not a value judgment) asks each participant to look out for the greater good. (And yes, of course, I was hyperbolizing when I used the term "commie." Nobody says "commie" any more.)
The obvious consequence, here in the U.S., is that when the subject is business success, morality isn't part of the discussion, except to the extent that it might place some boundaries on the behavior of the corporation.
But even that is unlikely. The world of commerce is the world of laws, regulations, contracts and negotiations. Employees should place the greater good ahead of their own interests only to the extent that the corporation structures things so that employees who do so are more successful than those who don't.
"Right" and "wrong" aren't easily reconciled to capitalism. It is an intrinsically amoral system, which cares about what works and what doesn't.
Throwing away trash, personal donations to charities and so on have very little to do with the discussion. They all take place outside the world of commerce.
Very different subjects.
In business, it's up to the Board, CEO, and executive team to set things up so that the corporate good (not the same as the greater good) is both clearly defined, and in the individual best interests of the employees who work there.
Asking employees to be altruistic toward their employer is ridiculous, and entirely non-parallel with other circumstances in which some form of altruism (generally "reciprocal altruism," family altruism or sacrificing short-term self-interest for long-term benefit) does make sense.
Oh, one last thought: Who gets to define "the greater good?" When large numbers of people are involved, as is usually the case in corporate America (and I'm defining "large number" as any number greater than one), it's rare that everyone agrees about what constitutes the greater good, let alone how to go about achieving it.
- Bob
Dear Bob ...
In response to your recent post, "How long should a discipinary freeze last?" I think you missed the point of his question.
His point was that if you are not included in the 4% this year, next year's 4% is based on a lower base salary, as will every raise thereafter (until promotion, I suppose), so missing one year's increase has a "permanent" effect, even if the employee gets raises thereafter.
I look forward to your answer.
- Need clarification
Dear Clarifier ...
You're right. Truth be told, I considered the question to be rhetorical given the tone of the rest of the inquiry.
It's like this: Had the employee received a minimal raise due to poor performance instead of no raise due to a disciplinary action, this wouldn't be a question at all. "If I perform well next year, will you give me this year's raise?"
No.
For companies that follow the structure I recommend, this is even less of a discussion point. For them, base compensation reflects marketplace value only, so there's no freeze, no carry, no discussion. Your base comp depends on your skills, knowledge and experience relative to the position you currently hold.
These companies use the annual bonus (variable compensation, also known as at-risk pay) to recognize performance. If someone is on the receiving end of disciplinary action, I think it's reasonable to withhold a performance bonus. And since a performance bonus is, by definition, recognition of this year's performance, again there's no conversation about carry-over or make-up compensation.
- Bob
I cheated.
After my last post regarding my problems with MessageLabs ("Spam filtering for dummies," Advice Line, 12/26/2007) I notified the company's press contacts that I'd highlighted MessageLabs in Advice Line. (Unlike non-client technical contact information, this contact information was easy to find).
A technical support representative contacted me within hours, offering as much help as necessary to resolve the situation.
I confess that my cynical side wondered if someone without InfoWorld's name and a large subscriber list would have received the same attention. This didn't stop me from taking advantage of the offer.
Here's what I learned, most of it to MessageLabs' credit:
My opinion is that this would be desirable. Whether it would be profitable is another matter, and they do run a for-profit business. I'm not in a position to figure out how this would play out.
At the moment, MessageLabs doesn't clearly explain how a non-client with a problem should contact them, but has promised to fix this.
My worst suspicions - that its practices were a deliberate ploy to drive companies to sign up so as to be able to receive this sort of support - turned out not to be the case.
And, I am pleased to report, the quality of their support staff was top-notch. They know what they're doing, quickly diagnose problems, and sincerely and professionally wanted to help.
Thought you might want to know, even if it did mean I had to write something nice about someone, which is nowhere near as much fun as the alternative.
- Bob
January 31, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Zell and the art of employee management
It always irritates me when this happens: Frank Hayes beat me to the punch (a sadly common occurrence; for my money Frank is the best columnist in IT). Take the time to read his excellent column about the Tribune company and its new owner/CEO, Sam Zell: "Frankly Speaking: Sam Zell's 'crazy' idea plugs content filters," Computerworld, 1/28/2008.
Zell plans to lead the Tribune based on the radical notion that he has talented employees who are also, coincidentally, grown-ups. He's going to run the company based on that assumption. That means no more use of web filtering and monitoring, e-mail tracking and so on as ways to make sure employees aren't wasting time on the job.
It isn't that I haven't written about this subject ... for example, see "Employee privacy - buck the trend," Keep the Joint Running, 11/13/2000, not to mention a very old IS Survival Guide, "Sam Kinison on management," (4/15/1996).
Still, it's one thing for a columnist and self-appointed pundit to talk about this. It's quite another for the billionaire owner of a media conglomerate to build the future of his business around it.
As further evidence, here is how the Tribune's new Employee Handbook begins:
Rule #1: Use your best judgment.You have to like a guy like that.
Rule #2: See Rule 1.
That's it. That is the one hard and fast rule. Unless a serious mistake was made when you were hired, you have pretty good judgment.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 31, 2008 06:19 AM
January 28, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Balancing strategic and tactical improvements
Dear Bob ...
My current boss has asked me to undertake an extensive review of organizational information practices, with an eye to (1) understanding how the business works, and (2) seeing what can be done to improve our practices.
So far, I've documented about 100 requests and suggestions for improvements from staff in the various business units, and to my mind, the next obvious step is to sit down, prioritize which tasks are most important, and just start addressing them.
Instead, my boss wants me to identify broader strategies, establish business drivers and benefits of pursuing these strategies, and them submit these to the next management level up for approval.
To my mind, this smacks of retrospective justification. If there are perceived problems out there, why do we need a strategy before we can fix them?
Or is this a case of me seeing the trees instead of the forest?
- Prioritizer
Dear Prioritizer ...
I think you and your boss are each about half right.
One reason to not just "do the list" is that even if every idea for improvement is a good idea taken in isolation, it's doubtful they will all mesh harmoniously if you're able to find a way to put them all into practice.
One of the basic, unexpected principles of design is that in order to optimize the whole you have to sub-optimize the parts. If you have a list of one hundred improvements it's just about certain that many of them ... probably most of them ... have a local focus. That means they are intended to improve a part, which will sometimes happen at the expense of the whole.
If this point isn't clear, read "Optimizing the organization," (Keep the Joint Running, 10/27/2003).
The other big reason for not just diving into the list is that when a company allocates too much of its available staff to work on a large list of small stuff, there might not be enough left to take care of what's most important.
One reason you are right is the Edison Ratio: Genius (and success in general) comes from one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. In context it means having big, strategic ideas is often less important than sweating the details.
The other reason you are right is that small, focused efforts have little risk of failure and deliver business value quickly. It's the big strategic ones that fail often and don't deliver any value for long periods of time.
There's a way out of this collision of incompatible rightnesses. It is (don't sneer!) a magic quadrant analysis.
The vertical axis represents cost and risk - the reasons why not. The horizontal axis represents benefit and impact - the reasons to proceed. Here's how you label and handle each quadrant:
* Upper left (high cost/risk, low benefit/impact): Kill. There's no point to something that costs a lot, has a high likelihood of failure, and won't accomplish much that is useful.
* Lower left (low cost/risk, low benefit/impact): Delegate or re-scope. Most of your items probably live in this quadrant. If they really are isolated, small efforts that are local in scope, beneficial in a minor way, but won't cost much and are pretty much sure things, delegate their execution to the area they effect and forget about them. The good news about these is that they accumulate. A few thousand small, seemingly unimportant improvements turn into a big deal after awhile.
Others in the same quadrant will turn out to be linked in some way to other items either in this quadrant or others. By consolidating them, you'll eliminate redundant work, avoid incompatible outcomes in related or linked efforts, and achieve more important results. This, more or less, is what your boss is telling you to do.
* Lower right (low cost/risk, high benefit/impact): Full steam ahead. There aren't a lot of these, and they're the best of all possible worlds. You spend little, risk little, and get a lot in return. It is possible you'll have some of these on your list. If so, get them started as fast as you can.
* Upper right (high cost/risk, high benefit/impact): Select and manage. Companies can't undertake too many high-cost, high-risk, high benefit/impact initiatives at the same time. They can't - companies can't absorb that much change all at once. And, each effort of this size and scope requires significant executive oversight or they will fail. Companies have only a limited supply of executive oversight.
My best advice, then, is to find the linkages that almost certainly connect many of the items on the list, and then to package them together in the form of strategic initiatives, so that when your company implements them the results will fit together.
Find a way to delegate the rest so they are handled quietly and locally.
That gives your company the best of both worlds.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 28, 2008 09:56 AM
January 25, 2008 | Comments: (0)
End-user-supplied metadata - problem or solution?
Dear Bob ...
Do you know of any cases where a large enterprise has used a Wiki for their metadata, allowing most people (after registering) with access to the intranet update the metadata?
The problem we are having is that IT does not want to own (seems they did not budget or schedule for it) the metadata, so now we have an entry for every database, schema, table, column, term and concept, but most of the entries simply contain the name, data type and when it was created. This was created using automated scripts from the various databases, and is not helping me as a downstream developer.
Most of the knowledge has been given out, but in so many PowerPoint slides and e-mails that no one person knows it all. Since the problem is that IT doesn't have the staff to fill in the metadata I figured we, the users could.
- Volunteer
Dear Volunteer
I don't know of any cases for metadata. My initial reaction is that there would be a significant loss of control. I think of metadata the way I think of the chart of accounts - something to be carefully planned and centrally managed.
But maybe I'm just getting old.
In any undertaking, when a business chooses an alternative, it's balancing risks. Compared to the risk of undocumented metadata, it's entirely possible the risk of having too many incorrect entries might be lower.
Or, it might not: Remember the wise words of Mark Twain, who said, "It ain't what we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's what we do know that ain't so."
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 25, 2008 08:50 PM
January 21, 2008 | Comments: (0)
How an Advice Line situation turned out
Dear Bob ...
So, awhile ago I wrote you about what to do when I found out my boss was looking to replace me ("When you hear you're going to be replaced," Advice Line, 12/15/2007). Well, I took Lewis' First Law of Business ("We are all capitalists") to heart and started looking for another job. I found a great opportunity to leverage my current skills while learning new ones, and I turned my notice in yesterday.
When I sat down with my boss and HR, they pressed me as to why I was leaving. Applying Lewis' Second Law of Business - actually an off-shoot of the First Law - ("Is it beneficial to me?") I declined to tell them the real reasons for my departure, relying instead on a current on-going personal crisis (divorce) to tell them that I "am looking for a clean start somewhere else." Which is not a lie.
I guess I am telling you all of this to get your approval, or consent at the very least, for not telling them what a bunch of yellow-bellied, lying, conniving, thieving, bastards they really are. After all, other than venting, what possible good would there be in that for me?
Just sign me,
- Venting
Dear Venting ...
Congratulations. You handled it perfectly. Other than the emotional gratification you'd have experienced, explaining the real reason for your departure would have nothing but downside in it for you.
I sympathize regarding your divorce. I've been through it. There's no such thing as an easy one. They start out hard and get worse. Good luck.
Thanks for letting me know, and for giving me permission to post your experience in Advice Line. It is valuable for readers to know this sort of thing works, and that the hardest part is to make the decision.
Much as I'd love to believe my advice by itself constitutes gospel, it isn't. I figure an ounce of fact is worth several pounds of opinion.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 21, 2008 11:49 PM
January 18, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Defining government's customers
Dear Bob ...
A long time ago people were calling everyone including the dog their customer. A lot of that is still going around and it gets in the way of clear thinking sometimes.
I liked your (now ancient) article [probably "Who defines value," InfoWorld's Survival Guide, 7/29/1996) positing that only paying customers are real customers and that HR, Facilities, Operations, etc are IT partners – not customers – in the job of meeting the needs of the real customers.
In that article you mentioned that government organizations are much the same but with a twist since the paying part is different for them. I work for DoD and sometimes find it useful to point out the advantages to an organization of the “paying customer” way of looking at things. However, the point gets a little lost when the discussion drifts off to taxpayers as the paying customer.
Since this is DoD the concept of the war fighter as the customer instead of everyone helps but I was hoping you could help me refine a useful stance for government in general.
- Gummint Guy
Dear GG ...
Personally, I'm sick to death of taxpayers thinking they're government's customers. We're the owners. Even that isn't quite the case - all adult citizens are government's owners, not just taxpayers - but it's a lot closer to the mark than all of us figuring that since we put money in, we should receive goods and services in return.
Customers are the people who make buying decisions. Smart businesses cater to them because in the world of commerce that's usually a better way to build revenue and profit than ticking them off.
Government doesn't have customers. When public officials try to please the people who "make a buying decision" it's called taking a bribe and is considered bad form (unless the funds are delivered in the form of campaign contributions, and what's received in exchange is access and influence, at which point it's the American Way … but that isn't relevant to this discussion).
Searching for the right metaphorical equivalent to "customer" in the conduct of government isn't a good use of mental energy. If we're going to spend a lot of time forcing a metaphor to fit where it doesn't belong, let's think of government as a tavern and try to figure out what it produces that's parallel to beer, cocktails, Irish stew, and free popcorn.
What's the point?
While it makes sense to run government in a businesslike way, it doesn't make sense to run government as a business. Government doesn't have customers in any meaningful sense, doesn't have competitors in any meaningful sense, and doesn't operate by exchanging products and services for enough money to pay for their production plus a margin of profit.
What government agencies do have is a mission - a reason for existence: Something they are supposed to do; people or organizations they are supposed to serve. My best advice is to stop worrying about who is the customer and instead focus everyone on what they are supposed to accomplish.
In your case, it sounds like your team exists to help the men and women who fight our wars to win their battles and live to fight the next one. I think you'll find that if you're able to keep everyone's eye on that ball, the need to identify a "customer" will go away.
What won't go away is one of the needs identifying customers does satisfy, and that's determining who has the expertise and experience to help your team figure out what the best results look like. If you build a minivan and want to improve it, understanding that parents with a few children are the most likely buyers means you know to ask a bunch of them what they want that your current products don't deliver. They are the experts in what they are willing to spend money for and the criteria they use to choose from among competing products.
If your team (for example) is responsible for the design and production of a weapon system, I imagine the equivalent experts are officers and soldiers - officers because a weapon's capabilities influence battlefield tactics; soldiers because the weapon has to operate under battlefield conditions.
Equivalent logic will serve to identify the expert you should listen to no matter what your team's mission.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 18, 2008 02:11 PM
January 16, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Continuing the Greater Good discussion
[More on "A greater good," Advice Line, 12/29/2007):
Normally, I am very impressed by Bob's insights and thinking outside or beyond the box views.
This one seems a little off the mark.
I think Bob missed the (perhaps unspoken) theme here that we, or at least some of us, are completely disgusted and fed up with corporations that are becoming increasingly arrogant, mean-spirited, and repulsive.
His response is to hide behind an examination of Capitalist and Marxist economic principles. This is the kind of answer I'd expect from Ken Lay, not the normally enlightened Mr. Lewis! :)
Of course economic systems are amoral - they can't have morals any more than they can be happy or sad.
But the extent to which "morality isn't part of the discussion [of business success]" isn't a consequence of which economic system we choose to (loosely) follow, it's a function of what we, as a society, define as success.
Bob has chosen the "bottom line" criteria espoused by Wall Street and BODs everywhere, where the ends justifies the means, and greed is good.
Bad Bob, bad. If I had a newspaper, I'd hit Bob on the nose.
------------------------------------------
Bob's reply:
Fed up or not, disgusted or not, here's the way things are: Businesses exist to provide value to shareholders; the managers of a business have a fiduciary responsibility to see that the shareholders get that value.
They have quite a bit of leeway in figuring out how to make that happen. That leeway extends to placing ethical boundaries beyond the legal boundaries of acceptable behavior, so long as doing so doesn't cause shareholders financial harm.
It also extends to ignoring all conventional ethical mores, so long as the behavior is legal, in the same pursuit.
That's a fact. I'm not responsible for it. I am responsible for not pretending that it isn't the case.
If the managers who run a business want it to run according to their idea of ethics, it's up to them to figure out how to do so in a way that makes the business at least as successful as any other choice. If they want employees to act for the greater good, they have to:
* Define in clear, appealing terms what that means.
* Build consensus that the greater good really is good.
* Structure the company so that employees who act for the greater good are more successful than those who don't.
If someone works for a company whose managers haven't done this, I'm not going to pretend that employees should act for the greater good anyway. That would be bad advice, for all the reasons I listed.
If you disapprove of how most companies are run, join the club.
It's a big club, which doesn't change my advice one bit.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 16, 2008 06:57 AM
January 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Maybe this is a bit of a stretch.
It's easy to over-use sports metaphors when writing about business. Among their many limitations: Sports is unambiguous. You either win or you lose. When you (for example) deploy a new IT application, assessing the success of the effort is just a wee bit more ambiguous than that.
Second limitation: Sports is defined by how well you make split-second decisions. Business is defined in large part by how well you avoid making split-second decisions.
On the other hand, my wife has a cousin who plays for the Green Bay Packers, and after yesterday's 42 to 20 victory over the Seahawks, it's hard to resist the temptation.
So I won't.
Some thoughts that might be relevant to running IT:
- The NFL asserts ludicrous intellectual property rights. During the game, an announcer said something to the effect that any commentary of any kind about the game is a violation. I didn't hear anything about this being limited to commercial use, so be careful what you say about the game to friends over a beer.
- The intellectual property situation in this country has been problematic ever since Warner Brothers tried to warn off the Marx Brothers for unauthorized use of "Casablanca" in a movie title - a bad move by the way: Groucho's ridicule is a model of how to handle this sort of thing. If you haven't already read it, here's a link to the letter he wrote in response.
It isn't improving. Not to pick on Warner Brothers; the company never learns. You might recall its attorneys sent hundreds of cease-and-desist letters to children who had the temerity to think the 1st Amendment protected their right to put up Harry Potter fan sites on the web.
In like fashion, I might be violating the NFL's asserted intellectual property rights right now. According to its website:
We (or our affiliates) and our member professional football clubs own all rights in the product names, company names, trade names, logos, product packaging and designs ("Trademarks") of the National Football League and such member clubs, and third parties own all Trademarks in their respective products or services, whether or not appearing in large print or with the trademark symbol. Unauthorized use of any such Trademarks, including reproduction, imitation, dilution or confusing or misleading uses, is prohibited under the trademark laws of the United States and other countries. You are expressly prohibited from using or misusing any Trademarks, except as provided in this Agreement, and nothing otherwise stated or implied in the Service confers on you any license or right to do so.
So as an act of civil disobedience: Green Bay Packers. Seattle Seahawks. Great game.
That's two unauthorized uses of NFL trademarks and one unauthorized description of the game. I guess the NFL will have to sue me.
How is this relevant to you? The right claimed by various software companies and purveyors of all sorts of adware and spyware to install software on your company's computers without letting you know in advance is a direct descendant of this nonsense. The simple notion of property rights has been twisted around to an unrecognizable extent.
There's nothing you can do about it, other than to be alert to even seemingly farfetched risks. I just felt like going off on a pointless rant. Sorry. The next two bullets are more relevant:
- Never mind his physical skills - I watched Brett Favre between plays. Quarterbacks don't have to be leaders. That's optional. Favre spent his time between plays encouraging players, talking with them, keeping them loose and focused ... making sure his team was 100% in the game. You could see it in his body language and the body language of everyone he talked to.
This was a big deal when they were down 14 to nothing.
On the other hand, his physical skills mattered a lot, as did the physical skills of his players, for all the obvious reasons. What his leadership accomplished was to make sure his players heads were pointed in the right direction so that they would put their physical skills to the best use possible.
- The most important point: Early in the game, Ryan Grant lost the ball. Twice. Both fumbles turned into Seahawk touchdowns.
American business wisdom says we need to hold people accountable - that there have to be consequences for mistakes. American business wisdom is ... wait, there's a word for this and it will come to me ... oh, now I have it ... stupid.Assuming the NFL doesn't sue me for this unauthorized commentary I'll be back to more standard fare in my next post.
Had the Packers operated according to this so-called wisdom they would have removed Grant from the game, and possibly from the team.
Instead they gave him the ball a lot and he rushed for more than 200 yards and three touchdowns in very difficult conditions.
Somewhere, there just might be a lesson in this for IT leaders, in spite of it being something that happened in professional sports.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 13, 2008 08:54 AM
January 10, 2008 | Comments: (0)
A contrarian view of "A contrarian view of process"
A comment on this week's Keep the Joint Running, "A contrarian view of process," which suggests that too much emphasis has been placed on process, at the expense of more important matters, such as establishing what Jim Collins calls a "culture of discipline":
Dear Bob ...
Discipline and process are two sides of the same coin. Discipline and process are both structured, well thought out approaches to solving problems.
The biggest difference is that discipline is more individualistic or team based. Process attempts to extend that discipline into the broader organization. And so the shift is to move from disciplined people or teams, to process based organizations. It is a logical next step in the evolution of a dynamic organization. It isn’t one or the other. Or that one is better than the other.
By the way, I would think that amazon.com is a clear example where process is a key driver behind the success of the organization.
- Process driven
Dear Driven ...
There is a difference between discipline and having a culture of discipline. No question, in many circumstances "disciplined execution" means reliable execution of well-defined processes. That isn't the only expression of a culture of discipline, though.
For example, another hallmark is that business decision-makers rely on evidence and logic in their decision-making, preferring these to their personal biases and "gut feelings."
In spite of many attempts to make it so, decision-making isn't a process in any meaningful sense - it is a "practice." The difference is that when you follow the steps of a process, good results happen. When you follow the steps of a practice that's just the starting point.
Think of bowling as a process and hitting a pitched baseball as a practice. To be good at either you have to be disciplined about your approach to the sport.
But in bowling, it's pretty much true that if you can release the ball exactly the same way every time, you can get a strike every time. Variation in the output is due entirely to variation in the input.
When it comes to hitting a pitched ball, if you swing the bat exactly the same way every time any decent pitcher will easily strike you out. Practices require judgment, insight, inspired guesswork, sometimes the ability to anticipate an opponent … following the steps gets you in the game, but that's about it.
So far as Amazon.com is concerned, process is certainly important. Its customer-facing technology is far more important. The fact that Jeff Bezos thinks like a merchant, and constantly focuses on business strategies and tactics that will attract more customers and get him a greater share of their wallets, has nothing at all to do with process.
My opinion, at least.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 10, 2008 05:34 AM
January 09, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Two related Comments regarding my recent post, "Is looking out for the greater good reasonable?" (Advice Line, 12/29/2007), edited for length:
"Everyone is supposed to look out for themselves first. Anyone who doesn't is a commie."and ...
Come on, Bob. Isn't that a little over the top?
Is everyone who lets a vehicle change lanes in front of them in traffic a communist? How about if you're broken down by the side of the road in a remote area. Is someone who stops to help a communist?
If you're on vacation and you could leave trash on the grass without anyone noticing but instead you take it to a trash can are you a communist?
Or what about someone who donates to a charity that pays for surgeries for children born with deformities in poor countries. Are they a communist?
Isn't it pretty harsh to label as a communist anyone who helps someone else without receiving anything in return?
Interesting topic. The "greater good" -- isn't this the "values" we were taught as kids?Bob's Last Word:
Just the other day, my nephew didn't want to share his toy with my niece -- he was punished and told to stand in the corner for 2-minutes. We "adults" teach our kids and grandkids this but we don't live by it.
So why even teach such "good behavior" skills if we don't take control of the actions ourselves.?We are hypocrites! Do as we say and not as we do!
Sadly, as I have gotten older, I'm finding that morals and values don't count. Why? Because morals and values require us to do what is difficult -- to do the right thing! To go beyond the dollar and show that your "soul" cannot be purchased.
Sadly the corporate world is made up of individuals that believe in the "me world" and not in the "we world". The wrong people are in charge because of "trickle-down" management policy of promoting those that are so called "loyalist" -- don't think -- just do as I say!
I'm not looking for a Utopia -- just to avoid the dangerous direction corporate America is traveling. We need grown-ups running companies -- not children!
Just an opinion: Both commenters need to dig a little deeper on this subject. The bedrock assumption behind capitalist economics is that each individual "maximizes his or her own utility." Which is to say, each of us looks out for our own best interests, however we define them.
Marxist economics (and I'm stating this as a fact, not a value judgment) asks each participant to look out for the greater good. (And yes, of course, I was hyperbolizing when I used the term "commie." Nobody says "commie" any more.)
The obvious consequence, here in the U.S., is that when the subject is business success, morality isn't part of the discussion, except to the extent that it might place some boundaries on the behavior of the corporation.
But even that is unlikely. The world of commerce is the world of laws, regulations, contracts and negotiations. Employees should place the greater good ahead of their own interests only to the extent that the corporation structures things so that employees who do so are more successful than those who don't.
"Right" and "wrong" aren't easily reconciled to capitalism. It is an intrinsically amoral system, which cares about what works and what doesn't.
Throwing away trash, personal donations to charities and so on have very little to do with the discussion. They all take place outside the world of commerce.
Very different subjects.
In business, it's up to the Board, CEO, and executive team to set things up so that the corporate good (not the same as the greater good) is both clearly defined, and in the individual best interests of the employees who work there.
Asking employees to be altruistic toward their employer is ridiculous, and entirely non-parallel with other circumstances in which some form of altruism (generally "reciprocal altruism," family altruism or sacrificing short-term self-interest for long-term benefit) does make sense.
Oh, one last thought: Who gets to define "the greater good?" When large numbers of people are involved, as is usually the case in corporate America (and I'm defining "large number" as any number greater than one), it's rare that everyone agrees about what constitutes the greater good, let alone how to go about achieving it.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 9, 2008 04:53 AM
January 06, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Should disciplinary freezes carry over?
Dear Bob ...
In response to your recent post, "How long should a discipinary freeze last?" I think you missed the point of his question.
His point was that if you are not included in the 4% this year, next year's 4% is based on a lower base salary, as will every raise thereafter (until promotion, I suppose), so missing one year's increase has a "permanent" effect, even if the employee gets raises thereafter.
I look forward to your answer.
- Need clarification
Dear Clarifier ...
You're right. Truth be told, I considered the question to be rhetorical given the tone of the rest of the inquiry.
It's like this: Had the employee received a minimal raise due to poor performance instead of no raise due to a disciplinary action, this wouldn't be a question at all. "If I perform well next year, will you give me this year's raise?"
No.
For companies that follow the structure I recommend, this is even less of a discussion point. For them, base compensation reflects marketplace value only, so there's no freeze, no carry, no discussion. Your base comp depends on your skills, knowledge and experience relative to the position you currently hold.
These companies use the annual bonus (variable compensation, also known as at-risk pay) to recognize performance. If someone is on the receiving end of disciplinary action, I think it's reasonable to withhold a performance bonus. And since a performance bonus is, by definition, recognition of this year's performance, again there's no conversation about carry-over or make-up compensation.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 6, 2008 09:42 AM
January 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)
I cheated.
After my last post regarding my problems with MessageLabs ("Spam filtering for dummies," Advice Line, 12/26/2007) I notified the company's press contacts that I'd highlighted MessageLabs in Advice Line. (Unlike non-client technical contact information, this contact information was easy to find).
A technical support representative contacted me within hours, offering as much help as necessary to resolve the situation.
I confess that my cynical side wondered if someone without InfoWorld's name and a large subscriber list would have received the same attention. This didn't stop me from taking advantage of the offer.
Here's what I learned, most of it to MessageLabs' credit:
- Keep the Joint Running wasn't the culprit that triggered MessageLabs' spam alert system. Another account that had snuck its way onto my hosting service really was a spam source.
- What MessageLabs does under these circumstances isn't to tag every message from a spam-sending SMTP server as spam. What it does is to limit the number of connections available to that server. The result is that messages are delayed or blocked because the volume of mail so greatly exceeds the number of available connections.
- I connected MessageLabs and my hosting service, who quickly identified the offending account and deleted it. It appears the immediate problem is now fixed.
- According to one of MessageLabs' press contacts, who also corresponded with me, their intent is that their tech support staff should be as available to any non-clients who are experiencing problems as they were to me. She acknowledged that the phrasing on their website did not make this clear, and tells me this is under review. If you're curious, here's the exact phrasing:
Contact Us
Technical Support Numbers
MessageLabs operates 24x7 support for clients that subscribe to our various security services.
Clients can contact our support team on the following numbers:
Followed by a list of contacts and telephone numbers.So here's how it's looking: MessageLabs isn't evil. It does practice guilt by association. It doesn't proactively notify ISPs and hosting services that they have a problem. Whether they should is a judgment call.
My opinion is that this would be desirable. Whether it would be profitable is another matter, and they do run a for-profit business. I'm not in a position to figure out how this would play out.
At the moment, MessageLabs doesn't clearly explain how a non-client with a problem should contact them, but has promised to fix this.
My worst suspicions - that its practices were a deliberate ploy to drive companies to sign up so as to be able to receive this sort of support - turned out not to be the case.
And, I am pleased to report, the quality of their support staff was top-notch. They know what they're doing, quickly diagnose problems, and sincerely and professionally wanted to help.
Thought you might want to know, even if it did mean I had to write something nice about someone, which is nowhere near as much fun as the alternative.
- Bob
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Posted by Bob Lewis on January 4, 2008 11:57 AM
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Three books. Three ways to change the world, your life, or at least Bob Lewis' bank account. Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World distills the world of IT leadership into eight learnable skills and gives you concrete, practical techniques for each one of them. Bare Bones Project Management: What you can't not do makes project management manageable, even for first-time project managers with no formal training in the discipline. ManagementSpeak: What managers say/What they mean … well, it won't help your career, and won't make you a better manager. Mostly, it will make you chuckle, guffaw, and maybe even chortle. Make friends - it's the perfect gift for anyone who has ever suffered through one of those meetings. Order your copies today! |
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