I had the good fortune last month to be invited to participate as a guest CIO on ITSM Weekly, a great IT-related podcast with the amusing ongoing tagline, “What happens when a CIO, a Service Desk Manager and an industry junkie chat weekly?!”

Amidst the discussion and banter, Chris Dancy of ITSM Weekly gave me a bit of a ribbing about what he perceived as my all-too-common anti-QR-code rants on Twitter. And yes, I have tweeted more than once with outright skepticism about the usefulness and likely impact of QR codes.  Chris’ good-natured needling made me step back and think about why: what exactly makes me so resistant to the notion of QR codes?

And the answer runs deeper than just QR codes per se.  It turns out, as I thought about it, that the story surrounding QR codes represents, for the modern CIO or CTO, kind of a horrible blend: the worst aspects of technology advocacy, combined with the worst aspects of marketing.  This post is an attempt to explain those broader implications.

For those (probably many) of you who don’t really know what QR codes are, look at the upper right of this post to see an example: they’re a two-dimensional barcode of sorts, typically consisting of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background.  QR codes can encode all sorts of information: text, a URL, or other data, and they are typically read/decoded by smartphone applications that are readily and freely available on most mobile platforms.

QR code enthusiasts envision people walking up (for example) to the door of a restaurant, using their smartphone to scan the code displayed in the window, and, well, getting any number of potential outcomes on their screen: a menu, a coupon, a URL, a pointer to a video about the place’s history, etc. In fact, in some countries like Japan, QR codes are everywhere, used for these and many other business situations.

From a technical point of view, it’s indeed really cool that this Rorschach-worthy splotch can be instantly converted to text or other information. Depending on the specific format (yes, there are several divergent standards) and on the nature of the content, as many as 4,296 alphanumeric characters can be contained in one of those splotches. That corresponds to roughly 700 words, or almost three typical pages of ordinary text. That’s a lot of information available at a smartphone glance, so to speak.

So what’s my beef with all that? What’s not to like? Two aspects particularly rankle me as an IT executive:

• It smacks of technology for technology’s sake. Most great CIOs I’ve known have spent a lot of their career pushing back against being typecast as a mere technologist; most of them recognized early on that the way one adds value to a company as a technologist is to get deeply steeped in the business ins and outs, especially customer and financial aspects, and to apply technology appropriately, not just because it’s “cool.”

So sure, QR codes are “really cool” technologically. But are the business use cases really there? Will customers, in numbers, actually go the extra mile of seeing that splotch and feeling motivated enough to pull out their phone and scan it? Personally, I’m an early adopter of and avid experimenter with new technologies (especially when they’re free and widely hyped, as is the case here), but I have scanned fewer than ten QR codes ever. For many advocates, I fear that the coolness (and granted, the potential) of the technology is making them overestimate the probable acceptance of that technology by the masses.

• Excessive hype.  Aside from applying a basic “sniff test” to the breathless, even giddy posts pertaining to QR codes, I’ve noticed that many such posts and even press releases quote surveys and reports on the supposedly major acceleration in QR code penetration here in the US. (Sample purple prose in one such report: “QR barcode use has suddenly gone ballistic.”)

The surveys themselves, and the reports based on data taken from those surveys, are visibly flawed.

If you dig into these posts and reports, it turns out nearly all the data cited stems from a mere handful of companies (ScanLife, JumpScan, and Mobio Technologies, Inc.), all of whom, wait for it, just happen to market QR-code related products! Can you say “conflict of interest”?

Moreover, the surveys themselves, and the reports based on data taken from those surveys, are visibly flawed, chock-full of statistical and methodological red flags:

• the reports almost invariably feature graphs that lack Y axis labels, or that are labeled (for example) as “no scale given; relative measure only.”
• The reports often combine data for all bar code scans (including UPC (conventional) barcodes, which are of course a far more plausible and prevalent use case, due to the abundant comparison-shopping apps that people use in bookstores etc.), and then use that data to infer QR code usage. One survey evidently asked the general question, “Have you ever used a barcode scanning application?” And the data then obtained from the answers to that general question now leads QR code advocates to conclude (erroneously) that “while QR codes aren’t mainstream yet, they’re past the early adopter phase.”
• There’s seldom an attempt made to take into account one key factor in the increase in barcode scanning: the meteoric rise in smartphone penetration overall. A rising tide lifts all boats, and even if we’re seeing an increase in QR code scanning, that needs to be taken in the context of millions more smartphones being sold per month.

Finally, in a particularly delicious example that Darrell Huff would be amused by, ScanLife shows a graph comparing 1D (conventional) barcode scans with 2D (QR code) scans, favorably to QR codes, of course. Well, read the fine print under that graph: “Note: 2D traffic includes 3rd party apps while 1D traffic is only sourced from the ScanLife app”. Apples are being compared to oranges here, in other words. Vested interest. When data is presented in so obviously skewed a fashion, by people with a clear commercial agenda, one has to wonder whether it’s really all part of a sales job.

And the reports also don’t even begin to address a potential major factor when examining such data at this stage: what percentage of people scanning QR codes are doing so right now simply out of the sheer novelty of it all? As Steve Smith observed, “we are still in the gee-whiz stage of 2D codes”. Will this phenomenon have legs, so to speak?

So let me recap my main concerns about the QR bandwagon:

• Even relatively widespread adoption (which QR codes have yet to see, of course) of a great new technology by technophiles doesn’t guarantee eventual deep penetration to the mass market. That should be obvious to anyone who isn’t running a Linux box for their desktop.
• Will a critical mass of non-technical people (say, those who couldn’t manage to set the time on their VCRs back in the 80s and 90s) really tend to whip out their smartphone and scan QR codes in profusion? Maybe, but right now it’s just a matter of opinion.
• Will there ever be enough “bang for the buck” with QR codes (i.e., investment of time/money versus benefit obtained from using them)? Even as an early adopter, I’ve scanned fewer than 10 QR codes ever, because there was never sufficient payback for my effort. And for the retailer or marketer: will QR codes really pull more people in the door, or is it just another gimmick? Where’s the data? (the real data, that is). Even in museums (one plausible use case mentioned for QR codes), I can envision only the highly motivated museum-goer as likely to indulge in QR code scanning.  It’s technology for a very narrow slice of the audience. It may be worth doing for that slice, sure, but let’s not go overboard in our excitement or our investment.

Back in the late 90s, several companies invested millions of dollars promoting what amounts to an earlier version of this scheme: specialized barcodes published in magazine ads, designed to be read by a “CueCat” scanner which they distributed broadly, for free, to people like Radio Shack customers and Wired magazine subscribers.  It failed miserably. In December 2009, the popular gadget blog Gizmodo even voted the CueCat the #1 worst invention of the “2000s” decade.  Yes, now we have smartphones and don’t need to obtain special equipment, so that gives QR codes an advantage that CueCat didn’t have. But still, it gives me pause that QR codes are being promoted with much the same zeal, and perhaps with similar blinders as to the true practicality of the technology. It’s déjà vu all over again: endless hype, plus technology pursued without solid practical reasons to do so: these are, and deserve to be, twin bugaboos for any technology executive.

And that’s why I express skepticism about QR codes on Twitter.

Lagniappe:

Opinion:

• Hamilton Chan, “Why QR codes will go mainstream”
• Oliver Williams, “Why isn’t everyone using QR codes?”
• Heidi Cohen, “QR Codes Are Here to Stay [Data]”
• Dan Frommer, “Death To The QR Code”
• Steve Smith, “Down the QR Code rabbit hole”
• Dan Neumann, “RIP: Why We Don’t Need QR Code Campaigns”
• Dan Neumann, “2D Barcodes: You’re Doing it Wrong”

“Data”:

• Veselin Nedeff, “QR Codes Usage Stats for the First Half of 2011”
• Veselin Nedeff, “Global Growth in Mobile Barcode Usage – Q1/2011”
• Veselin Nedeff, “QR Code Scanning Now Mainstream in US Retail”
• Mobio Technologies, Inc., “The Naked Facts: QR Barcode Scanning in 2H-2010”
• Mobio Technologies, Inc., “The Naked Facts: Whiplash Edition. QR Barcode Scanning in Q1-2011”
• Wayne Sutton, “The QR Code Statistics you have been looking for – infographic”
• Heidi Cohen, “QR Codes: 26 MUST-HAVE Facts [Data & Charts]”

The bear says, “You see? It really does work.  Now make yourself light again.” Whereupon the hedgehog quietly retorts, “How about you doing something once in a while?”

Midnight Train

Most senior technology executives have a good sense of the huge value that comes from comparing notes and impressions with one’s peers about industry trends, techniques, project approaches, even vendors. Networking, appropriately handled, can enable you to find out all sorts of “lessons learned” without having to go through the pain of learning them the hard way.

But as with most things, there are effective and less effective ways of going about that sort of networking. For a long time, I looked to industry conferences to provide this sort of connection and exposure to a wider and wiser set of peers. But despite a few positive experiences, I’ve changed my mind in general about the utility of conferences.

Aside from technical exposition and tutorials, most industry conference sessions revolve around case studies. And oh, what cases they are, according to the presenters. Quite typically, everything is golden, nothing has ever gone awry or possibly could. Their own approach is the only one conceivable for success. “This one goes to 11” seems to be their slogan. The presenters seem to think that the more enticingly they portray their project and approach, the greater value they’ll provide to their audience.

And as for dialog? I’ve found, through painful experience, that the kinds of questions typically asked at conference sessions are most often designed to make the questioner himself look really smart. They’re often not even real questions, more lengthy expositions. We’ve all encountered that sinking “captive audience” feeling you get when you realize that such a questioner, a zealot of one flavor or another, has commandeered the audience microphone and is out there grinding his or her axe, and that someone is going to have to deal with it. Awkwardness pervades the session until a moderator or a fellow participant finally speaks up and shuts it down. That’s not dialog. That’s not networking. Even hallway conversations at such conferences can be filled with similar self-aggrandizing.

But this syndrome is actually deeper than something you just see at conferences. I would submit that it is unfortunately characteristic (admittedly in the extreme case) of what often plagues IT spokespeople in general, as they present before senior management or their board. We all want to be valued and highly regarded, and somehow, many of us decide that the best way to achieve that is to tout the bright side of our coins and leave any dark sides unmentioned or glossed over.

Let’s look at an example, in the form of a recent article about the fabulous success of Agile approach at eBay. Read the article; you won’t find a single wisp of a thought about any downsides, any blemishes, that occurred along the way. It was all golden, apparently. You see only references on how “to out-think and out-execute the competition”; or, “deliver useful information in days instead of months.” Can you say “silver bullet”?

Presenting any complex endeavor in nothing but glowing terms is to willfully forge an illusion, of course, not just at a conference or in an article, but at a board meeting as well. Somehow, the “case study” style of presentation tends to feature just that sort of dubious strutting, an implicit declaration that “everything went great.” Yet recognize that the people you’re presenting to are accustomed to piercing through that sort of bullpucky every day from vendors they deal with; you’ve lost your audience as soon as they figure out that you’re of similar ilk. It’s a similar deaf ear to the ones that teenagers turn when their parent tells them again and again about trudging ten miles through the snow to get to school, uphill, both ways. It’s a fish story.

The broader issue of how to present to one’s own management is something I’ve discussed elsewhere. But on the specific issue of finding a better solution to accomplish most of the goals that people hope to achieve by attending conferences? Local peer groups with regular meetings. Well-facilitated and attended peer groups, in my experience, can provide benefits that most conferences can’t or don’t: far greater continuity, candor, dialog, and, yes, screening. Most are participation by invitation only. And in such a setting, people stop having their principal goal being to impress others, and turn to looking to glean and impart useful information and tips above all. The best of the ones I’ve participated in adopt a tenet of “what’s said in the room stays in the room,” which greatly encourages candor and maximizes the true practical utility of the discussion.

Case studies and anecdotes are interesting, but my point is that conferences typically consist of lots of these, all golden, implausibly strung together back-to-back. And as I’m fond of saying, the plural of anecdote is not data. Many conference presentations are, at least in some sense, nothing but elaborate sales jobs. And if you really went to the conference for networking and learning, you want dialog, not sales.

Just a quick, personal post this time: I was recently interviewed by CIO Magazine on the topic of “How CIOs Can Stay Tech-Savvy“.  Since (as is normal) only a portion of my conversation with the reporter actually made it into the article, I thought I’d expand briefly on the topic here.

My remarks were two-fold, consistent with what I’ve written before on this all-important topic:

• It’s critical for the IT executive to “keep his or her hand in” by doing some hands-on work and experimentation with new technologies
• Your purpose in doing this hands-on work is not to become a viable technical resource in the area, but rather to get some deeper understanding than you’d obtain by just reading an article or two.

As mentioned in the article, I estimate that I spend 5-10 hours a month doing this kind of hands-on dabbling, sometimes with more success than others.  Let’s look at the kinds of things I do, large and small:

• Obviously, I administer my home network (four machines running three different operating systems, plus other home networking devices) and provide advice to neighbors and friends.
• I administer my blog, including configuration, changing WordPress templates, and even custom-coding PHP callbacks at times.
• I also actively seek out “early adopter” opportunities with new technologies, or technologies that are simply new to me.  I currently have four virtual machines that are launchable on my Mac: Ubuntu, Fedora 11, Windows 7, and Windows Vista.
• I have an ongoing Javascript dev project I work on that analyzes my iTunes music library and helps me identify gaps in metadata and lyrics, so that these can be corrected. That Javascript also dumps all the lyrics in my music library out into XML, to get them out of the proprietary world of iTunes.
• At the beginning of each year, I list out the technologies I’d like to delve into more deeply that year, in terms of reading and experimenting.  This list is based purely on what has intrigued me as I’ve scanned blogs, feeds, and Twitter. For 2009, my list included Amazon EC2 and S3, Ruby, Heroku, and CouchDB.  I’ve not gone as far as I’d hoped with a couple of these, but hey, 2010 will have a list too.
• In a given year, I might do some coding in Javascript, Perl, PHP, and Ruby. Admittedly, I usually need to look quite a bit of stuff up, but that’s mostly a factor of doing this only an hour or two a week.

As I emphasized in my remarks for the article, the point here is not to become a player on the field. I’ll never be as skilled in any of these technologies as the people I’d hope to hire with that expertise, should the need arise.  And that’s a good thing: the temptation is always there, particularly for someone who rose up through the developer ranks, to micromanage.  But at the senior executive level, it’s far more important that you stay focused on process improvement and strategy than on nuts-and-bolts techniques. Any of the experimenting I describe above should be viewed as self-education and a hobby, not a serious endeavor.

But you can bet that my self-education practice lends me a deeper insight into any of these technologies than if I’d sat back and simply read magazine articles on them. And oddly, I’m one of the few senior IT executives I know who still do this sort of thing. Granted, it will always feel to me like it’s too little, but not doing it at all is, well, not an option.

Are you among those who believe that if you don’t follow someone back on Twitter, you’re being snobby and arrogant?  Then this post is meant for you. My purpose here, quite candidly, is to persuade you that reflexively following someone back is not only a habit which encourages spam, but is in fact a major contributor to making Twitter a thriving spam platform.

For those who reflexively follow, in other words, I ask you to consider the ramifications of your behavior to the greater community, especially when multiplied by the thousands or millions of Twitterers who may behave likewise. Basically, you’re helping the spammers win.

First, let’s think about this: why does anyone follow anyone else on Twitter?  Three main reasons come to mind:

1. The follower believes that the person he’s following has interesting things to say, and wants to read those interesting things;
2. The follower is hoping that the person he’s following will follow him back, for one or more of the following reasons:

• so that the follower’s count will increase
• so that the follower’s messages will then have broader distribution/marketing power
• so that the follower can send Direct Messages (DMs) to that person for even greater exposure and attention.

3. The follower is reciprocating being followed, out of politeness, sense of obligation, or idealism. Often, there’s a belief that following back will “strengthen the relationship.” You can “transform them into a fan with your valuable tweets“! Or so goes the claim.

I’m arguing here that the first of these behaviors is useful, the second describes spammers and marketers above all, and the third is a well-intended but unfortunate fulfillment of the spammer’s hope, one which encourages their continued activity.

Reciprocal following by rote in many cases does little to further a relationship.  Remember that they call Twitter “asymmetrical”.  Let’s use myself as an example.  I tweet about a fairly narrow range of topics, basically: IT management, cloud computing, and sometimes interesting or amusing industry or sociological matters.  I happen to have a broad list of other interests that I myself don’t typically tweet about but helps me pick whom I follow: literature, languages, music, politics, travel, theater, to name a few. I follow people solely for the first of my reasons listed above: because I want to read what they have to say. Again, it’s asymmetric: my reading interests are not the same as what I tweet about. Anyone who follows me simply because I followed them (i.e., behavior #3) may be taken aback by how uninteresting my tweets are to them.

Let’s look more closely at what happens when I’m followed by people who are unlikely to be interested in the content of my tweets.  If you watch closely, you’ll notice that you are often followed by entities (read: marketers and spammers) because of a keyword contained in something you’ve tweeted.

Just to give some examples: recently, I’ve been followed by:

• @HerbiesHeadshop, because I happened to use the phrase “down in the weeds” in a tweet;
• @BuilderPal, because I wrote and tweeted about what I call “roof projects” in the context of information technology;
• @proxyserver, because I happened to use the term “proxy server” in a tweet.

I’m not interested in any of the services these people provide, so I have no reason to follow them back. But more important: I’d argue that none of the above entities is remotely interested in my tweets. As a matter of fact, I am fairly certain that none of the above entities, or actually anyone who follows people as a result of keywords harvested from the Twitstream, is even reading my tweets, let alone anybody else’s. They just want to be followed back, so that I will then be more likely to read their tweets. They are using Twitter as a means to one end: marketing their services. Advertising. Exposure. Page views. And so they target (however clumsily) people they believe are interested in the products they provide. It’s kind of a new (and cheap) way of generating a targeted email address list.

Let me say it again: people who follow you using behavior #2 usually have NO interest in your tweets and in most cases aren’t reading anyone’s tweets at all. You are just a means to an end.  It’s not about you, it’s about them. If you’re laboring under the illusion that following someone who follows you is a way of strengthening the relationship, you should recognize that that strength is quite often going to be one-way only.

I could, of course, simply ignore any of these follows; most of them will eventually unfollow me anyway, not because of the content of my tweets (remember, they’re not even looking at these), but simply because I didn’t bite: I didn’t follow them back. I didn’t help them meet the sole objective they had in following me in the first place.

How do the spammers win? Spammers really only have an audience on Twitter if people follow them. More followers mean higher positions in search results for their pages and products. Most notably, following a spammer gives them the ability to Direct Message you, which increases the likelihood you’ll see and read their message and click on their links. And let’s be clear: the only reason people follow spammers is this strange perceived obligation that’s arisen on Twitter: follow everyone back who follows you; “it’s only polite,” after all, or it’s “snobby and arrogant” not to. When you succumb to that perceived obligation, the spammers win. If no one followed back, the spammers would go away.

It’s easy to turn behavior #3 (reflexive following) into behavior #1 (following because you’re interested in the person’s tweets): before you follow someone back, simply review the last 10 tweets the person has sent, which turn out to be astonishingly predictive of whether they’re a spammer.

You’re obviously welcome to use Twitter as you please and follow people for any or no reason. But consider the points I’ve made, in terms of the impact on the Twitter community of your actions.  And if you follow reflexively, don’t ever complain about getting spam DMs, because it’s your behavior that got you into that position.

Use Twitter for education, conversation, and interaction. It’s really the only thing it’s there for (other than providing rife subject matter for TechCrunch articles). Unless, of course, you’re a spammer.

Lagniappe:

• Atherton Bartelby, “FOLLOW FAIL: The Top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter”
• Skellie, “How to Follow Everyone Back on Twitter Without Ruining Your Experience”
• Roger Hjulstrom, “Don’t let anyone tell you how to act on Twitter”
• Twitter, “Turning Up The Heat On Spam”
• “How spammers use Twitter”
• Stop Twitter Spam blog

I don’t want this to be just another post about Twitter, the current hot trend of the Internet.  Rather, I’d like to relate this new Twitter fad to a long-planned important topic here.

Specifically, what can we in technology do to keep current and stay up-to-speed on our various areas of interest and expertise? There’s more out there than any of us can learn, and new technologies come along all the time.  Truly staying current, at a reasonable depth level, would be a more-than-full-time job.

Here’s how I’ve come to grips with that basic reality. These remarks are most relevant to the executive level, but to some extent they apply across the spectrum of roles in IT.

• If you don’t work at the nuts-and-bolts level with a given technology for 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day, you’re really just a dabbler anyway. Don’t delude yourself that you know a technology at the detailed level just because you have read a few articles or a book on it.
• Embrace that certain unavoidable level of dilettantism. Work on understanding what a technology can accomplish, how it relates to the bigger picture of architectures and business value, and how it differentiates itself from other players in that game.
• Recognize that the skill you really need most of all is “just in time” learning. I took a headhunter call a few months back from a company that was looking for a seasoned senior technology executive, but they were adamant that the person have coded and deployed Ruby on Rails applications for three or more years.  And sure, wouldn’t that be great: but there are high-quality executives out there who understand technology at a deeper, bigger-picture level, and can pick up the Ruby nuances in a matter of a few weeks.  And, judging from the other professed needs and gaps of that company, they should have been deemphasizing the specific technologies and searching much more for that big-picture guy or gal.
• As an executive, don’t worry about learning a technology at other than the conceptual level unless and until it becomes relevant to your business needs and goals. That said, you do need to stay current, at a conceptual level, with ever-shifting technologies.

So, there’s a lot out there, and it can be overwhelming. If you want to stay in the game at this level, you can’t just throw up your hands and not keep learning.  So how do you amass that concept-level understanding, then?  My pre-Twitter ways of drinking from the technology firehose involved spending a great deal of time doing the following:

• Subscribe to email newsletters.  Read, follow links.
• Find relevant web sites with content targeted to my interests. Read, follow links.
• Read white papers and technical journals
• Read blogs, follow links
• Use RSS to target my interest areas. Read, follow links.
• Experiment with various technologies (at a light level) on my own

I’m not stopping any of those activities, particularly the all-important last one.  However, I’ve come to realize that there aren’t any really good sherpas out there for this ongoing battle, no effective way of whittling down the massive input stream into just what I need.  So even though there’s nothing wrong with any or all of these above activities, the trouble was that the whole day can go by while I do that.  In other words, those approaches are just not sustainable for a busy executive.

Enter Twitter. Once you get past the common knee-jerk reaction (e.g., why do I care to hear what people had for breakfast?), and actually use it for a few weeks, you realize that it has some unexpected advantages:

• Probably 90% of Twitter users produce little more than drivel. But, you don’t need to follow any of those 90%.
• Messages, by virtue of the 140-character limit, are pithier, hence more scannable. Brevity is the soul of twit. (I can’t be the first person to say that).
• Topic areas are more findable, prunable, and groupable, leading to an incredible and still-growing abundance of Twitter utilities and after-market products to help people divide, search, conquer.
• Twitter, used properly, is much less subject to the incursion of advertising (or pure inanity) that plagues nearly everything else on the net: you can (and should) customize the people you follow for maximum utility. It’s so much easier to simply unfollow someone who turns out to be a spammer or a fool than it is to, say, unsubscribe from a typical email blast stream. It’s your action that does the unfollowing, not theirs.

“Mindcasting” is the term that I find most applicable to Twitter. Through Twitter, I get to tap into the minds of people I find useful, people who are willing to share, via this new medium, their perspective and interests. Those whose tweets prove interesting and useful, I keep following. Those who don’t, get dropped, and that’s OK. Via Twitter, I get to establish and hone the membership of my own private Algonquin Round Table, as it were, of fascinating interlocutors.  It’s more granular than relying on RSS, in my view, in that it’s more targeted and more bite-sized. I can trust the people I follow to give me quality links to read. I can see whom those people are following, and extend my circle to include those folks as well.  As a result of this daily honing and pruning, I get a much higher “signal to noise” ratio in my reading, thanks to my Twitter stream.  And lo and behold, very little of that stream ever relates to people’s breakfasts.

I’ll avoid going into detail about the frailty of Twitter’s offering, operationally (see links below about the infamous “fail whale“, other than to gently point out what should be obvious: that they need a different level of IT management if they are to continue to scale.

You’re all welcome to follow me, if you so choose, on Twitter here.

Lagniappe:
Useful articles on the Twitter phenomenon:

• “Twitter sucks, so change your friends,”
• “Forget the Fail Whale: Twitter Jumps the Shark“
• “On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting”
• “OMG! Shut up about Twitter already“
• “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy“
• “Twitter Explained In 267 Seconds“

Let’s sail into a stretch of a metaphor this time. You probably know by now how much I embrace metaphors as a way to impart, often via a concrete example, ideas and concepts that are hard to grasp. So let’s go way back and talk about a metaphorical influence from long ago.

When I was in early high school, we would occasionally spend English class watching and then discussing a variety of short subject films, many of them from the fertile minds at the National Film Board of Canada.  Some of these films, described by the NFB as “socially engaged documentary”, bordered on (or transcended) the bizarre; they thus spurred all sorts of avid arguments among teenagers, easily as much as Ethan Frome or Wang Lung, the more literary staples of the curriculum that I can remember from that year.  There was one such film in particular, in fact, that has stuck with me for decades.  After some digging, I’ve finally been able to identify it by name and origin.  The researchers at the NFB have now kindly confirmed for me that the film is titled “I.B.M.”, and that it was directed by Jacques Languirand. When I reflect on it, the film’s staying power with me makes sense, since it not only features IT elements, but also serves admirably and in multiple ways as a metaphor for IT issues.

As I recall the five-minute film, it features an unchanging close-up view of an automated keypunch machine, punching out a series of IBM computer punchcards with a mysterious and incomplete common message. The film shows the cards sliding into place and getting punched, one at a time, then rolling off into the output hopper. Only parts of the full message can be read at first, since some of the letters of each word are omitted or obscured. Little by little, though, over the course of the film’s duration, each successive card that is punched contains more and more of the message, until it becomes clear at the end of the film that the text reads, “Participate in the process rather than confront results.”

Think about the wisdom and depth of that line: “Participate in the process rather than confront results.” Three ways come to mind of relating this metaphor to IT, to its role across the enterprise, and even to effective IT management of staff. They share a common aspect: the duty (and the reward) of emphasizing participation over passive observation.

• The duty of stakeholders. Stakeholders need to be involved in any project, not look in from outside.  Note the recent and encouraging ascent in the industry of certain Agile practices that emphasize the ongoing and deep participation in a software project by its stakeholders, who provide constant input and feedback on micro as well as macro levels.  Contrast that approach with the more traditional, “over the transom”-style, one-time hand-off of supposed user requirements.  Stakeholders, take this to heart: jump in and insist on ongoing involvement in the projects you care about, otherwise the results that you eventually confront may not be entirely to your liking.
• The duty of IT. Equally, IT needs to work on an ongoing basis as part of the business, an equal partner at the table, and not just as IT in a vacuum, reacting to what it’s given.  At its worst, I’ve seen IT become little more than “order takers” for the enterprise — relegated to asking questions that are essentially equivalent to, “oh, do you want fries with that?” and obediently scribbling down the answers.  That approach of course seems cooperative and agreeable, but in truth, treating requirements gathering that way is actually a form of neglect of one’s responsibilities to the greater good of the enterprise.  Ironically, it often leads to long-term failure rather than success.  Don’t let this happen.  Instead, IT people need to be there at every juncture, going full throttle, to challenge and to help mold requirements towards greater viability and cost-effectiveness.  Few people in the enterprise are in as good a position as IT staffers to drive out the appropriate balance between long-term and short-term considerations.  User requirements often come in without context, or without practical weighing of consequences and ripple effects, or with a failure to consider plausible alternative approaches.  Molding and fleshing out those key requirements is a long arduous process; commit yourself to participate in it.
• The duty of leadership. Think about how you behave as an IT leader towards your employees.  Here too, do you participate in the process, or do you tend to just confront the results?  As an IT leader, it’s my obligation to resist falling into the rut of sitting back and mainly evaluating my staff on how well they’re executing.  Instead, I have to make sure that I stay actively and regularly involved in coaching, trend-setting, and occasional course correction, all (of course) without drifting into micromanagement either.  In other words, I need to focus on being a collaborator more than a critic, helping to further our collective agenda.  If I see something that isn’t working, for example, I can’t just ding my employee for the gap; instead, I need to work together with him or her to figure out the best way to regroup and move ahead.  We’re in this together, after all.  Not fully understanding or following through on this key duty, collaboration over critique, is in fact a frequent way that I’ve seen IT leaders fail.
  

But back to the film.  Of course, its main “gimmick” is that the message that it’s communicating isn’t clear at the beginning; it emerges into full clarity only upon successive efforts at articulating and perfecting it.  Who in IT can’t relate to that?  Think about how user requirements constantly evolve, for example, or management expectations, or even industry standards of success.  The message also reminds us of the benefits of “continuous improvement”.  Incremental and tiny improvements end up creating whole-scale shifts over time, and drive everyone to new levels of clarity and achievement.

Finally, thinking about this film helps me realize anew how far we’ve come with all those incremental technological improvements over the years.  After all, I don’t know anyone who works with punchcards anymore.

A few months back, I wrote a post on various “Astounding Sayings” that I’ve encountered in my career in information technology.  It turns out that it’s been one of the more popular posts I’ve written, judging from page views, so in true Hollywood fashion, it must be time for a sequel.  I am retitling it slightly, though, to distinguish it from the Peterisms I post from time to time.  The point of writing about the “astounding” sayings was that they usually reflect misguided energy (or, to put it bluntly: wrong-headed thinking); the point of the Peterisms, on the other hand, is to distill and communicate absolute, undeniable, sublime truth and wisdom at every possible turn. (Hopefully it’s unnecessary, but just in case, <insert smiley face here>.)  Hence, I’m now going to call these non-truthful, unwise sayings “astounding utterances” instead.

Here are two more such utterances, with moral-of-the-story observations for each.  Note: as before, these are true stories.  I may have changed some of the facts, lightly, to make them less identifiable.  They also always come from at least several years in the past, to provide a healthy amount of distance for everyone.

The utterances that I consider to be astounding, in their context, are highlighted for you below in bold.

• Looking out for #1, and, um, that would be ME.
  

Regular and formal goal-setting, to my mind, is one of the key managerial ways to focus and align everyone’s efforts in the business world.  Done well, it ensures that people are working on the right objectives, and are incented to achieve things for the common good of the business. The exercise often also brings to light any number of disconnects (teams working at cross-purposes, etc.) that would otherwise go undetected.

Usually, the way I’ve found this kind of goal-setting works most effectively is to actually collaborate with the employee on establishing meaningful goals for their role.  This isn’t exactly a jaw-dropping insight.  Workers themselves usually are quite expert in what needs to be done in their area; managers can help prioritize, push for improvements, and “ripple down” the larger goals of the company at that particular time.  So, the manager will typically draw up a list of suggested goals, ask the employee to do the same, and then they work together on aligning the two so that it all makes sense.  Goals should of course be “SMART”—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely—but I won’t go into the specifics of that here; check out the links at the bottom for more information.

All of that’s pretty obvious, right?  Well, during one such goal-setting exercise a few years back, one of my managers came to me and reported that one of her employees had gotten upset at the draft suggestions the manager had drawn up for possible goals.  The employee didn’t like seeing specific targets for her work, such as measurable throughput, successful completion of projects, improvement of operating results.  Her response to seeing her manager’s suggestions was to snort, “Those aren’t my goals—those are the company’s goals!”

We can of course laugh at how obviously misguided this person was (just why she imagined that the company was paying her, if not to push for improvements and to help achieve certain company goals, I have no idea).  But I think the incident reveals an all-too-frequent attitude in the workforce, sometimes at all levels.  People who aren’t focused and actively driven to working on achieving meaningful overall company goals will simply hold everyone back. They’re in it for themselves, first and foremost.  If you find someone who doesn’t innately understand that having the company succeed will almost certainly tend to augment their own situation (salary, position, etc.), you need to work with that person quite seriously to see if you can bring them around.

• We wanna do what WE wanna do. Why are you asking these annoying questions?
  

You’ll note a theme, as usual, in this pairing of utterances.  For my second story, I’ll describe just a bit (tip-of-the-iceberg style) about a situation I walked into several years ago, where a development team had gone whole hog, tooth and nail, hook-line-sinker-and-the-whole-nine-yards, into Extreme Programming as their operative model.  Now, my purpose here is not to bash Agile or Extreme Programming, because there are actually quite a few positive aspects of those approaches, and discussing them fairly deserves at least a whole separate post. 

But when I started my CTO role at the company, I needed, as always in a new position, to ramp up quickly on current projects, deliverables, time frames.  And I could find nothing to go on.  Far from being Specific, Measurable, Attainable, etc. in their goals, this team had come to a style of work (and had been allowed to do so) where next to nothing was ever written down, and few goals were concrete other than (it seemed) just getting through the day.  In fact, I’d been hired precisely because top management was growing ever more concerned at how little was actually getting delivered.  I sat the project manager down and asked him how they hoped to know when they were really done, or whether what they were delivering would meet the business needs, or how they hoped to test what they had produced if they didn’t have definitions of what the specific goals were.  Where, in short, were the guiding definitions and documents that would serve as their touchstones during such projects?  He looked at me, arched his eyebrows, and proudly stated, “We’re parsimonious on documentation around here.”

Whatever one thinks about Agile and Extreme Programming (and let me reiterate that that is a complex topic that deserves a separate post), this was clearly a situation that had gone to a bad extreme, one where accountability and purpose had gradually drifted out of the picture.  There’s room for a lot of different and viable approaches in software, but almost completely eliminating accountability and direction isn’t an approach that I’ve seen bear a lot of fruit.

And there’s nothing astounding about that.

Lagniappe:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_(project_management)
• http://www.goal-setting-guide.com/smart-goals.html
• http://www.topachievement.com/smart.html

I haven’t given myself the luxury of telling an IT anecdote or two here recently, so it’s about time: here are two, with moral-of-the-story observations for each.  Note: these are true stories.  I may have changed some of the facts, lightly, to make them less identifiable.  They’re also always at least several years in the past, to provide a healthy amount of distance for everyone.

I’d actually like to make this post the first in a recurring motif, a series that I’ll call “Astounding IT Sayings,” for what I hope are obvious reasons.  The saying that I consider to be astounding, in its context, will be highlighted for you below in bold.

• This one goes to 11

There I sat, interviewing for a CTO position.  Of course, these sorts of interviews always go both ways, and I was at least as interested in hearing about the state of the company, its products, its technologies, as they were in seeing whether I’d be a good fit for what they needed.  Without a doubt, the company in question looked solid, and was clearly on the move in their market.  As I talked to various executives and also a number of IT staffers, I heard just a few doubts being expressed about a current major project, but otherwise, everyone I talked to was amazingly upbeat about the technology, the capabilities of the staff, their ability to work together with the business, and the robustness of their processes.

Then came the kicker.  As I spoke to the Director of Technical Operations, I asked him about the company’s software launch processes and how solid they were.  Having been burned any number of times by weaknesses in this area, I was especially interested in hearing how they promoted software from development into test into staging and then finally into production, both for maintenance fixes and for major releases.  I asked, “on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is complete chaos and 10 is perfection, where do you think this company is, in terms of the solidity of its release processes?”  Without missing a beat, he confidently answered, “Oh, we’re at an 11.“

I didn’t really need to ask a lot of follow-up questions, since doing so would have inserted a pointless element of contention into the interview: the “11″ had already revealed to me what I would find out. It’s been my observation that nearly all companies have weaknesses in their release processes: e.g., bug fixes break other things; major releases cause old bugs to resurface; rollbacks aren’t well thought-out or fail entirely, and so on.  I’ve actually never seen a company that was even at what I’d consider an 8 on that hypothetical scale of 1 to 10.  More than anything, though, I was looking for an attitude of continuous improvement as the underlying philosophy, and “we’re at an 11″ was the exact opposite of that.

• There is nothing either good or bad, but voting makes it so

It was a bet-the-company project, one that had to succeed: implement a portal web site that would supplant and ultimately replace all the company’s current e-commerce sites with a more sophisticated, more capable, more comprehensive integrated offering.  We’d been working away on it (all new architecture, new approach, groundbreaking innovation in terms of presentation and business process change) for many months, and the launch date loomed before us.  We weren’t ready, and everyone knew it at heart.  Too many glitches, too many unresolved issues, too few successes in our test environments.  Crisis moment.

A new key executive had just ridden into town, was only a few weeks into the job, and he called a meeting of all the project’s principals.  He kicked off the meeting with this announcement: “I’d like to hear a vote on whether we’re ready to launch.” My jaw dropped. No discussion or even mention of metrics, intermediate milestones, or readiness criteria. Instead, a verbal vote.  On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being completely unready.

What ensued was actually what one would tend to expect of a group of middle managers in front of the new and powerful key executive, with no one wanting to come across as negative.  “Oh, I think we’re at a 7,” the first person opined. “I’d say an 8,” piped up his neighbor.  We went around the table, with nearly all the votes falling in the range of 6 to 9.  I was among the last to speak: “We’re at a 1 in my view, completely unready, and here’s why,” I said to a chorus of gasps.  I explained that we actually shouldn’t be voting but should instead be nailing down facts-based criteria on which we’d base our launch decision.  I pointed out that we’d gotten precisely zero transactions successfully through the system end-to-end.

OK, said Mr. Key Exec.  Looks like maybe we’re not ready. Everyone is going to work the weekend.  (This meeting was on a Friday).  We’ll meet again on Monday and reexamine where we are.

And that we did.  Lots of hard work, lots of late night pizza and diet Coke.  We gathered together in the same room around noon on Monday.  To my amazement, this is what I heard: “OK, let’s see where we are.  Why don’t we go around the table again and everyone give me your impression of our launch readiness on a scale of 1 to 10?”  And that’s what we did.  “Oh, I’m up to a 9 now. We really made progress this weekend.” “I’m at an 8, but I was at a 6 on Friday.”  And round and round.  When it came to me, I again quietly restated my “1″, pointing out that despite hard work and progress, we had yet to see a single successful transaction.  I said that judging from experience and based on where we were at this point, my prediction was that we wouldn’t really be ready to launch for another three months.

The website launched about three months later.

The key takeaway should be obvious: no matter what the pressures, don’t ever base a major operations decision on a vote, where such voting would serve to substitute for a sober evaluation of facts-based criteria.  Launch readiness is way too important to leave up to pure gut instinct and mass optimism.  Create your metrics and your criteria up front, collect them, and look at what they tell you.  Then act accordingly.  That way, you’ll end up with results, rather than astounding sayings.