CTO/CIO Perspectives » Recommended reading

Novels of IT, Part 3: Adventures of an IT Leader

Peter Kretzman — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:14:04 +0000

My long quest for an insightful, broad, and practically applicable “novel of IT” finally met with resounding success, once I got my hands on the outstanding book that is the subject of this post: Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell.

To recap: I was looking for a book that was both reasonably engaging as a novel and one that accurately portrayed a broad swath of the inner workings, nuances, and personality types that are typically part of the landscape of IT in today’s world. Reading the book should provide a window into common dilemmas and disagreements regarding IT issues, lending perspective and insight into all parties’ motivations and interests. See my earlier posts on Chris Potts’ FruITion and John Hughes’ Haunting the CEO. Again, my views aside, I should emphasize that all three of these “novels of IT” are worth reading and forming your own opinion.

Adventures of an IT Leader comes by far the closest to meeting the criteria I had outlined for a “novel of IT.” It opens with an executive, Jim Barton, being unexpectedly tapped as CIO by the new CEO of his firm, after long and successful stints managing other areas of the company. In short, Barton isn’t an IT person by training or experience. In fact, one reason for his selection as the new CIO is that he has long been the foremost critic of the IT function at his company. And now, unexpectedly, he has to walk a few miles in IT’s moccasins, so to speak. The novel then follows Barton and his numerous IT challenges and crises for about a year.

Note that it doesn’t make sense for a novel (any novel, but especially a “novel of IT”) to be a how-to manual or a set of detailed instructions. It’s meant to be fiction, after all, not an O’Reilly cookbook. As a novel rather than a cookbook, the book should provide enhanced, realistic insight into personality types, situations, common dilemmas, trade-offs, etc. A great outcome of such a book, to my mind, is for it to portray common IT scenarios evenly enough so that the reader comes away thinking, “wow, that issue is not as clearcut as I’d always assumed; I’ll have to think about those nuances some more.”

This book excelled in that respect: without falling into the trap of loftily providing the “right answer”, the book depicts realistic situations and conversations (among well-drawn and not stereotypical characters in the novel) that surface the important nuances without pointing fingers of blame. As Barton struggles to understand his new milieu and ponders what actions he should take at the helm of IT, we see balanced, careful discussions of key IT concerns such as the following:

Why important IT infrastructure investment is often neglected;
How and why projects fall prey to scope creep and become “runaway”;
Why IT resources’ views and recommendations are often ignored, in favor of promises made by external vendors;
How technical complexity tends to increase over time, resulting in risks growing ever higher;
Why depending on ROI alone as a project selection criterion results in limitations for the business;
How issues can arise with developers working on their personal side projects even while major project deadlines loom, and why the answer on what to do about this isn’t obvious.

Readers see quickly that the authors’ goal isn’t to provide definitive answers on what precisely to do on any of these; instead, the lines of the pro and con arguments emerge naturally in each case as Barton wrestles with it, and the reader comes away realizing that the answer, any answer, will necessarily involve trade-offs, risks, downsides. Running IT often consists of placing bets, as it were, not determining the “one true path” that is the right answer. Even the chapter-ending “Reflection” sections provide genuine and thoughtful open-ended discussion questions, not framed with a predetermined agenda. The book would work well as a set of case studies for group discussion, in fact.

The reader comes away realizing that the answer, any answer, will necessarily involve trade-offs, risks, downsides.

As with any CIO, not all of the decisions that Barton makes (or the ones that he inherits) turn out to be successful bets as events transpire. In fact, the company is thrown into crisis when a production outage occurs, due in part to a security update that had been de-prioritized. How Barton deals with that crisis and the ensuing fallout is one of the most compelling aspects of the novel.

The epilogue of the book, looking back on its incidents, provides an especially cogent summary of a truth often missed by people who haven’t themselves worn the shoes of IT management: essentially, that much of the devil is in managing the nuances, the day-to-day seemingly trivial details. The authors observe, “The lack of effective IT management decision-making on the mundane issues will eventually lead to spectacular and seriously negative consequences.” Note how that’s a far cry from (and a much wiser perspective than) the stance taken in FruITion, which argues that the IT function has become so trivial as to not need an executive at all.

This book isn’t perfect of course, and I have a few quibbles with it: the patchwork nature of its organization at times, for example, or the ease with which Barton generally succeeds despite his rookie nature; however, more than any other “novel of IT” I’ve encountered, it is extraordinarily even-keeled and insightful on the key issues surrounding IT and IT’s role within companies. It explodes stereotypes rather than reinforcing them; it serves up genuine insight and understanding rather than pat solutions. As such, of the three novels I set out to review, it best fulfills one of my criteria: I’d be eager to recommend it to my CEO, or to anyone who works closely with IT.

Lagniappe:

Mark McDonald, “Adventures of an IT Leader — Book Review“. This author takes the opposite view of this book from mine.

Novels of IT, Part 2: Haunting the CEO

Peter Kretzman — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 05:05:50 +0000

Last time, I introduced this series by pointing out that reading what I call “novels of IT” could serve a few very useful purposes for those of us who work in and around information technology. In fact, I presented a number of criteria that come to mind when answering the implicit question of why anyone should bother to read a novel of IT.

Ideally, it’s because such novels, at their best, can do the following:

provide a degree of engagement and entertainment in making their points
provide a realistic insight, in a “show not tell” kind of way, into what motivates the typical players in these business scenarios,
help all factions (inside and outside IT) come to see the other side’s perspective and arrive at deeper understandings of common problems and disagreements.
allow the CIO to hand the novel to his or her CEO or CFO and trust that everyone’s reading of it will help reach common ground in how to collectively and collaboratively approach the company’s goals.

There are, of course, pitfalls involved in constructing such a novel, the foremost of which is falling into blatant stereotypes: most notably, the nerdy CIO who clings to technology and can’t see a larger role for himself or herself. The book I covered in my first post on IT novels, Chris Potts’ FruITion, not only fell into this trap in spades, but took it to a whole new dimension, painting IT in general as basically no longer needed as a separate discipline, and as having become so trivial as to not need an executive at all.

This time, I’ll discuss John Hughes’ recent and excellent contribution to this genre, Haunting the CEO.

Haunting the CEO is a slim, readable novel that depicts a CIO, Brian, who is faced with a new CEO, Jim, who wants to make changes in order to turn around the company’s declining results. Jim tells Brian that he expects IT to drive business growth and profitability, as well as innovation. He keeps Brian on, provisionally, while telling him in no uncertain terms that he needs to see action and results sooner rather than later. But Brian is a techie, through and through, and doesn’t really have an inkling on how to begin.

Enter Carol, Jim’s CIO from his previous company, who has agreed at Jim’s request to serve as informal volunteer mentor to Brian. As they meet over coffee and lunches, she walks Brian through examining his current practices and IT staff, challenges his thinking, and ultimately helps him both to achieve greater insight into what he needs to change in his own behavior as a leader, and to take concrete action to turn around IT in general at the company.

You can tell this novel was written by someone who’s been there, done that.

This novel of IT distinguishes itself enormously from FruITion in particular in one main way: you can tell it was written by someone who’s been there, done that, rather than delivering an abstract solution from on high. John Hughes’ foreword directly admits as much: discussing his 30-year career, he writes, “my mistakes are woven throughout the stories, characters and events you’re about to immerse yourself in.” True to one of the core leadership traits he espouses in the book, humility, the author’s own words here foreshadow CIO Brian’s own path to learning what he needs to change and leave behind (in himself and in his staff) as he turns around IT for the greater benefit of the company.

Haunting the CEO is filled with small and large insights about leadership in general, and IT leadership in particular. As with other small business books with great wisdom (Kenneth Blanchard’s The One Minute Manager comes to mind), it’s easy to pick on its occasional oversimplification of complex issues, or to quibble about the vagueness of the necessary steps to follow in order to echo Brian’s success. But above all, the book reasonably and accurately depicts, in broad brush ways, the necessary “mental transformation” (to use its own words) required for an entrenched technologist to become a true business leader.

Personally, I would have preferred that the book show much more of Brian’s changed interactions with his business peers, and would point out the unfortunate aspect that in the end, the changes Brian effects appear to come mostly through his firing of about 10% of his IT staff. For that reason and more, I’d be a little leery of whether this book fulfills the criterion I established up front: wanting to be able to hand this book to my CEO so that he or she can get deeper insight into IT and its interrelationships with the rest of the business. The danger behind doing that with Haunting the CEO is that the standard image it paints of the CIO as the entrenched technologist is fading, so to some degree the book may be making points that reinforce and thus risk perpetuating a near-obsolete (and damaging) stereotype.

All that said, this is a fine novel of IT, and well worth the time spent reading it and absorbing its many lessons.

Next time, I’ll talk about the last of the three novels of IT on my initial list, Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell.

Lagniappe:

Caron Carlson, “A novel look at the CIO’s need to lead”
Elliot Ross, “Book Review: Haunting The CEO”

Novels of IT, Part 1: Turtles All The Way Down

Peter Kretzman — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 20:11:55 +0000

Novels are harder than most technology-oriented people typically realize. The backbone of a good novel is character development, meaning that the character learns and grows — which makes it easy for especially amateur novelists to start off with a character who is, frankly, little more than a one-dimensional dolt. This is an even more dangerous pitfall when it’s a “novel of IT”: the temptation is almost unavoidable for the author to create as protagonist a stereotypical technology leader, clueless as to what is really important or how to be effective, who is then gradually enlightened by wiser individuals as the novel progresses.

There are three IT-related novels I’m aware of, all relatively recent, that fall essentially along those lines.

fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology, by Chris D. Potts
Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell
Haunting the CEO, by John Hughes

All of them are worth reading, but I had majorly different reactions to each. While I’d intended to cover all three in one blog post, the complexities involved in discussing the first, very problematic example have led me to divide this discussion into more than one post.

Not everyone is a fan of fiction, though: why read any of these novels? In my view, the veneer of fiction, of semi-realistic dialog and interaction among the typical players in business-IT situations, promises a degree of engagement and entertainment, as well as the chance to obtain a deeper understanding of how and why the involved parties interact they way they do. Ultimately, I’d want such a book to provide me with insight, in a “show not tell” kind of way, into what motivates the typical players in these business scenarios, and to depict a healthy growth of character and role that lets me understand my own situation and how better to foster collaboration, synergy, and business effectiveness. Beyond the superficial, the events of a novel and the utterances and interactions of its characters can eloquently illustrate various approaches and philosophies, often more forcefully and meaningfully than would a straightforward treatise.

As a CIO, I’d want to be able to hand the novel to my CEO or CFO.

In fact, a fundamental purpose of quality fiction is to enable the reader to live and understand another perspective. So primarily, I would want such a “novel of IT” to help all factions (inside and outside IT) come to see the other side’s perspective and arrive at deeper understandings of common problems and disagreements. Otherwise, it’s sheer polemics. As a CIO, I’d want to be able to hand the novel to my CEO or CFO and have everyone’s reading of it help us find common ground in how we approach our goals.

(One small aside: before I begin, I should note that none of the novels I’m going to cover can compete, as artful fiction per se, with what I consider to be the best IT-related novel: Ellen Ullman’s The Bug. Unlike the three novels I will cover fully, The Bug is intended primarily as art, not as a fictionalized essay designed to make points about how to run IT. Highly recommended.)

Let’s start with FruITion, by Chris D. Potts.

This book, which has been generally praised, depicts itself as essentially contrarian, as describing “what happens when corporate strategists decide to ignore all the IT strategy orthodoxies.” It’s meant to reveal “indispensable messages about the next generation of strategies for information technology,” as one of the blurbs on the back has it. The key distinguishing feature of the book, arguably even underscored by the implications of the photo on the cover, is that it’s intended to turn the conventional view of IT on end.

Well, I’m going to be a contrarian to the contrarian. Simply put, I think the fundamental thrust of the book is wrong-headed, divisive, lofty, unnecessarily diminishing of the importance of the role that IT plays in a business, and ultimately not helping disagreeing factions find common ground, or showing useful ways that IT can truly provide value to business.

As Twain famously said, history may not repeat itself all the time, but it sure does rhyme a lot. Or, as Yogi Berra said, “you can observe a lot just by watching”. Or, in Potts’ own words, “the language you use is taken as evidence of your mindset.” And, just by carefully watching the interactions and language in FruITion, my unavoidable observation is that Potts’ mindset is particularly, astonishingly, and blatantly ill-disposed towards IT.

Ian, the protagonist and first-person narrator and CIO, is a straw-man-stereotype kind of IT person. He’s tentative, focused on technology, set in his ways, reactive, defensive, a bit paranoid. Conversely, the novel presents the non-IT executives (the CEO and her delegates) as wise, fast-thinking, and a bit mysterious in their uncanny insights into what’s not working. They’re a little inscrutable, and more than a little threatening: Ian is constantly fretting about whether he’s about to be sacked, and the strategists are constantly making subtle and not-so-subtle references as to whether or not he’s “getting it” and whether he’ll even be around for the next go-round.

It’s “us vs. them,” in other words, in spades. Ironically, one character, presented as particularly insightful, is introduced positively as being “fed up with the ‘us and them” and ‘we know best’ attitudes of some IT people towards the rest of the company.”

Yet IT is presented mainly in the negative (indeed, with disdain) at every turn.

Yet IT is presented mainly in the negative (indeed, with disdain) at every turn, characterized repeatedly and triumphantly as “delivering no value on its own”, and it’s emphasized that “no one values what IT does.” Everyone else in the novel sees things clearly except for the IT people, who “execute their strategies at arms length from everyone else rather than by collaborating.” In one characteristically heavy-handed moment in the novel, Ian’s “IT Strategy Manager” views with excitement the chance to participate in a key software vendor’s new beta release: “It could change our whole strategy,” he enthuses, not realizing how narrow that statement shows his notion of strategy to be.

Face it, we’ve all known people in IT that exhibit those small-picture tendencies. But I don’t believe that it’s useful or accurate, in this day and age, to trot out such stereotypes and thereby blast the entire discipline. One “strategic” character in the book even tells Ian, “we want you to break loose, join the gang, help us turn the tables on those bastards in IT.” In the end, Ian escapes (ascends?) into this strategic realm, away from IT, but all the future pesky technical decisions are then relegated to a Technical Services Manager whom they elevate to “CTO,” and whose stated job it is “to get the IT we wanted to use delivered reliably well, economically, at an acceptable level of risk, and with economies of scale and synergies. Nothing else.” Simple, eh? (Note the amusing similarity of this new “CTO” role to what the role of the CIO was also thought to be, way back when. As the old joke has it: from here, it’s “turtles all the way down”).

In essence, it’s “technology bad, strategy good”: this novel presents an overly simplified, frankly offensive, and ultimately detrimental dichotomy. The book seems, quite intentionally, to consider current-day IT as a mere exercise in procurement: “All in all, our people now know enough about IT and how to use it not to need an executive to make those decisions for us. All we really need is someone who can source the IT services we want to use.” Really? We know what we want; IT just needs to get it for us. Order takers. How many years/decades ago did we all collectively figure out that that’s a counterproductive approach?

In short, if there’s any book that actually fosters the “us vs. them” rift that’s too often characteristic of how IT fits into a company, this would be it. It’s simplistic, dismissive, lofty, and ivory-towerish; in the end, despite its contrarian nature, it delivers next to no new practical insights. And one sad aspect of its dismissive nature: those who point out its failings will almost certainly be accused by its proponents of “not getting it.” (Witness this review of Chris Potts’ interview with Claudia Imhoff). I think I “get it” quite clearly, though, and I simply reject it as misguided, naive, and ultimately counterproductive to the needs of a modern organization.

Next up: two more novels of IT that I believe show a (much) more even-handed, useful, and insightful approach.

Lagniappe:

Colin Beveridge. Book review: Fruition. http://www.colin-beveridge.com/index.php/book-review-fruition/.
John Gøtze. FruITion. http://gotze.eu/2008/08/29/fruitio/.

Must-read books on the human factors of IT — part 1, the 70s

Peter Kretzman — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:42:52 +0000

What is it that sets apart a top-notch IT executive from others of his calling? To my mind, one mark of today’s true professional, especially at the senior executive level, is to be deeply familiar with the seminal books in his or her field. The dilemma for an IT professional, though, comes from the ongoing and increasing flood of books to choose from, and trying to figure out how to walk the fine line between focus on the intensely tactical and focus on higher-level concepts and ideas.

The tactical books do have their place on your shelf, actually, and it would be a mistake to ignore them simply because you’ve moved beyond daily application of your development, configuration, and technical trouble-shooting skills: judicious selection and absorbing of nuts-and-bolts techniques and new approaches will keep your insight into technology and its possibilities fresh.

I started in IT as a developer, and I remain fascinated by the endless possibilities and techniques of the world of software. In the last decade or two, though, I’ve become even more intrigued by a metalayer above the more tactical concerns. True to my ongoing insistence that the biggest challenges in IT aren’t purely technical, I am ever more convinced that the greatest difficulties are presented by “psychology of IT” issues: the human factors in how software and systems are conceived, built, tested, deployed, maintained, and eventually decommissioned. Here are just a smattering of the eternal, non-technical questions that go far beyond the computer language du jour or the latest hot methodology:

How do teams actually create and complete information technology projects? What works, what fails, and why?
Why are some software developers ten times as productive as others?
Why do some software teams gel and others don’t?
Why do small companies with very few resources often beat out large, well-funded efforts in the marketplace?
How technical should managers be?

So starting with this post, let’s embark on a multi-part survey of the groundbreaking, timeless books on such issues. I’m going to pick what I consider to be the top three books from each decade, starting with the 70s. Each of them deserves not only a place on your bookshelf, but to be read and reread every few years. And contrary to what one might think, their insights remain not only valid after all these years, but have become all the stronger by having been confirmed by the history of the industry since their publication.

Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming (1971)

Weinberg opens with, “This book has only one major purpose—to trigger the beginning of a new field of study: computer programming as a human activity…. If our experiences are any indication, each [software developer] could be functioning more efficiently, if he and his manager can learn to look upon [him] as a human being, rather than as another one of the machines.” This book was especially groundbreaking by addressing software development as both an individual and a team effort. Remarkably readable and full of anecdotal examples, it covers virtually every human aspect of the software development “sausage factory”: team formation, individual contributions, goal setting, leadership, estimating. Weinberg’s “Silver Anniversary” edition of this book contains annotations and commentary for each chapter, reflecting on similarities and differences to today’s environments.

Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)

I’ve said it before: if there’s one single book that every IT professional should read, it’s this one. Brooks’ foreword presents it as a “belated answer to Tom Watson’s probing questions as to why programming is hard to manage.” Brooks’ writing brims with key universal concepts that can be unfortunately non-intuitive to people outside the field, but which ring familiar to any long-time IT practitioner. The titular essay introduces the concept of the “mythical man-month”, his adage that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it even later.” But there’s much more, such as “plan to throw one away”, where Brooks points out that the “first system built is barely usable; … there is no alternative but to start again.” I can’t say enough about this book. As with the Weinberg book, the anniversary edition now being sold includes extra material: Brooks’ later (1986), equally seminal essay, “No Silver Bullets” (see my post on this: “No Silver Bullets. Really!“), as well as some added chapters that revisit the assumptions of the first edition.

Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)

Ultimately, this is a book about the limits of computers and software. Weizenbaum, a noted computer scientist in the early days of Artificial Intelligence research, wrote a program called ELIZA, featuring a script that “enabled it to parody the responses of a nondirective psychotherapist in an initial psychiatric interview.” In other words, his test subjects would converse with a software program that emulated a therapist. Weizenbaum became horrified by how many people forgot that this was “just” a machine they were talking to, and that the dialog was really just an illusion. Many insisted, to his amazement and despite his explanations, that the computer actually understood them.

IT professionals today can be just as swept away, to a fault, with the potential ultimate power of software and systems as Weizenbaum describes. I’m inspired and reinvigorated every time I read his sobering, methodical discussion of the nature of programming, the limits of its scope, and the need to consider the social implications of technical projects.

The next time, I’ll be on to the key books of the 80s. I’ve already picked the books I tentatively plan to write about, but I welcome your suggestions.

Lagniappe:

Here are a couple of books that didn’t quite fit in my theme and chosen time frame, but which are still worthy of mention:

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote that this book “has had a wider influence than any other book on the history of science.” This book is not about information technology directly, but its influence has been monumental across all scientific disciplines, and it is a book that any technologist should know well.

Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974)

This was a self-published book in the early 70s, by influential industry visionary Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term “hypertext.” It’s probably different from just about any book you’ve ever read.