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“Refuse to lose”: how executive pressure contributes to IT failure

“We went live before the system was ready”.  It’s a common excuse/explanation that I hear from IT people when they tell war stories about system launches that failed miserably. Implicit (and sometimes explicit) is the add-on statement: “and we told them so beforehand, too.”

There are obviously many things (and many parts of the org chart) that contribute to a failed launch, but here I’d like to focus on what drives this particular kind of launch-before-readiness, where the views of the rank-and-file are unheard or ignored.

In a nutshell: it’s management pressure. Sometimes that pressure comes from middle management, sometimes from the very top, and often from both.

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, Pillars of Purview, Projects
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Conventional wisdom that fails for IT

I’ve done several posts featuring what I call “Peterisms”, which are basically aphorisms I’ve adopted that encapsulate hard-earned IT lessons. Let’s turn it around this time, and talk about two sayings that sound equally folksy-sensible, and that I hear again and again, but which I feel are actually dangerous to apply to information technology work. And, of course, I’ll discuss why that’s so.

  • If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it
I know of very few aphorisms that tend to be repeated as smugly as this one, particularly by scared people. The implication is that action is generally to be avoided, that the status quo is probably just fine, and that one should wait for a true crisis before intervening. And, of course, that it’s your fault if you’ve ignored this sage advice and intervened anyway. It’s ironic, then, how IT departments themselves end up complaining endlessly about how they’re always in fire-fighting mode.  This prevailing attitude evolves among (and is a telling symptom of) burned-out sysadmins and developers, especially those who are stuck maintaining systems they didn’t themselves write or engineer. It can be equally summed up as a “don’t touch it, don’t breathe on it” kind of superstition. Or, perhaps, it’s akin to the proud but defensive statement that “we’ve always done it that way.”
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Filed Under: Anecdotes, Peterisms, Pillars of Purview, Projects, Stakeholders
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Cloud computing: misunderstood, but really not that complicated a concept

Consider these statements:

  • Baseball is a game where the pitcher throws to the catcher.
  • An iPhone is a device that lets you call anywhere in the world.
  • The Grand Canyon is a tourist attraction in Arizona

You’ll have noticed that these statements aren’t wrong, per se. But they still take you aback, don’t they? They miss the point, miss the magic, neglect the important differentiators. By explaining too little, defining the subject too narrowly, they explain nothing that’s really useful.

Here’s another:

  • Cloud computing is where you have a lot of intelligence in the network and it’s available from wherever you need to get to it

A distressing portion of mainstream media covering cloud computing has decided that the best way to explain the phenomenon is first to make hand-waving general statements such as the above example from BusinessWeek, and then cite a few consumer-understandable examples such as in this piece from NPR: “Do you have a Yahoo e-mail account? Maybe a Gmail account? Do you put up pictures on Flickr? Perhaps you’ve started keeping your schedule online. If so, then you are using cloud computing — that’s what tech companies call it when people work and store information on the Internet.”

Flickr, Gmail, and Facebook are great services, but declaring that they represent the burgeoning trend of cloud computing is as incomplete and unsatisfying as explaining the Grand Canyon as just a tourist attraction in Arizona.

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Filed Under: Industry trends
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On Twitter, if you follow back reflexively, the spammers win

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:

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Filed Under: General, Industry trends, Personal
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Some timeless IT/tech jokes, and why they’re still relevant

If you’ve been in the information technology industry for a number of years, certain jokes tend to pop up again and again. Why? I’d say it’s because their underlying premises, the things that make them applicable and funny, continue to occur. So even if you’ve heard these before (and that’s probably the case), it’s worth taking a few moments here to look at them again and consider what makes them timeless.  Remember, even jokes have morals to the story. Sometimes especially jokes.

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, Humor, Top 25 posts
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The title issue revisited: CTO vs. CIO

Key question of the day: given the recognized ascendancy of business/IT alignment and business change management as a vital purview of the effective CIO/CTO, should senior technology executives decrease their emphasis on technology, and focus primarily on corporate strategy and change? Should the company just have one role (call it a CTO, perhaps) do all that technical stuff, and move the CIO role into that of predominantly business strategist?

Let me raise my hand for the Nays. That would be the pendulum swinging way too far in the opposite direction. The problem of business/IT alignment won’t be solved by ghetto-izing technology concerns, and/or pretending that an executive is really only part of the senior team if she/he has a mostly strategic orientation and little responsibility for technology. That’s called a backlash, and it’s bound to lead to trouble. Here’s why.
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Filed Under: Role definition, Top 25 posts
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A case study of “going to the cloud” (SaaS)

Here’s one series of questions that’s great to ask a candidate for a senior position in IT, be it in project management, development, operations, or whatever: Tell me about a recent project or initiative for which you were responsible. What was the goal, and how did you ensure that the goal was achieved? What were the roadblocks you encountered along the way, and what did you do to address them? What mistakes did you make? What would you do differently if you were faced with a similar project or initiative again?

For this post, I’ll play candidate and outline the kind of full and detailed response I would be looking for as a hiring manager, based on a project from my own experience. Let’s use a relatively simple one: implementing off-site (Software-as-a-Service, known as SaaS) email, replacing a poorly implemented in-house email system. Today, this would loftily be called “going to the cloud.”  (Yes, I’m aware that cloud computing encompasses far more than SaaS, but that’s not my thrust here).

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Filed Under: Anecdotes, Pillars of Purview, Projects, Vendor management
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The Practical CIO: Difficulties in project prioritization & selection, part 2

OK, let’s assume you’ve gotten great at picking the right projects to do to benefit the company. How do you know you can actually accomplish the ones you’ve picked with the resources you have? If you’re like most companies I’ve seen, it’s done on a wing and a prayer. But there’s a better way.

Last time, I wrote about ways to pick projects that satisfy the company’s “SHOULD do” dimension: ones that are strategic, financially beneficial, risk mitigating, or legally mandated, for example. I set out practical guidelines for the process of selection in that dimension, to ensure as level a playing field as is possible.  And I left it for this follow-on post to discuss prioritization from the perspective of the other dimension, the “CAN do” dimension, which needs to calibrate the list of chosen projects to what can actually be accomplished by the available resources.

Both dimensions inform each other, of course; they’re not independent or sequential. In other words, the company might be able to tackle five smaller projects rather than one huge project, and figuring out if it’s a good idea to actually make that trade-off will be based on executive judgment of the benefits in both scenarios.
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Filed Under: Pillars of Purview, Process, Projects, Stakeholders, Tools, Top 25 posts
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