jump to navigation

Being Bartholomew Cubbins September 16, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
Tags: , ,
9 comments

Consider an ice cream company.  They make great ice cream and have enjoyed much success over the years.  But lately, their market share is slipping, and they are feeling heat of the competition.  They decide they need a new product line, a complete new set of frozen treats that will reshape the ice cream market.  To whom do they turn for product design and development?

Their CIO, of course!  Who better to know the vagaries of ice cream eaters?

Wrong. We all know this is wrong.  They would no more ask the CIO to design ice cream than they would the CFO or their general counsel.

Why, then, do companies that develop more technical products turn to the CIO to develop and market those products?  Why would anyone think that  a CIO, with their deep knowledge of systems, infrastructure, and service delivery, is able to build and sell a product at a profit?

Many CIOs these days are suddenly wearing several hats: CIO, Product Development, Web Marketing, and the like.  Some CIOs even have a P&L and are expected to make money for the company!  Who ever got it into their head that CIOs are also savvy marketers and salesmen?

As technology pervades every aspect of our lives, computing is becoming intertwined with almost every product bought and sold.  Desperate for help with all this technology, companies are turning to the only people they have on hand that seem to understand how to make all this stuff work: the CIO.  If a widget suddenly has a computer in it, the CIO is called in to help design, build, market, and sell the widget.  In some cases, they put the CIO completely in charge of the entire widget division!

This is a big mistake.  I take great pride in being a CIO, and I work hard to be a good one.  I have lots of experiences with computers and building software systems. I have no experience with developing and marketing products, whether they have computers in them or not.  I should not wear that hat.

I can provide lots of advice to a product developer who has little computing experience.  A person who understands the market space and has a brilliant idea, but has little understanding how computers might be used in that product, would do well to consult with a good CIO to understand the benefits and risks of the technology aspects of the product. Together, we could do great things.  Separately, we’re on the verge of disaster.

When you talk about very non-technical products, like ice cream or lawn fertilizer, this seems like an easy argument to make.  When the products involve lots of technology, like online banking or web-based shopping, people have a harder time seeing the distinction.  I think the problem is compounded by the fact that lots of CIOs are itching to do other things and gladly accept these other hats, all with the best of intentions.

I think a CIO can get in a lot of trouble by wearing too many hats.  If you want to be a CIO, wear that hat.  If you want to be a product designer or marketer, wear that hat.  But, like Bartholomew Cubbins, CIOs with too many hats are going to find themselves, sooner or later, all sorts of difficulties.

[tweetmeme source=”EffectiveCIO” alias=”http://bit.ly/cio105″ only_single=false]

Magnitude and Precision September 14, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
Tags: , ,
2 comments

A quick math test:

Paula Programmer has been assigned to write a new interface for a web-based application.  She estimates that the task will take seven days.  After one day of hard work, how much of the task has Paula completed?

  1. About one-seventh
  2. 14%
  3. 14.28571%
  4. Not enough information to answer.

Optimists might answer A, on the assumption that Paula estimates well and works consistently.  Pessimists will always answer D, believing that until Paula delivers some code that works, she’s done nothing but shop on eBay all day. An optimist that can do math in their head might come up with B.  Finally, a compulsive optimist with a calculator will answer C.

Why?  Why are people instinctively drawn to numbers with more digits?

I’ll tell you why: more digits imply more precision.  Many years ago, right around the time that schools stopped teaching kids how to use slide rules, they stopped teaching kids the difference between magnitude and precision.  Instead, armed with calculators, kids can rattle off an answer to 8 digits, blissfully unaware that digits 2 through 7 are meaningless.

To review: the result of any computation is only as accurate as the least accurate of all the values used in the computation.  If you divide a one-digit number by another one-digit number, your answer is accurate to a single digit.  In Paula’s case, when you divide “about a day” by “about seven days,” you get A, “about one-seventh,” her inline shopping habits notwithstanding.

Why does this matter?  We deal with numbers all the time in our jobs.  As leaders, we constantly request estimates from our people, and ask them to compute cost ratios, return on investment, completion percentages, and the like.  The resulting numbers are often used to justify projects, allocate resources, and make important business decisions.  Often, the false precision in these numbers gives them a credibility they do not deserve, and our decisions suffer as a result.

Just as distressingly, people often do a lot of extra work to create precision where it isn’t needed.  That extra precision doesn’t help, and the time wasted making the number that accurate can’t be recovered.  I sometimes ask for numbers “to the nearest x zeroes” so that my people know not to waste their time creating useless precision.  Thus, a request “to the nearest four zeroes” should be rounded to the nearest $10,000, and so forth.  They save time, I get the answer I need, and we all move forward.

Given that the public school system long ago ceded their responsibility for effective mathematics education, we must take on that task.  Effective delegation includes expectation management, and that includes defining the precision of any numerical results we request.  Make sure your people know what you want and how precise you want it.  You will get better answers and they’ll save time.  My estimate? At least 4.32675%.  Maybe more!

[tweetmeme source=”EffectiveCIO” alias=”http://bit.ly/cio104″ only_single=false]

Simply Amazing September 11, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
Tags: , , ,
2 comments

It is the time of year that corn mazes become popular.  People will pay to wander through a maze cut into a corn field, enjoying the fall weather while they try to find their way in and out.  I always naively assumed that corn mazes occurred almost as an afterthought to the process of raising corn.  At some point, I supposed, a farmer rode through his fields with some sort of mower, carving out a maze. I was markedly incorrect.

Corn mazes, it turns out, are a big business.  Mazes are laid out before planting begins, and the actual cutting is often controlled by GPS-directed tractors.  Maze designs are marketed by various companies and can cost many thousands of dollars.  In my area, farmers join maze co-ops that control where mazes are created, ensuring that each maze has a strong local market to drive revenue.  Within the co-op, mazes are not located closer than 30 miles from each other to reduce competition. Non-co-op mazes pop up, of course, but they do not get the other benefits of belonging to the co-op.

Who knew?  How could such a simple, all-American thing like a corn maze actually require so much complicated planning and forethought?

It turns out that almost every “simple” thing is actually quite complicated, behind the scenes.  In fact, the best simple things are just a front for very complicated systems and processes.  From clean running water and electricity to your iPod Touch, there are many layers of detail that you just don’t have to worry about.  Thankfully, I might add.

IT is no different.  There are many complicated layers to even the simplest of IT tools and systems.  Ideally, those of us in IT should be masking all that from the end users, providing a simple tool that does something well.  Unfortunately, we generally do a terrible job of hiding complexity from our end users.  Sometimes, we think we are doing them a favor when we expose complexity in the form of “features” intended to help them.  Instead, we generate more confusion and annoyance.

It is unfortunate that people know what a “404” error is or that disks must be defragmented.  My mom should not have to know that software is updating itself or that the printer heads need to be aligned.  People want to use computers to get something done, not to become more proficient with computers.

I have no idea, honestly, how to do anything with my car except to start and drive it.  I like looking under the hood to admire the engineering therein, but heaven forbid that I would do anything under there.  I am not an automotive engineer, and I don’t want to be one.  I just want to drive a reliable car.

I think those of us in IT lose sight of what users really want.  We forget what it is like to really be an end user.  Even as we build wonderful new systems, we need to keep our users’ real goals in mind.  They just want to enjoy the maze.  They don’t want to know how to grow corn.

[tweetmeme source=”EffectiveCIO” alias=”http://bit.ly/cio103″ only_single=false]

Keep Or Save? September 9, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Technology.
Tags: ,
2 comments

Why won’t people make up their minds?  For fifty years, we in the computing business have been building bigger and bigger systems designed to store everything everyone ever wanted.  When we’ve finally gotten to the point where we pretty much could store everything for everyone, they want to start getting rid of stuff!  What do they want?

Abraham Lincoln once said (and I’m paraphrasing a bit):

You may save all the documents some of the time; you can even save some of the documents all the time; but you can’t save all of the documents all the time.

Or something like that.  Abe, bless his heart, never imagined multiple petabytes of cloud-based storage.  If he had, he’d know that we could store everything all the time, but we really don’t want to.

Now that most of us have stored way too much stuff, document retention is a real problem.  Most of the data we keep is useless, and some of what we keep can present legal or security problems.  We need to keep only the data that is important for running our businesses.

Many companies are trying to solve the problem of document retention by foisting the problem off onto IT. Let me be completely clear on this: document retention is not an IT problem.  Document retention is a business problem that IT can help with.

Often, people on the business side of this problem create policies that address “email retention” or “file retention.”  This is not much different from creating a policy on “paper retention.”  Email is not a document, nor is a file.  Email, files, and paper are simply mechanisms to store a document.

For example, an email message, a file, or a sheet of paper can all hold a representation of a contract.  Regardless of the media, they should be retained for however long your document retention policy says that a contract should be kept.  It may be easier to find and destroy electronic versions of a document, but the retention rules are unchanged.

For similar reasons, email is not considered destroyed when you remove it from your Inbox and save it on your hard drive.  It is not destroyed when you move that file to a DVD, and it still isn’t destroyed when you print the file and destroy the DVD.  It’s destroyed when you finally shred the paper and the intellectual content of the document is no longer available in any form.

Effective document retention is important, and IT plays a big role in helping the business find and manage their documents, no matter how they may be stored.  But the best way we can help is to make sure that the policies are set by the business, not by IT.  Once the policies are in place, we can help find ways to make implementation easier and more effective.  And that’s something we should be doing for all of the people, all of the time.

[tweetmeme source=”EffectiveCIO” alias=”http://bit.ly/cio102″ only_single=false]

Happy Labor Day! September 7, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
Tags: , ,
add a comment

No great insight today (or any other day, I hear some of you muttering).  Instead, here is a quick to-do list for this Labor Day:

  • Pack up your white shoes.  That’s right; it’s time to put away those white pumps and bucks, saving them for a glorious return next Easter Sunday.  Winter’s almost here, and you’ll need to shift to drab, dark footwear more befitting the season.
  • Think of three great memories of this summer, and share them with someone.  Mine are
    • A wonderful family trip to New York City
    • Seeing my daughter start her freshman year in college
    • Helping my son begin his Boy Scout Eagle Project
  • Go outside and enjoy the last moments of summer
  • Grill something and eat it

Happy Labor Day!  See you on Wednesday!