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What Are You Measuring? October 21, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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When you boil it all down, computing is about numbers.  Two of them, actually, 0 and 1.  Over the years, we’ve worked up from that, of course, so that you have to dig to find the 0s and 1s, but our obsession with numbers is deeply ingrained.  This has bad implications for those of who try to lead IT organizations.

Given our predilection for numbers, most people in IT like to collect them.  Storage usage, bandwidth, code size, database tables, and the like are obvious targets for the numerically fascinated.  But we also collect more abstracted numbers, like project success rates, hours spent doing things, call volumes, and satisfaction indices.  Sometimes, we place a lot of importance on these numbers and work hard to optimize them in some fashion.

Some numbers are necessary.  On the operations side of the house, disk utilization and processor loading are important metrics that drive good capacity planning models.  These numbers are easy to collect and understand because they relate back to physical resources that can be measured accurately.

Other numbers are a bit softer.  Many organizations try to quantify qualitative data, like customer satisfaction.  Gauging satisfaction is tough; there is no number that equates to “great” or “awful.”  That doesn’t stop us, however: our inherent love of numbers leads us to assign numbers to feelings and opinions. That’s not inherently bad when we make simple comparisons.  When one customer rates us a 9 and another decides we are a 1, there is a clear difference of opinion.

The problem with numbers is that they are so prone to manipulation.  Once you make the leap from adjective to value, it is way too easy to start doing arithmetic.  Suddenly, we are averaging those ratings, or worse, computing standard deviations and higher order statistical metrics.  These computed values are worthless, no matter how attractive they may seem.

Consider: if you are in a room with two people, one of which says “I love you” and another that says “I hate you,” the average in the room is not “We like you.” Depending on which way you turn, you are going to either get kicked or kissed.  Math and emotion simply do not mix.

In spite of this, many organizations use these numerical metrics to make business decisions and control compensation.  I’ve seen teams rejoice when customer satisfaction climbs from 3.3 to 3.5, as if the 0.2 difference has any significance.  They are beholden to the numbers and have lost track of the feelings and emotion behind them.

Part of being an expert with a tool is knowing when you shouldn’t use it.  We fancy ourselves to be experts with numbers; we should do a better job of applying them appropriately. In many parts of our businesses, we need to stop focusing on numbers and start listening to people. That’s where you’ll find the real answers and understand your real problems.

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Economic Indicators October 19, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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With the current economic malaise, everyone is looking for some sign that things are turning around.  I recently had a chance to check one of my favorite economic barometers and the news is not good. I am referring to the Vendor Exhibit Swag Index, which assesses the value of free items given away to attendees at major conference exhibits.  Having just returned from a week at OpenWorld, I can confirm that the VESI is down dramatically from last year.

A year ago, free iPods and Wii consoles were being thrown at attendees with wild abandon, and raffles for cars and motorcycles were common.  This year, you’ll be lucky to get a blinking pen or a small USB drive.  Even the bowls of candy atop the vendor tables looked like something left over from last Halloween. The tightening of marketing budgets tells you a lot about the finances of the company, and the VESI looks grim for 2009.

Beyond the disturbing economic news the show floor was, as always, a microcosm of the real world.

The OpenWorld exhibit floor is huge, occupying two floors in San Francisco’s Moscone center.  In the center of each floor is the high-rent district, the equivalent of Boardwalk and Park Place at the show. These booths are larger than some homes and are crawling with marketing folks who feign interest in your obscure IT problems while mentally counting the minutes until they can get out of their 3-inch heels.  The very priciest booths have two-inch padding under the carpet to soothe the aching feet of the vendors and customers.

When the VESI is high, in good years, you’ll find the best giveaways at these booths.  Crafty attendees know how to exploit a diversion, swooping in while a vendor is distracted to grab a pen, flashlight, or t-shirt. It takes a certain kind of person to score an entire bag of goodies without ever getting their badge scanned. For the discriminating IT professional, a single show like OpenWorld can yield a new wardrobe for an entire year, from casual t-shirts to dressy Polo shirts, topped off with a coveted logo jacket for the winter season.

Just off the center of the floor is the suburbs of the exhibits, with the starter booths and McMansions of the aspiring vendors. Not quite rich enough to run with the big boys, these vendors can still put up a nice booth with decent giveaways and a manageable staff. No padded carpet, mind you, but they might have some futuristic chairs for you to sit in.

Beyond these companies, though, lies the backwaters of the show floor: the little generic box booths that ring the room.  Here you’ll find the vendors that scraped together everything they had just to show up.  Often, the same two people will be in the booth for four days straight, dead on their feet by the end of the show.  You can almost imagine them maxing out their credit cards to get in, hoping that they’ll generate enough leads to justify the expense.  Their fixed smiles are overshadowed by the desperation in their eyes as you walk by.

And who hasn’t taken that awkward walk down the back aisle of a show?  Booth after booth of anxious vendors, hoping and praying that you’ll stop, chat, and place an order on the spot.  As you run that gauntlet, eyes averted, you can almost feel their shoulders slump as you pass by without stopping.

And what if they call out to you? “Can I tell you about our new product release?”  Like a knife in your heart. All you can do is quicken your pace, purse your lips in a tight smile, and quickly shake your head as you move on to the bright lights and excitement of the center of the floor.  Behind you, another broken vendor stands next to a bowl of individually wrapped Life Savers and a stack of literature, untaken. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, they think. Next year, we’ll spring for Reese’s Cups.

Let’s hope that next year is a better year, with a VESI through the roof and every vendor in a big, beautiful booth. And if you do go to a show, grab one of those pen/laser/USB/wifi-detectors for me.

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So In Conclusion October 16, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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I once worked with a person who was brilliant but, shall we say, less than tactful.  He could be abrupt and had a tin ear for many societal niceties, especially with those that he felt were wasting his time.

Once he was sitting through an interminable technical presentation.  As the speaker went through his slides, the crowd became increasingly restless but sat politely.  My coworker could finally take no more and called out from the back of the room, “So in conclusion!”  The speaker, rattled, quickly wrapped up and released the crowd.

The common reaction among those in the meeting was to outwardly note the terribly rude behavior but inwardly breathe a sigh of relief.  No one wanted to sit there; one person had the nerve to express what everyone was thinking.

Who hasn’t been in this position?  Who hasn’t wished for someone to take one for the team and cut short an awful speaker? Yet we won’t, because most of us are far too civil to do such a rude thing in public.

Perhaps we should. I do a lot of speaking, and I always hope that I am serving my audience well.  But I know that I often do not, and that they would rather move things along and call it a day.  While being shouted at from the back of the room might be a bit much, I would truly appreciate a gentle comment to pick up the pace or to redirect the flow of the presentation.  Speaking is about serving the audience, not yourself.

Similarly, those of us speaking need to be attuned to the subtle cues that our audience is giving us.  Shouted advice notwithstanding, our audience is telling us how we are doing with their posture, their eyes, and their furtive text messaging below the table.  If your audience is drifting away, that’s your fault, not theirs.

Whether I am speaking or listening, I look forward to the end of the presentation. Not because it is over, but because that’s where the questions get asked.  I find a dialog between a speaker and the audience much more useful than a monologue. I view the speaking part of the engagement as a way to set the stage, to provide background information, and to pique the audience’s interest.  With appetites whetted, we can then engage in a directed conversation that everyone benefits from.

I am always frustrated by panel discussions. I love listening to panelists field questions from the audience, comparing divergent opinions on the fly.  Why, then, do panel moderators almost always arrange for panelists to speak for fifty minutes, allowing ten minutes at the end “in case there might be questions?”  “Might be?” I’d rather have the panelists speak for at most ten minutes, with fifty minutes guaranteed for questions. If they can’t generate any questions in ten minutes, you have the wrong panelists!

As always, speakers need to focus on their customer: the audience.  The audience wants to be entertained and educated; rarely do they simply want to bask in your presence.  In conclusion, we need to be more attuned to the subtle cues of our audience so that we meet and exceed their expectations.

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Missing Users October 14, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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A common conversation among CIOs these days is how they are dealing with the current recession.  We talk of budget issues, staffing concerns, reduced resources, and a general reduction in our ability to execute and expand our services.  Especially at this time of year, the conversation turns toward next year’s budgets and what we might expect to see in the coming year.

One of my big worries for the coming year is a shortage of users. Not in the sense that there won’t be people to use our systems, but in that IT cannot survive without those critical users that help define, build, test, and deploy our systems.  The economy is affecting the supply of users that are able to help us do things.

For many years IT worked in a vacuum, building things as we saw fit.  The prevailing attitude was that users should be happy with whatever they got, and little time was spent engaging users to ensure we were building the right things the right way.

Many of us (or those of us still employed in IT) realized that this methodology was less than effective and changed our approach.  We actively engaged our user community in every aspect of the development process.  From project charter through requirements analysis, testing, training, deployment, and post-production support, users with specific business knowledge are key to the success of our projects.  Without them, we are doomed to fail.

Unfortunately, the economic pressures being exerted on IT are being felt by everyone else.  People are busier than ever before, doing more with less.  As a result, they simply do not have the time to engage with IT to partner for success.

In a sense, finding that time to help is harder for our users than it is for our staff.  The reality is that many IT shops can easily augment staff by backfilling with contract labor.  If you want to focus a few developers on a new project, you can bring in additional contractors to take over the day-to-day stuff while your developers dive into a new project.

This is rarely possible with non-IT staff.  Business people, especially those that assist with IT projects, usually have deep knowledge of your company’s business rules and processes.  If they are added to a project team to contribute that knowledge, you cannot easily hire an outside contractor to backfill that knowledge gap.  For the most part, IT skills are fungible; non-IT skills are not.

This has deep implications for our ability to execute and deliver results to our companies.  As we seek funding to do things, it can be easy to overlook the non-IT assets needed to make those things successful.  Funding can’t expand those resources, yet our success depends on engaging those very important people.

What to do?  There is no easy answer.  First and foremost, coordinate early and often with you business partners to ensure their availability and willingness to help.  Be very respectful of their time and engage them for your most important work first.  And like most things in life, these times will pass, things will improve, and we’ll re-engage with our previous fervor.

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Chief Guinea Pig October 12, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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As technology penetrates every aspect of the business world, those of us in IT find ourselves deploying tools more and more frequently.  These tools are more tightly integrated to everything our users do.  In days gone by, we provided green screens for data entry and green bar for rudimentary reporting.  Now we control every aspect of communication, including voice, email, and text messaging, and provide interfaces to every system in the business.

Most shops do a lot of testing before rolling out new stuff.  Typically, testing begins on the IT side of the house and ends up on the user side, with qualified end users signing off before something goes into production.  Is there a place in that process for the CIO?

I think there is.  I think I have a responsibility to know how our systems function and what the overall user experience is going to be. I’m the first to admit that I am not qualified to test the business processes behind these systems, but I do think I have a voice in the general experience.

Generally, I consider myself the primary guinea pig for almost everything we deploy in my company.  I usually try out each new laptop, many new phones, and almost all user interfaces that we develop.  I try to see how these tools would impact a typical end user.  Are they easy to use and understand?  Do they have confusing options or weird configuration choices?  Would users be confronted by tedious, pointless interaction sequences?

In short, if I were an end user, would I be happy with the device or system? I feel strongly that I should never ask a user to use a device or participate in a process that I have not personally experienced.

In conversing with other CIOs, I find that some do not wish to engage at this level.  They don’t have time to go through this process and don’t feel that they are qualified to make a reasonable judgment. However, most of them do have trusted coworkers that fulfill the role of guinea pig for them.  They value the testing experience; they’ve just outsourced the task to someone else.

There have been times I find myself doing the same thing.  Some new phones are only available on other carriers; I’ll find someone I trust to see if the phone is acceptable.  Some business processes are beyond my reach (or security level), but I’ll find someone else to give me the unvarnished truth about a new system.

CIOs should be operating at a strategic level above the details.  That altitude, however, does not absolve of us from having the ultimate responsibility for the quality of everything we deliver to the business. Ironically, our distance from a tool or system gives us a different perspective from the developers who toil so closely with it.  By being closer to the forest than the trees, we can often see problems that are overlooked by the tactical developers and testers.

Although it may drive your developers to distraction, simply asking “why?” as you walk through an interface or use a device may ultimately create a better experience for your end users. And that, regardless of your preferred level of engagement, is what our job is all about.

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