On 20 Dec 97 at 23:01, Jeff Kell wrote:
> In the olden days of IT, we often implemented systems on a basis of
> value to the enterprise, feasibility of implementation, and
> availability of resources (hardware, software, personnel, support)
> in the best interest of the enterprise (or in my case, university).
> Success rates were high as were user satisfaction levels.
The olden days always look better. In the same way that a rusting
hulk looks like a ship in a poor light at a distance.
I started installing X.25 WAN's and "enterprise wide" systems on
mini's (PDP 11/70's and VAX/780's) beginning shortly after leaving
the navy in 1980 and continuing up until the present time. My
recollections are far different from yours. I too worked for large
companies. I had to, the small ones couldn't afford the price of 64
Kb of memory for an 11/70, much less the $250,000 or so that it took
to buy one.
Because of the the expense there certainly was a lot of evaluating,
or at least posturing over the decisions made, but the primary drive
was fear. Fear of being left behind, fear of losing market share,
fear of making a mistake. Decisions were often made that did not
meet the needs of the company for which they were made. I have been
party to several large scale projects that were foredoomed to failure
because of the politicing that went on over the control of the
budget. The value of the application to the firm paying for it was
never realized. Indeed the project was often a surrogate
battleground for other struggles within the organization.
Management has been reading the DP technology trade rags as long as I
have been around. Long before Byte went mainstream there was the
weekly ComputerWorld that every savvy pseudo-techno-manager-wanabe
had to read so that he could liberally salt his talk with the week's
latest acronym or buzzword. Those were the days of the bi-weekly
corporate wide methodology change. Team meeting, egoless programming,
Yourden, bottom up design, top down programming, Object Oriented
Programming, Computer Aided System Engineering, Management By
Objectives, Design By Deliverables, 3GL, 4GL. A new training course
every eight to ten weeks. One year I spent as much time attending
courses, travelling to courses, or returning from courses as I did at
my desk working on the project I was employed to write.
IT practitioners (it was MIS or DP back then) were worse than bunch
of sorcerer's apprentices or acolytes of the high priesthood of
techno-babble. Their mantra was: "freeze the specifications...
freeze the specifications... all hail the frozen specifications" God
Almighty! Like anyone would admit in writing what was really going
on in their jobs. Talk about form over function.
But, the costs were so great, the risks so huge, that this was the
only way to get anything done. Like religion and the afterlife, it
needed those trappings so that the great journey into the unknown
would not be as terrifying as it might otherwise be. The fact that
it usually ended in same way, with the patient dead and no
resurrection in sight, didn't really matter I suppose. The grieving
relatives were all comforted, believing that they had done the best
that they could. The DP/MIS/IT medicine men packed their bags and
went off to greener pastures and new victims.
VISICALC was the worm in the apple. It was the virus that ate into
the heart of MIS and is still eating it out from the inside. It has
mutated and given offspring. Lotus-1-2-3, AMI-PRO, MS-WORD, ACCESS,
ODBC. All these creatures owe their existence to their great
grandfather, VISICALC.
VISICALC and its first generation offspring, Lotus 123, drove the PC
revolution. They gave an entire management class a tool to get
their jobs done better, faster, more creatively. All without having
to first have their ideas vetted in committee to see if they were
worthy of the attention and expense of the assistants to the acolytes
of the high priests of data processing in the church of the eternal
MIS.
It was the best thing to happen to mankind since Adam woke up and
stopped sponging off God.
The wonderful thing about life is that it is such a messy affair.
Yet, out of the mess comes such a multitude of little insignificant
things. Things like the written word, calculus, trigonometry,
particle physics, cosmology, movable type, aircraft, space flight,
the world wide web. All of these things spilling out of the
disjointed activities of millions of individuals, unhampered by
someone else's concept of "order" and "efficiency".
> Unless IT can have the upper hand on supported platforms/software
> and hardware, this will only get worse. Users go out and buy
> hardware on their own, buy software on their own, try to do real
> production work with it, then expect IT to "fix it" when it
> breaks, or "make it work". This is, in my opinion, the "IT crisis
> of 2000". Support levels drop
IT having the upper hand is like having the servant tell the master
what is good for him. Too often what is said is what is good for
the servant, the master be damned. Information Technology
departments in a classic business are a service. They should behave
like one.
When you go shopping for a car, a house, or a meal, do you buy from
the vendor who tells you that this is what you need, that this is
what you can afford and that this is what you will buy, there is no
need for you to look at anything else? Or do you deal with a vendor
that treats your beliefs, prejudices, skills and tastes with respect?
Who asks what you, the client wishes? Who offers reasoned
alternatives. Who works with you to get something that suits your
needs, stays within your budget and is what you want, not what
someone says that you must have?
If organizations put a tenth of the energy into earning money that
they put into controlling their employee's thinking and behaviour
then the entire world would be a much wealthier place. We learn
more from our mistakes than our successes, so what do we do in
business or government? Spend our time making many little mistakes
and learning from them, or spending our time trying to avoid making
any mistakes at all? Competition breeds efficiency and lowers
costs, so what do we do in business? Do we generally let different
departments and groups compete to provide solutions to company
problems, or do we strike committees to determine and then to impose
a central planning solution? The one size fits all syndrome.
Yes, running a heterogeneous computing environment is a pain the the
patooey. I have MPE/iX, HP-UX, WinNT and Win95 to contend with. I
have two different version of MS-Office going and several people that
will not give up on MS-Word 6.0. Not that I blame them. So what? is
the work getting done? Are the letters to clients and prospects going
out in a timely and professionally appearing manner? Are the
people tasked with using these tools able to employ them
effectively? Isn't that all that matters in the end?
Having to listen to otherwise bright people that seem able to
frighten themselves into paralysis when confronted with a CRT is a
trying experience, particularly when it repeats itself with
monotonous regularity. Listening to a not so bright example expound
at length why he absolutely has to download the entire seven years
of the detailed GL transaction archive so that he can run it through
his lotus spreadsheet scenario generator is not the highlight of any
intelligent person's day. I grant all this.
But I also know that what I do not understand far exceeds the breadth
and depth of what I do understand. I know that even a fool can have
an idea or at least be master of his particular job. I know that we
got to where we are as a species not because of the success of some
master plan, but because of the billions of failed attempts to do
something else. I know that I can learn, and that my company can
benefit, from the actions of those whose interest it is to succeed in
what they do, regardless of how they go about doing it. I believe
that the more of these people that a company has working for it, the
more likely that company is to succeed. I believe that the more I
act to serve these people in a way that THEY find acceptable, the
more useful work my company will get out of them.
My job is not to direct, or even to guide. My job is to get the
obstacles out of the way of the people that are doing the work. The
people doing the work get to decide what is, and what is not, an
obstacle. I make no presumptions. Neither am I passive. I offer
possible solutions to situations that may or may not be perceived as
problems. Sometime they are taken up, sometime not. Sometimes they
are taken up much later. Sometimes an alternative is chosen that I
had nothing, or little to do with. But over time everything gets
looked at, and over time everything improves, if only a little.
"Educating the user" is a fool's task. It is just an euphemism for
converting someone to your set of prejudices. I work
constantly at my profession just so that I don't fall farther behind
any faster than I can avoid. I gave up all hope of staying abreast
years ago. How then can I "educate" a user whom is probably having
the same difficulty in his area of expertise as I am having in mine?
The user doesn't want to be educated in the problems facing IT
anyway. He wants a problem solved. He wants it solved sometime soon,
so that the solution can be of use to him and not his replacement.
These are reasonable enough expectations I think. If later it turns
out that another way might have had a lower overall cost or provided
greater flexibility, well then one has to weigh the value of that lost
opportunity against the value received in the meantime plus the cost
of having to figure that out to begin with. If the net comes out to
within 20% of each other then you really haven lost very much, if
anything. And you have the advantage of knowing exactly why the
replacement is better than the current solution.
Regards,
Jim
---
James B. Byrne Harte & Lyne Limited
vox +1 905 561 1241 9 Brockley Drive
fax +1 905 561 0757 Hamilton, Ontario
[log in to unmask] Canada L8E 3C3
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