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Guess what’s now “best practice.”

A few years back it meant locking PCs down tight, preventing anyone outside IT from doing anything creative with information technology unless they could get it done with Excel.

“Shadow IT” … business departments implementing information technology without any IT involvement? An information security nightmare!

Nightmare? Look at the number of recent, massive data breaches whose targets have been … what shall we call the opposite of shadow IT … sunlit IT?

The actual evidence seems to show that shadow IT is, at worst, no less secure than sunlit IT.

The exact same cast of characters that advocated tight lockdown just a few years ago are now, without even a trace of contrition, writing favorably about how smart CIOs are supporting and leveraging shadow IT rather than trying to stamp it out.

Research current thinking on this and you’ll find the IT punditocracy has discovered IT has to handle some tasks more quickly than others. McKinsey, for example, calls it the “two-speed IT architecture.”

Welcome to the party, folks. You’re late. Did you at least bring some decent champagne?

To be fair: Just because these folks are latecomers, it doesn’t mean their insights are worthless. The McKinsey piece, while long on what the outcomes should look like and light on how to achieve them, is a fairly decent analysis.

Decent, that is, other than ignoring the significant role shadow IT will and should play in most two-speed IT architectures.

And, decent with this possible exception: “… companies need to improve their capabilities in automating operations and digitizing business processes. This is important because it enables quicker response times to customers while cutting operating waste and costs.”

If, by “quicker,” McKinsey’s analysts mean reducing cycle times for fulfilling orders, then fair enough. While the notion that information technology can be helpful in reducing process cycle times is hardly a fresh one, it’s no less valid today than it was when first introduced in the mid-1970s or thereabouts.

But “quicker” might also mean implementing new strategies or responding to marketplace changes. If that’s what McKinsey means by “quicker,” it’s way off, because optimized processes are one of the biggest impediments to rapid change. That’s because optimized processes need supporting infrastructure, and infrastructure encourages stasis, with “infrastructure” including:

  • Business process design. As these things go, this is the easy one. Designing an efficient process just isn’t all that difficult compared to what it takes to implement one. Visio is the most adaptive component of process infrastructure.
  • Design of business process controls. Beyond the process itself are management practices and process metrics. Designing them isn’t all that hard. Designing them so they don’t do more harm by getting in the way than they provide in benefits? Trickier. A lot trickier.
  • Design and build-out of the physical plant needed to support the business process. This could be as trivial as setting up a new cube farm, or as complex and expensive as designing and building a factory. Ignoring all other aspects of this task, whatever gets built will have to last long enough to be relevant until the company has paid off the design and build-out costs.
  • Design (or selection), implementation, and integration of supporting information technology. Presumably, KJR’s audience knows a thing or three about this topic. To make sure it doesn’t get lost: The integration part is, in most situations, the most expensive and difficult technical dimension of the task.
  • Employee training. The need to train employees is obvious. That their education is part of your business infrastructure is less obvious.
  • Investment in continuous improvement cycles until process optimization has reached the point of diminishing returns. No matter what the new process, it’s the organizational equivalent of a skill. Skills take time, and money, and effort to acquire and perfect.

There’s one more factor to take into account to understand why investments in business infrastructure put the brakes on business agility, and that’s the project failure rate.In most companies, more projects fail than succeed. That being the case, once a company has a process and its supporting infrastructure up, running, and optimized, the fear that implementing its replacement will fail isn’t merely very real. It’s realistic.

And when the odds of success are low, it’s perfectly natural for a company’s decision-makers to take what looks like the safer bet — sticking with that has worked, even if, in the long run, the result will be an obsolete company that sells and delivers obsolete products and services.

Especially because, in so many cases, by the time it’s impossible to ignore their obsolescence, it will be someone else’s problem.

* * *

Next week: Shadow IT’s role in a two-speed business (not just IT) architecture.

The guy in the next seat reminded me that Americans are, on average, bulkier than citizens of most other nations.

Some theorize it’s because of how much fast food we eat, others that it’s because we spend too much time watching television and not enough exercising.

I have a different theory: Everyone wants to ingest the same total amount of flavor. Most of the food we eat has been engineered to survive harvesting and distribution without excessive damage. One side-effect: less taste. To get the same total flavor we have to eat more quantity.

My seatmate offered no opinion, and in fact didn’t actually say anything about the subject. He didn’t have to — his body language spoke volumes, and he occupied same. The result was that I’d paid for a full seat but received only 75% of one.

Don’t worry — we’ll get to running IT. Eventually. But first: The airlines all claim their contorted pricing systems are based on sophisticated mathematical models that base fares on value. They are, of course, telling the truth, but it’s a truth for a different Earth than ours. On this planet, in this dimension, aisle seats are more valuable than window seats, which in turn are more valuable than center seats. Ever see a center-seat discount? Me neither.

It’s unlikely the airlines price as they do, and don’t do, just to be meatballs. My best guess is that each airline’s pricing committee is simply doing what business managers do best — hiding behind the herd.

As mentioned previously in this space, biologists explain herding as a way for individuals to reduce their chances of being eaten by predators. The herd is, of course, a more prominent target than an individual. But in a herd each individual member is less likely to get eaten. One member is taken — usually old or infirm — while the rest escape.

Don’t worry — we’ll get to running IT. Eventually. To do so, though, we next have to visit some research about elks in Yellowstone National Park. Ecologist Scott Creel discovered that bull elks let wolves walk right up and take them down. They’re so busy eating that they can’t be bothered to run away or defend themselves. As Creel put it, “The bulls will pretty much keep eating until you pry the grass from their cold, dead lips.”

It turns out that bull elk expend so much of their time and energy in mating-related activities that they end up too skinny to do anything else. They have to keep eating or they’ll die. So they keep eating, hoping the wolves will either find a different herd or take a different member of theirs.

This does sound just a bit like the airline industry, doesn’t it? The traditional carriers keep on doing what they’ve been doing until one by one they eaten alive by more efficient competitors. Right now, Northwest is the carrier that’s on the edge of Chapter 11. Its answer is the same as everyone’s answer — get concessions from the unions. And since the unions haven’t changed their business strategy since maybe 1955, they aren’t exactly well-equipped to help construct a decent defense, let along a creative, win/win solution.

Everyone is hiding behind the herd.

What’s bothersome about the situation is this: I’d bet that someone, somewhere at Northwest published an analysis years ago warning of the impending challenges and recommending creative ways to circumvent them. Maybe the solution was to charge more for aisle seats than center seats. Maybe it was to replace aging, fuel-guzzling, high-cost-of-maintenance airplanes with cheaper-to-operate upgrades. Maybe it was to offer a seat or two on the board of directors in exchange for wage restructurings. Who knows.

I’d bet an analysis was published and ignored because it turns out there’s an analysis like this, published and ignored, prior to every catastrophic organizational failure. After the Challenger exploded investigators found that NASA management had estimated flight risks at 1% of the risk level recognized by NASA’s engineers. The Army Corps of Engineers has been publishing warnings about the levees protecting New Orleans for years, only to see its budget cut to a fraction of what was needed.

So the chance that nobody at Northwest published an equivalent report is small. The odds that managers up the chain of command each downplayed the report to an increasing extent are high.

And that, at last, brings us to you. Someone, somewhere in your organization knows about a problem, has a pretty good idea of what you should do about it, and wants to tell you. The question is, are you ready to listen?

Or are you imitating a bull elk?

Do all writers and opinionators suffer from this?

I’m talking about what I probably shouldn’t call Pundits’ Tiresomeness Syndrome (PTS). I shouldn’t call it that because the compulsion to coin the phrase is a symptom of the underlying malady.

PTS is a complement to the need discussed in this space a few weeks back, where the need to matter leads to an inability to make polite conversation. I’m pretty sure I suffer from this because I hear myself, from time to time, punctuating a conversation with the deadly phrase, “I’ve written about this from time to time and …”

The implication, try as I can to avoid it, is that my views on the subject are more listen-worthy than those of anyone else I happen to be conversing with at the time.

It’s more or less on a par with the late, lamented Dr. Science, who explained why his explanations were worth paying attention to: “I have a masters degree … in SCIENCE!”

# # #

I knew a guy, once upon a time, who suffered from a severe case of PTS. No matter what the subject, and no matter how technically nuanced the subject, his go-to conversational gambit was “I have a theory about that. To the extent I was conversant with the subjects he would theorize about, I was pretty sure “his” theories were at least 50 years old and long-since superseded.

Did I say he suffered from PTS? To be precise, everyone around him suffered from it.

Then there was the CIO I knew who informed his leadership team that from that point forward his management team members should all think of him as just another member of the team. That was just before he said, “For example, here’s a situation we have to deal with, and here’s what I think we should do about it.” Hearing his solution took the rest of the management team meeting. It was PTS at its finest.

Among PTS’s symptoms, perhaps the worst is that it’s far from incurable. Quite the opposite, most of us sufferers know the cure.

It’s to ask a question. A question, and to be clear I’m talking about open-ended questions, not debate-style accusatorial ones, demonstrates interest in other people’s knowledge and perspectives.

This well-known cure … perhaps “treatment” would be a better term … has the fringe benefit of exposing the PTS sufferer to new and potentially interesting ideas.

It also takes advantage of a strange, paradoxical quirk of human perception: If I ask someone a question about themself, their post-question perception of me is that I’m a more interesting person than I was before I asked the question.

What’s most difficult in all this lies in another, socially dismal symptom: We find that understanding what someone else is trying to explain to us takes, as the years to by, an increasing expenditure of energy.

Explaining my views, that is, takes less effort than understanding yours.

Bob’s last word: In case the managerial point isn’t clear, it’s that as a leader and manager, you’re far better off asking your staff what they think about a subject … any subject … than you are telling them what you think about it.

You can certainly share your views, but you’ll be far more persuasive if you wait to share them until you’ve done enough listening first.

Bob’s sales pitch: If you’ve been paying attention you’ll understand there’s little likelihood that I’ll speak my last word on any subject any time soon.

And just to make sure we’re still friends, I really do value the anecdotes, knowledge, and opinions KJR’s subscribers share with me, whether through email or the Comments.

PTS or no PTS, I want to hear from you. Now showing in CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide:5 Ways CIOs will disappoint their CEOs in 2003.”