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Most IT professionals understand the need to work late from time to time. Suggest it’s a normal part of the profession, though, and you’ll get an earful. If I were a cynical sort, I’d think many IT professionals just aren’t happy without something to complain about.

Several weeks ago, I listed IT being a ghost town at 5pm as one of seven warning signs of a complacent IT organization. Not, I hasten to add, a certain diagnostic — just a warning sign. Into the fray steps Steve Delahunty:

“I had a … boss who complained that people were complacent … The problem was that when he left he didn’t peek into every cubicle and office. The lack of people around the halls in his view meant there was nobody there late. But also, we now can all work as easily at home as from the office. Meaning that I would often get online at night and see so many of my staff on their instant messenger clients it was like we were almost fully staffed online at 9pm with many folks working on work projects.”

Which brings up two points. The first is to be careful how you interpret what you see … and don’t see. Just as a doctor, facing a patient with a high fever, has a lot more work to do before reaching a diagnosis, a manager facing empty cubicles needs to dig in a bit before reaching a diagnosis of complacency.

The second is the subject of this week’s missive (credit where it’s due: it’s a recommendation by my partner, Steve Nazian): If you haven’t developed an instant messaging strategy for your company — one that facilitates its use while building in secure design, not one that locks it down — you’re creating, not preventing, a security hole.

We have more than two decades of experience managing and mismanaging personal technologies. Personal computers, electronic mail, remote system access, contact management software, personal digital assistants, Blackberries … it’s always depressingly the same:

1. IT forbids their use.

2. They leak in through the windows and side doors anyway.

3. A few employees are disciplined for violating company policy.

4. A rational executive somewhere in the business raises a huge stink about IT preventing employees from doing their work.

5. The CIO, recognizing the political liability of trying to keep the tide from coming in any longer, develops a strategy for managing the new technology instead of banning it.

This time it’s instant messaging. If you try to prevent it, employees will figure out a way to use it anyway. And once again, because their use is illicit, the workarounds will almost certainly create security holes. It’s akin to the well-known consequence of requiring strong passwords and forcing frequent changes: Post-It notes containing the hard-to-remember passwords stuck to computer monitors throughout the company.

There are still, in this industry, those who think the goal of security is to create an environment in which intrusions are impossible. If you’re one of these people, I can help. It’s actually quite easy. You can achieve it with three simple steps:

First, disconnect your internal network from the Internet. Second, disconnect all personal computers from the internal network, remove all disk drives and USB ports, and make printers illegal. And third, ban laptop computers from the enterprise altogether.

Of course, you’ll prevent employees from performing any useful work, but that’s just the unfortunate and unavoidable side effect of making the enterprise secure. It’s the nature of the beast. Security creates friction in business processes. The more secure you are, the higher the cost and slower the pace of doing business.

The best IT professionals put into practice what IT executives advise the rest of the company: They use information technology to maximize their own effectiveness. The best employees elsewhere in the company do likewise. Isn’t that the whole point of information technology — to help individual employees, workgroups, departments, divisions, and the enterprise as a whole work more effectively?

Instant messaging is simply the latest of the many tools available for enhancing personal effectiveness. In dealing with it, you have two choices.

You can either embrace it, and in doing so promote the very healthy attitude it represents. Or you can try to prevent it. Which is to say: You can either encourage a good attitude and improved security, or a bad attitude coupled with security holes.

Sad to say, far too many IT executives, faced with these alternatives, will instinctively choose the latter.

ManagementSpeak: Must be able to overcome internal and external barriers, so troubleshooting and analytical skills are a must.
Translation: Must be able to identify and operate management hot buttons.
This week’s contributor is good at figuring out what jobs really require.

Business cycles are speeding up, yet businesses seem to be slowing down.

So here’s something to ponder: For decades, businesses have focused on their processes, using techniques like Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints to reduce process cycle time while improving quality and reducing incremental costs.

Making products flow off an assembly line is nice. But assembly-line-like processes aren’t what slow a business down. It’s the inability to make fast, accurate decisions and act on them that gives so many businesses the appearance of a swimmer immersed in molasses.

Last week’s KJR discussed some of the particulars, with suggestions for speeding up decision-making by reducing committee-induced decision sclerosis.

But committees aren’t the only source of business slowdown. As a CFO of my acquaintance phrased the cure for another one, “Pick up the damned phone!”

Back in the days of Mad Men the cycle time for interoffice memos was measured in days. It started with hand-written or dictated text, handed to a secretary or sorted and transported by the mailroom staff on a (typically) twice-a-day schedule to the typing pool.

After a couple of edits, transports, and re-typings, the memo made its way to its intended recipient or recipients. The process took, in total, several days from initial dictation to final delivery.

Email replaced this with a process that took, in total, several minutes at most, while reducing the need for administrative assistants and typists at the same time.

Strangely, the committees that made decisions about such things back then didn’t jump on the new technology, yelling to IT, “How fast can we have this — the checkbook is open!” Go figure.

Anyway, everyone knows clogged email inboxes are a problem. But the ramifications of this indicator of email’s success go far beyond reductions of personal effectiveness.

Email has slowly slid from business accelerator to decision-bottleneck.

The cycle time for any process includes intrinsic cycle time, also known as touch time, and queue time. For email, touch time is how long opening a received email, reading it, clicking or tapping on the Reply button, typing your own message, and clicking or tapping on Send takes. Queue time is how long an email sits in your inbox before you open it.

When email was first introduced it shortened both of these compared to interoffice mail. Queue time has been lengthening ever since. Email has become a victim of its own success.

Compounding the felony is this: The distribution of interoffice memos was subject to the limitations of carbon paper, or the time and expense needed to make copies, added to which was the time and effort needed to fold the paper, insert it into interoffice mail envelopes, and address the envelopes.

With email there’s little burden associated with making sure it’s sent to everyone who ought to know about its contents. This isn’t something to stop, either. Sharing information with everyone who ought to know about it is a virtue, not a bad habit.

But, all these cc’s do add more clog to already overstuffed inboxes. For some folks, the time needed just to decide which ones to actually read and do something about has extended from a glance, to minutes, to, over the course of a busy day, as long as maybe an hour.

Or else, the messages that have scrolled down far enough are ignored entirely until the sender becomes frustrated enough to either re-send the original message or to pick up the damned telephone.

But I oversimplified, because if this was the total impact of queue time, it would be a livable problem.

Here’s why it counts as a major source of business decision slowdown: Queue time has to be totaled over all the messages in an email thread. In total, cumulative queue time can result in multi-day delays when reaching even simple decisions.

What’s to be done?

Picking up the damned telephone is hardly a cure-all: You’re more likely to reach voicemail than your target, and voicemails take longer to process than emails.

What telephone conversations will do is eliminate most of an email thread’s queue time: Instead of hitting the Reply button you converse.

Use your calendar system to schedule the call and attach whatever background material is essential, so you don’t just replace exchanging voicemails for exchanging emails.

One more thing: The organization as a whole has to find an alternative to cc-ing everyone who ought to know about something. This is far from easy. As a stopgap, consider installing Outlook with a default rule that yanks every email for which the recipient is on the cc-list and stashes it in a separate “cc for review” folder.

It ain’t pretty. But sometimes, less ugly will just have to do.