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CIOs are, according to many in the business punditocracy, supposed to run IT as a business. Yet in spite of all of the ink smeared on crushed trees advocating this thought process (not to mention the miniscule magnetic domains that have given up their freedom to store it) I’ve yet to see anyone define what they mean by “business.”

It might seem too obvious to bother with. We all know what a business is, don’t we?

That’s the problem with this sort of thing: We all do know what a business is, only we don’t all know what one is in the same way. Depending on the situation and who is doing the talking, businesses can be:

  1. Non-human, amoral organisms that have an existence independent of the people who make them up, and which, like any other organisms, consider self-perpetuation their first and most important goal.
  2. Mission-driven entities that exist to provide goods and services that have value to someone.
  3. Product generators that exist to deliver items for which customers will pay more money than was needed to provide them.
  4. Profit generators that exist to deliver a stream of money to their actively-involved owners.
  5. Ecologies — environments in which individuals compete, and sometimes collaborate to obtain resources.
  6. Assemblages of processes that connect to transform inputs into outputs.
  7. Places of employment that exchange work assignments for money and non-cash compensation.
  8. Social fabrics that provide a space for people to interact and form connections.
  9. Personal “force multipliers” that increase an individual’s ability to achieve goals.
  10. Opportunities for investment, to deliver a lump of cash to a passively involved shareholder.
  11. Commodities to be bought, sold, aggregated or dispersed for profit.

And more. This isn’t a complete list by any means. Nor are the items on the list alternatives on a multiple-choice test. Many can be simultaneously true.

When a CIO is supposed to run IT as a business, which definitions are supposed to be part of the formula?

Certainly not Definition #1. If you work in IT you might like it, as it makes Definition #7 a more enduring possibility. But even ignoring the pundits who also recommend disbanding internal IT in favor of outsourcing, self-perpetuation isn’t something you can sell to a board of directors.

Which also means you can scratch Definition #7 off the list.

Definition #2 is a certainty. In its simplest form, IT’s mission is to provide working information technology to the business. This, or something like it, is IT’s mission whether you run it as a business, a department, or a hobby, so scratch Definition #2 off the list as well. The same logic applies to Definitions #6, #8 and #9.

Definition #3 is a distinct possibility. Never mind a mission. A Definition #3 IT business would deliver products and services to internal customers in exchange for money, through the magic of transfer pricing (the practice formerly known as charge-backs).

Except that it doesn’t work that way. When companies engage in transfer pricing they put controls in place to make sure internal departments break even exactly. If they didn’t, the business as a whole would be an ecology (Definition #5, as are most companies that engage in transfer pricing anyway). Scratch this one off, too, and Definition #4 for the same reason.

Definition #5 is a good representation of a marketplace as well as a jungle, and in fact, marketplaces are near-perfect parallels to ecologies. It’s bad enough when a CEO turns a whole enterprise into an ecology. Another description of this sort of environment is “political quagmire.” One presumes “run IT as a political quagmire” isn’t what the pundits have in mind.

Definitions #10 and #11 make no sense either. It might be fun to sell shares in IT to various business executives and might even lead to beneficial results, in much the way the Green Bay Packers benefit from having 125,000 fans as the shareholders who collectively own the team.

Somehow I just don’t see it working very well in practice.

So there you have it. Eleven different definitions of “business” and not one of them makes any sense for IT. Which leads to a question: If IT isn’t a business by any reasonable definition of the term, what might it mean to run it like one?

I’m left without an answer, and with only one possible conclusion — that I don’t know what the pundits are talking about.

I suspect that’s something they and I have in common.

Thoughts from an Oregon vacation:

Experts experience a different world (1): In Sideways, Miles and Maya (Paul Giamatti and Virginia Madsen) have a deep, touching conversation about Pinot Noir. They sipped their wine and envisioned the work of growing the grapes, the weather, the scenery, the vintner’s technique … entire vicarious lives.

I experienced flavor.

Relevant IT insight: When non-technical managers overhear a conversation between two engineers and have no idea what’s being said, many shake their heads and roll their eyes. They should be delighted.

Experts experience a different world (2): When you tour wineries you mostly taste young wines — in our case, 2006 vintages. A young Pinot Noir really doesn’t taste very good to a palette as unsophisticated as mine.

A wine connoisseur can taste a 2006 Pinot Noir and predict when it will be ready to drink and what it will taste like … and enjoy the future flavor now. Great vintners taste the grapes and know how to create that flavor.

Relevant IT insight: By the end of the design phase of any systems effort, at least one person in IT, and another in each affected area of the business, must be able to envision the experience of using the future system. Otherwise, while the new system might meet all requirements and specifications, it will still be a mess.

What you like and what you should ask for aren’t always the same: My wife and I generally prefer red wines. As most of the wines were quite young, the whites were far more enjoyable.

Relevant IT insight: When making management choices, what you like doesn’t matter at all. Base your choices on what the situation calls for. Anything else is your ego at work.

You can’t optimize for everything: Joe and Shari Lobenstein — the proprietors of Lobenhaus, our wine country Bed and Breakfast (highly recommended) — also grow a small grape crop. Joe invited us to taste his Riesling and Pinot Noir grapes, which were ready to harvest.

The flavor was astonishing compared to supermarket grapes. So were the seeds, which make up a lot of these grapes.

It’s too bad, but you can’t get the flavor without the seeds.

Relevant IT insight: IT optimization also involves trade-offs. Move to a higher-bandwidth technology and you might find you’ve increased latency to unacceptable levels. Adopt a highly scalable process and you’ll likely find you’ve increased overhead costs, reducing your flexibility.

And so on.

The outside view tells you little about the inside view: You can only taste so much wine, so we spent an afternoon at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, the final resting place of Howard Hughes’ legendary “Spruce Goose.”

From the outside it looks like a very big airplane. When you enter and look the length of it, enormous looks small in comparison.

Relevance to IT: For business management, the experience is features and functionality. For business users, the experience is the user interface. Both are important. Neither provides useful information about what a system looks like from the inside.

But you already knew that.

Sometimes, what you get is better than what you’d planned: One of the exhibits was a Boeing B17G Flying Fortress — the workhorse bomber of World War II.

Bill Jarvis, the volunteer who showed us around the B17, piloted 30 missions over Germany in WWII, starting when he was 18-and-a-half years old.

On Bill’s last mission the Germans finally shot him down. He crash-landed in a sugar beet field in Luxemburg. Allied troops immediately took the entire crew prisoner, not sure if they were really Americans or were Germans trained to infiltrate.

After weeks of imprisonment and interrogation, Bill finally had enough. He told the MPs, in terms that weren’t uncertain and were laced with every cuss word he could think of, that he was going to see the General and they’d just have to shoot him if they wanted to stop him.

When he swore at the General in similar terms, the General concluded he had to be an American — no German could have had such a colorful vocabulary — and freed Bill and his crew.

Bill’s story is too long for this space, so you’ll just have to visit him at Evergreen. He says about half of it is true, but he can’t recall which half.

We’d planned to admire airplanes. Our best experience was talking to a World War II pilot.

Relevance to IT: In the end, technology and process are never as interesting or as important as the people who use them.

But you already knew that, too.

ManagementSpeak: We are doing well — in fact better than planned — but we are still vulnerable to external factors.

Translation: If it all goes base-over-apex, it’s not my fault.

The phrase comes from Ralph Norris, when he was CEO of Air New Zealand. The translator preferred anonymity.