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Does anyone else find The Gartner Group annoying?

I’m reviewing its “PC Cost/Benefit and Payback Analysis.” The good news: I now understand the “Productivity Paradox.” It comes from Gartner’s inflated cost numbers.

The bad news: If Gartner is right, a lot of companies are spending far too much on some very basic items.

Example: Gartner’s average hardware cost per system totals nearly $5,000. I compared that with our costs. We use name-brand items: IBM ValuePoint 33-MHz 486 computers, SynOptics Communications Inc. concentrators, Compaq Computer Corp. file servers, and Novell Inc. networks. I can’t get our per-system cost above $3,500 no matter how hard I try.

Another example: Gartner uses a per-system average software cost of $1,000 for four applications per system. Companies with LANs load software from the file server on a concurrent-use basis. All in all, I think we spend about $300 per user on software. (I guess Gartner has never heard of discount software vendors — the Borland International Inc. Office bundle gives you word processing, spreadsheet and database applications for $300.)

So far, I’ve saved $2,200, or about 37 percent off Gartner’s estimate.

In the world according to Gart, the single biggest expense comes from “End-user Operations” — a total of $22,693 over a five-year period. (As an exercise to the reader, how do they know it’s not $22,695 or $22,536? This kind of phony precision looks impressive, but what does it mean?)

If you look at Gartner’s breakdown of this monstrous expense, you’ll find that more than $3,000 goes to “Data Management.”

This translates, I suspect, to filing, which translates to filing paper, which translates to doing your job.
Another $3,400 goes to “Application Development.” Given that without a PC the same people would be developing manual ways of doing the same chores, this also translates to doing your job.

Gartner assigns $6,700 to formal and casual learning — about $1,350 per year. But isn’t this actually time invested in learning to be more productive?

About $7,000 goes to the “Futz Factor,” which I guess means fiddling around making things work right. Without a PC, this time (50 hours per year) would probably be spent sharpening pencils, rearranging the furniture, and otherwise fiddling around. People are like that, with or without computers.

My absolute favorite expense: $1,500 over five years in supplies. Are we talking about the paper needed to print out memos and spreadsheets? Without computers we would still use the paper. Yes, we use more with computers, but this still translates to doing your job.

So in total, nearly $8,000 of the $23,000 goes to doing your job, a lesser amount goes to learning how to do your job better, and about $7,000 represents truly wasted time. My, how problems diminish when you look at them more closely.

Here’s the problem: Gartner has a point, and the point is that we can all improve the ways in which we manage PCs. Gee, what a surprise. Just like everyone else, we should be expected to do a better job next year than we did this year.

Because Gartner is so influential, we’re all going to be hearing about the huge burden we’re imposing on our employers with this life-draining technology. After all, who will our executives believe, The Gartner Group or their own employees?

The definition of an expert here in Minnesota is “a guy from the East Coast with slides.” So I’m expecting Gartner to win without even a chance to debate the issues. Never mind that no employee accustomed to having a PC on the desk would ever give it up. After all, what do they know?

Last week I replayed a 20-year-old diatribe that ridiculed my mythical (is that the same as legendary?) Value Prevention Society.

I founded the VPS in a bygone era in which the worst harm DYI applications could inflict was pretty minor and the potential value was, in relative terms, high.

The point of ridiculing the VPS was that the excessive pursuit of safety … well, the name says it: The excessive pursuit of safety prevents value from happening.

Playing it safe isn’t safe.

The world, however, has changed more than a bit. Being a malicious actor is cheaper and easier than ever; meanwhile, malicious actors are more often state-sponsored or organized crime.

So failing to take prudent steps to prevent the harm malicious entities can now inflict can now lead to outcomes that aren’t just annoying. They can be catastrophic.

And yet, other than scale, nothing has changed: While malicious actors can inflict serious harm, preventing innovation is, in the long run, a certain path to disaster.

Even worse is the mental habit that encourages the rise and persistence of the VPS – the inability or unwillingness to engage in systems thinking, and in particular the tendency to only look at a situation from just one perspective among many.

VPS members, as a general rule, only look at the reasons to not do something.

No, change that. Looking at the reasons for not doing something and considering the existence of those reasons compelling is the defining qualification for VPS membership.

But one-sided logic isn’t the exclusive province of the VPS. It can come into play whenever any of us have to choose anything, from hiring a job applicant, to deciding who to vote for, to answering the question, “Do you want fries with that?”

Bob’s last word: I got my start in punditry challenging Gartner’s Total Cost of Ownership methodology as applied to personal computers. I objected to it in large part because of its self-evident one-sidedness: It looked (ready for the obvious part?) at cost but not the benefits associated with each component of cost.

For example, training was included as a cost but not the benefit of having well-trained employees taking better advantage of their personal computers.

So in conclusion, please: Don’t make me resurrect the VPS. Avoiding one-sidedness isn’t all that hard. It starts with the magic words, “Yeah, but …” and goes on to list and consider at least a few different angles to look at whatever you’re looking at from.

I think that last sentence was grammatical, but I’ll leave parsing it up to you.

Bob’s sales pitch: I’m not in the mood to pitch anything. You know what I do. Consider yourself pitched.

Now appearing on CIO.com: Brilliance: The CIO’s most seductive career-limiting trait.”

What it’s about: Smart CIOs know how to solve problems and pursue opportunities. Smarter ones expend their time and effort spotting and brokering the great ideas that can do this.