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For all its ambiguity and grammatical misclassification, “digital” as a noun … or “Digital” as a proper noun … has proven more durable than most of the management fads that preceded it.

It isn’t that digital businesses out-perform non-Digital (Analog?) competitors. The fact of the matter is, the definition of “Digital business” varies by commentator, while the definition of “successful Digital business strategy” often fails even such well known logical requirements as not equating correlation and causation.

Speaking of logical analysis, the situation is far worse than even that. As evidence:

According to the definitive source of such things, the Standish Group reports that only about 30 percent of all software projects are successful.

Meanwhile, the often-IT-illiterate Harvard Business Review reports that 70 to 95 percent of all digital transformations fail. Take into account that transformations of any kind are achieved with strategic programs, which in turn are composed of tactical initiatives, which in their turn are accomplished by the collective success of the multiple projects they charter, and you’ll conclude that Digital failures are an example of Sturgeon’s Law: 70 percent of Digital transformations fail because 70 percent of everything a company tries fails.

What’s made Digital as business strategy so durable is (in my awesomely humble opinion) that it has legitimized the pursuit of revenue as a strategic objective, making it more desirable than cutting costs. And, it is rooted in the proposition that information technology can provide a powerful path to more, and more profitable revenue.

In addition, Digital, along with IT’s successful employee-virtualization-response to COVID-19, turned the executive suite’s perception of IT from “where projects go to die,” to “the most important business function in the enterprise.”

Another factor in Digital’s executive suite staying power wasn’t something anyone would have predicted a decade or so ago: Unlike previous IT-driven requests for capital investment, by the time “digital” had acquired its capital D and had been turned into a noun, business executives had adopted Blackberries and loved them, right until they discarded them for smartphones accompanied by a wide variety of handy apps.

Add to that their unavoidable experience shopping for merchandise on Amazon.com and, for many, shopping for Kindle books there too, and strategy discussions didn’t have to start with “here’s what a smart product is” explained to skeptical executives reacting with thousand-yard stares. They started with “how can we make our products and services smarter?”

Bob’s last word: Some 60+ years ago, in his revolutionary Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein introduced us all to the word “grok,” meaning to understand something deep in one’s kishkes (I’m paraphrasing).

Last week I wrote about ROI and its flaws, concluding that ROI’s utility is limited when it comes to writing successful project proposals, not to mention evaluating them.

At the same time, what’s been badly underemphasized when it hasn’t been ignored completely is how important it is to write proposals your company executives and governance councils can grok.

That’s because having to convince someone of something they already grok is a lot like having to persuade them that the tall green thing they’re looking at through their window is a tree.

Bob’s sales pitch: Looking for someone to keynote an event? After publishing a dozen or so books and some 1,800 or so columns, it’s safe to say I have a strongly held opinion about just about any subject you can name.

I’ll be happy to share a few of them from your podium.

Think of it this way: You’ll be choosing someone to give the keynote. Why not yours truly?

Now on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: Why IT communications fail to communicate.” The point? Our tendency to use documentation to communicate, instead of recognizing that its role is to remind everyone of what they’ve already communicated.

There are simple sourcing strategies. There are effective sourcing strategies. But there are no simple, effective sourcing strategies.

This, at least, was the perspective offered by yours truly at Outsourcing Strategies 2004 the week before last. It is, it appears, the minority perspective. The popularity of the Core/Context Theory — “Keep what’s core to your business and outsource the rest” — appears to be undiminished by the complete lack of any evidence to support it.

Complete lack of evidence?

Yes. In fact, that’s being gentle about it. In the past few years, two research teams reported the results of extensive research on what characteristics and practices lead to enduring business performance. The better-known, reported in Jim Collins’ Good to Great, found seven features common to outstanding corporations: A “Level 5” leader — one focused on building a great organization, not on personal recognition (I’m oversimplifying: there’s a lot more to Level 5 leadership than this); a strong, focused, coherent leadership team; a willingness to face the “brutal facts of their current reality”; clear focus around an organizing business goal (the “hedgehog principle”); creation of a “culture of discipline” (as opposed to achieving disciplined execution through close supervision); the use of technology as an accelerator; and reliance on the “flywheel” effect (building momentum for success on ongoing, continual, accelerating change, not on one-time transformational breakthroughs).

The second research effort was called the Evergreen Project. Described by William Joyce, Nitin Nohria, and Bruce Roberson in What Really Works, the project found eight factors — four primary, four secondary — that separated winners from the pack. While the factors aren’t exactly the same as those articulated in Good to Great, it appears the differences are more a matter of how each research team chose to define its categories than major disagreements as to what’s important. Having a clearly stated, focused strategy as stated in What Really Works isn’t very different from the hedgehog principle. Two other primary characteristics, flawless operational execution and a performance-oriented culture, together look a lot like instituting a culture of discipline and using technology as an accelerator.

The two studies don’t line up perfectly, which isn’t all that surprising. The Evergreen Project found that a flat, flexible organization was important to success. Collins was silent on this subject. And Evergreen’s list of secondary factors — retain and attract exceptional talent, creating industry-transforming innovations, growing through mergers and partnerships, and keeping leaders and directors committed to the business — have less overlap with Collins’ findings.

How to account for the discrepancies? When two study teams look at the same pile of raw data, there’s no particular reason to expect them to abstract the same generalities. The process of doing so isn’t purely analytical (Collins is direct on this point, describing lots of discussions and downright arguments over what a bunch of specifics might mean.) And since both pieces of research are correlative rather than experimental, this kind of disagreement is to be expected.

One point is clear: Keep the core and outsource the rest is nowhere to be found among either study’s recommended practices. Sounds to me like keeping the core and outsourcing the rest isn’t correlated with enduring business success.

(Keeping a wary eye on the ROI of individual projects or applying any other purely financial perspective on running a company is similarly absent, by the way, as is focusing on the maximization of shareholder value, two very popular points of emphasis among the current crop of business pundits … but that’s another column for another time.)

Adherence to the core/context theory isn’t among the factors driving outstanding business performance. It’s unsurprising when you look at how most large-scale outsourcing contracts are constructed. Much of their payoff comes from nothing more than the playing of financial games — a transfer of capital assets that front-end loads the benefits and back-end loads the costs. Gee, maybe that has something to do with why client satisfaction frequently runs out of steam just a few years into the average outsourcing relationship.

So why would a business theory that’s unsupported by the evidence retain such popularity?

Simple, easy-to-understand explanations are comforting — much more comforting than notions like the need for focus, disciplined execution and persistence. And given a choice between a comforting explanation and one that actually works, many people prefer comfort.

That’s one of the brutal facts of our current reality.

I launched InfoWorld’s IS Survival Guide — KJR’s direct forebear — in 1996. Back then I had four goals:

1. Every column had to have something original to say, or at least an original perspective.

2. It couldn’t be dull. After all, if I put readers to sleep they wouldn’t get anything out of it. Also, friends shouldn’t bore friends to tears.

3. Speaking of getting something out of it, every column should contain useful and practical ideas readers could use as soon as they finished reading.

4. I had to last at least one year without running out of material.

Nineteen years later it’s safe to say I at least achieved goal #4. How well the IS Survival Guide/KJR achieved the other three is for you to judge. Meanwhile, goal #4 is now to make it through an even 20 without violating the first three goals too badly. After that? Let’s get through year 20 first.

Which leads to asking a favor.

Writing a weekly column like this, where the primary distribution is email, is a lot like giving a webinar. There’s no immediate feedback that lets me know how I’m doing. Except for your posted comments and emails, it’s like talking to an empty room.

That’s the favor. I’m going to write at least one more year of these weekly mumblings. I’d appreciate your taking a bit of time to let me know if you continue to find it useful. Thanks.

* * *

There’s something of a pundit-class tradition, namely, to use the beginning of a new year as an opportunity to predict what will happen during the next twelve months.

I tried this a couple of times before deciding to leave prognostication to others. Not that their forecasts were more accurate than mine. But forecasting turned out to have three unfortunate consequences:

  • It violates goal #3, because it’s a rare prediction that provides any useful guidance, even when it turns out to have been correct.
  • It expands. Every year, tracking the progress of old predictions, and adding new ones took more and more space. I could see a time when making new forecasts and tracking old ones would expand to occupy the entire calendar … sort of like the holiday shopping season.
  • It entrenches. When a forecast doesn’t play out, ego drives a pundit to solemnly declare that whatever was supposed to happen is just taking a bit longer than expected. The possibility that your friendly pundit might have simply been wrong? Unimaginable.

So no predictions for 2015.

Okay I lied. Here are three, issued with the standard KJR Warranty — if they don’t work out, gee, that is too bad.

Prediction #1: Every prediction that takes the form “In x years there will be two types of company — those that did y and those that are out of business,” will prove to be wrong.

In business, there are no panaceas and no pandemics. Good consultants are consistently annoying when it comes to their (our?) answering every question, “It depends.” It might be annoying, but it’s almost always the best answer.

Prediction #2: Every prediction that “x technology will completely replace y technology in z years” will also prove to be wrong. For heaven’s sake, some companies have mission-critical systems that rely on IMS. No matter how obsolete a technology is, the last holdout will take a devil of a long time to dump it.

Prediction #3: In 2015, somewhere in the industry press, you’ll read an article that says, “CIOs should be business people, not technology people.”

I predict this with the same confidence with which I forecast that sometime next year, unless you live in, for example, Death Valley, it will rain.

Forecasting the reappearance of the CIOs-must-be-business-people article is entirely parallel. I say “the article” because I’m pretty sure there’s just one. It appears, lasts just long enough to remind everyone of its existence, and vanishes again, only to be resurrected again when some IT pundit has a space to fill and nothing original to say.

And every time it reappears it’s just as profoundly stupid as it was in every previous incarnation.

I mean … I mean … I mean if an article appeared suggesting CFOs should be business people, not finance people; CMOs should be business people, not marketing people; or COOs should be business people, not operations people; would anyone take such utterly nonsensical false dichotomies seriously?

You won’t read that here.

Welcome to year 20 of Keep the Joint Running. Let me know whether what you do read here is useful.