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The most amusing response to last week’s column was, “Our esteemed host, despite being gifted with intelligence and perception, is a liberal. And, when considering things political, liberals seem unable to actually look at the evidence.”

However else you interpret political events since the ascendency of the GOP in 2001, only a Fair and Balanced(TM) commentator would give political liberals exclusive credit for an unwillingness to consider evidence.

Not that it matters; I’m neither liberal nor conservative. I’m a member of the Competence Party.

The subject was giving tax cuts credit for tax revenue increases, which I used as an example of implausibility.

There’s a real connection to day-to-day business, since this proposition exemplifies a form of logic popular in business circles. I call it the Tom Peters Fallacy: Look at a success, identify something associated with the success you like, assert a causal relationship, and declare its universality.

Since I started this, I might as well finish it before getting down to business. Here’s my analysis:

  • Tax revenue increases have indeed followed all recent tax cuts, after a one to two year lag.
  • They’ve also followed all recent tax increases …
  • And all periods in which the tax rate didn’t change.
  • More significantly, all modern federal tax reductions have been accompanied by increases in federal spending.
  • And since all federal spending enters the private sector — either as wages to government employees or by paying the invoices of government contractors — it all generates taxable income.
  • Following all modern tax cuts the national debt grew faster than tax revenues.

The most plausible inference: Deficit spending rather than tax cuts is what increased tax revenues.

The relevance for you as an IT leader: Especially in complex dynamic systems (IT organizations are an example), cause and effect relationships are tricky to analyze. They usually have more than one cause, and operate in loops as well.

As long as we’re being political, here’s a news item that will cause many in IT security, and even more so many business travelers, to break out in cold sweats:

I’m quoting verbatim from “Travelers’ Laptops May Be Detained At Border,” by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post Staff Writer, 8/1/2008:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or a believer in J. Edgar Hoover’s legendary secret files to be concerned about this. All you have to do is provide support for international travelers.

The clearest risk is business impairment. To illustrate: One of your business travelers goes to Europe, does business, and returns. She documents the trip — maybe a write-up, maybe a spreadsheet, maybe a presentation, or some combination. Being prudent, she copies her files to a jump drive, just in case. At the border, DHS seizes her computer and jump drive. All of her documentation is unavailable for an unknown period of time.

Solution: Provide some means for remote back-up. At its most primitive it might mean e-mailing critical files as attachments. Or, it could mean providing an FTP site, or some public form of Internet backup you consider sufficiently secure.

Then, train, train, and train again. Employees discount low-probability risks as CYA activities. They might be right in this case, too — nobody knows the level of risk, and DHS isn’t likely to provide estimates of how many laptops they might sequester in an average week.

That’s the non-paranoid risk. If you’re paid to be paranoid, consider the possibility that one of the “private entities” with which DHS shares your data is a competitor.

Sure it’s unlikely. But then, security professionals are paid to be paranoid.

* * *

My colleague and good friend Ed Foster passed away last week, of an apparent heart attack. He was a fine journalist, a man of unimpeachable integrity, and showed courage in the issues and companies he took on. He was also a great guy. I liked him a lot.

Our industry will be the poorer for his absence.

While waiting in some line or other I noticed the young lady in front of me was reading a book about Watergate. She told me she was reading it for her history class. Her history is my current events. Ouch!

“Current” means different things to different people, which brings us to last week’s topic, the value of keeping your technology current.

Take IMS as an example. For those of you who also think Watergate is a historical subject (no, not “an” historical subject) IMS is an IBM product — a hierarchical DBMS, an technology that became obsolete with the advent of codacyl DBMSs, which in their turn became obsolete when relational DBMSs became available.

What’s good about IMS is that IBM still supports it. What’s better is that if you’re a DBA who knows IMS there are probably more jobs to be had than there is competition for them.

Here’s what’s bad: It’s hopelessly obsolete. Worse is that the only IT professionals willing to take those open jobs are either well on their way to geeze-land (like me) or don’t have enough on the ball to go after positions that will let them work on hot technologies like NoSQL, let alone mainstream SQL-oriented positions.

Worst news of all: If you’re the CIO or CTO of an organization that relies on IMS, you will never be able to make a financial case for converting to something modern.

Because there is no financial case for it. By now, your company’s investment in IMS is somewhere between formidable and incalculable. The cost of recreating the same functionality in a modern DBMS would be enormous.

After which the company would run exactly as it did before the conversion, only with that much less money available for other purposes.

The dots you’ll have to connect to associate the conversion with more revenue or less operating cost … the definition of “financial case” in most companies … are numerous enough that few business executives would sit still through your explanation, let alone buy it.

The problem is that most companies big enough and old enough to rely on IMS consider “business case” and “financial case” to be synonyms.

Most companies big and old enough to rely on IMS focus on financial engineering, not competitive advantage. If the CEO and board’s goal isn’t to sell more products and services to more customers, they won’t understand the business case for jettisoning obsolete technology.

Many IT professionals don’t either, because “obsolete” is an imprecise term at best.

In business terms, obsolescence is risk. That there will come a time when you’ll find yourself luring codgers out of retirement, or else have to settle for third-rate employees who can’t find any other employment … that’s a risk. A big risk.

There are others. Plenty of businesses still haven’t migrated from Windows XP, because it does everything the business needs, so what’s the problem? Again it’s risk:

  • Their anti-malware vendor will, at some point, drop support for XP. They’ll still need malware protection when that happens, and self-paced conversions are better than fire drills.
  • Computers wear out. Will Windows XP run on new hardware? At some point, no, and mixed environments are more expensive than homogeneous ones.
  • Printers wear out too. Will new ones have XP drivers? Many don’t right now.

But perhaps the biggest risk is the Stockholm Syndrome — the tendency of hostages to end up sympathizing with their captors. In the context of IT, it takes the form of accepting as normal the limitations obsolete technology imposes on business processes and practices.

You’re now a retailer, relying on batch mainframe COBOL systems. They are, everyone agrees, superior because they’re awesomely reliable and eat transactions just as fast as you can pump them in.

Nobody notices that while transactions are masticated and ingested in real time, they aren’t digested until 1 am, when the batch processes that post them are launched.

Because of the Stockholm Syndrome, it seems perfectly normal your company can’t ship orders until the next day. The delay is minor. Customers won’t care.

And when it turns out you have less in stock than you have orders, well that’s why IT developed a subsystem to inform soon-to-be-former customers their orders are now backorders, but don’t worry — backorders take precedence over new orders for the same item, whenever the shipment happens to show up.

Even if someone does realize batch COBOL’s limitations will kill the company, it doesn’t matter. There’s no money to fund a conversion to a more modern system. The board spent it all buying back stock to improve earnings per share. That’s much more important than winning and retaining customers.

Isn’t it?

It’s time to pull out your “I Like Ludwig” t-shirt.

That’s Ludwig as in Wittgenstein, the influential philosopher who pointed out that most sets can’t be unambiguously defined solely through well-defined rules.

Games are an example. There is no list of attributes that accurately classifies solitaire, tennis, football, Dungeons and Dragons, and office politics as games, even though we all know that’s what they are.

Not convinced? (1) Many games are contests against an opponent, but not when you’re playing FreeCell. (2) Many games are played by teams. Not tennis, though. Or FreeCell. (3) Most games have winners and losers. Dungeons and Dragons does not.

As for office politics, like all politics it has game-like characteristics such as having winners and losers. But most games are played for fun. In this day and age there’s little that’s fun about politics of any kind.

Gender classifications – an increasingly contentious issue all working managers must deal with – face the same Wittgensteinian challenge. We each maintain in our subconscious a list of physical and behavioral characteristics we think of as masculine (e.g. hairiness), a different list we think of as feminine (e.g. a higher-pitched voice), and a bunch more that are gender-neutral, for example liking or disliking borscht.

Your feminine/masculine lists and mine probably differ, which is why you and I might find ourselves disagreeing as to your gender, mine, someone else’s, and SNL’s legendary “Androgynous Pat.”

Which leads me to conclude that as a society, and in our HR policies, we’re finding ourselves arguing about the answer to a question that doesn’t have one.

Of more direct relevance to you as a KJR subscriber, we’re expending quite a lot of time and energy on how to deal with gender identification in the workforce. And I’m starting to wonder what the point is.

Never mind the question of whether genes, physiology, specific behaviors, interpersonal attraction, or overall sense of personal identity should be gender’s determinant. That’s of legitimate interest to psychologists, sociologists, maybe those responsible for competitive athletics (and maybe not; it is, as mentioned, a complicated and confusing topic) … and, of course, parents, not to mention the individuals who have or are still sorting out who they are.

It’s also, as we’ve experienced over the past several years, a topic of illegitimate interest for political rabble-rousers who are more interested in scoring points than helping formulate coherent and compassionate public policy – see “politics as a game,” above.

Mercifully, it’s a question that has (I think) a relatively simple answer when the question is how to deal with gender identification in the workplace.

Which brings us to this week’s question to ponder: Why do businesses collect “Gender” as a data field in our HR databases at all? The KJR answer: It’s tradition, and one that long ago outlived its usefulness.

Even if a person’s gender is, in any meaningful way, a predictor of how they would perform in a given role, that would only be a loose correlation at best, and as anyone knows who has passed a class in statistics, statistical significance is entirely different from importance.

So imagine we simply abandoned gender as something we pay attention to in workforce management (marketing and CRM are entirely different matters). Were we to take that step, employees who want their colleagues to identify them as men or women could still choose to dress and behave like stereotypical women or men.

Those who want their colleagues to not care could also dress and behave accordingly.

And those who consider their gender to be both non-binary and something they want a colleague to be aware of could just tell them.

Presumably, nobody would ask a colleague “What gender are you?” on the grounds that the question is (1) nobody’s business, and (2) unbelievably crass.

And if they were that crass, the object of their curiosity ought to answer as follows:

“Really?”

Bob’s last word: I suppose ignoring religion as a dimension of all this would be copping out. And so …

There are those who consider the question of gender to have religious significance, for example the Judeo-Christian bible, which only recognizes men and women as categories. To which I have two observations.

The first is that religion has no place in management, other than a need to accommodate such religion-driven requirements as allowing time for obligatory prayer. The second: Some religions recognize more than two genders.

So unless you think business management should incorporate theology into its HR practices, it would seem that classifying employees by gender is far more trouble than it’s worth.

My legally ignorant solution: Don’t do it.

Now on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide:The successful CIO’s trick to mastering politics.” It’s all about relationships, not just winning and losing. Failing to embrace this fact of organizational dynamics can kill a budding manager’s career.