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June 14, 2006
I.T. Been Berry Berry Good To Me
The best quote of the year so far: from Romano Prodi, former president of the European Commission running for prime minister of Italy against incumbent Silvio Berlusconi back in April. Said Prodi about Berlusconi, "you lean on numbers like alcoholics lean on lamp posts, not to be enlightened, but for support..."
Yeah. That's the spirit! Numbers should be fought over. A bunch of new ones from Forrester, in CIO Magazine, show IT organizations doing the same old same old, when it comes to providing value to the business. In this report, IT's top batting average of .380 against Business Pitching feels bad, but that's really hot in baseball.
Just Makes You Think: Oh yeah, that's right... this stuff is pretty hard...
For the sake of skirting copyright, I memorized the information so I can now fearlessly just "tell you what I remember"... OR you could go see for yourself online (or...the June 15th hardcopy includes the Forrester survey numbers chart).
I remember that Forrester said:
1 - Improving productivity or products/processes rates in the high .300's
2 - Optimizing cash flow or customer lifecycles hits the mid to low .300's
3 - Powering successful innovation in process collections or in product collections steps in the mid to low .200's. Wipe your shoes.
But what do these numbers mean?
First, the way Forrester set it up, the batting average actually represents the number of "IT Decision-Makers" who gave IT strong credit when given the chance to do so. For example, almost-but-not-quite four out of ten gave IT credit for improving productivity or likewise for improving products.
Now, looking at the numbers and what they are attached to, is it insane to say that the more complex a problem is, the less likely IT is going to make an obviously critical contribution?
We know the problem complexity rises as you go from the top of this list (e.g. productivity) to the bottom (e.g., innovation). Why?
Well, in each case, think of the number of variables that are reasonably under critical IT influence as they combine with each other. In order of appearance:
- There are simply fewer of them when it comes to improving productivity or improving products/processes. (We didn't say the tasks were any easier, we just said simpler.) That level of influence is a lot like construction work.
- But the next level -- optimizing cash flow or customer lifecycles -- is more like winning poker games. More participants trying to not be on your same page.
- And the remaining level -- innovating (reconceiving, not just improving) products or processes is more like herding cats. More participants who see your page but could care less.
Here's the main suggestion. As we drop down the list, and move from productivity to optimization to innovation, the necessary influence on the variety of participants who need to buy in becomes increasingly less a deliverable of IT.
Going along with that, we can still hope that IT can contribute to the necessary influence. But then of course, we must identify what kinds of influence are necessary, before we can understand whether IT can make a significant contribution.
What this calls for is a perspective in measurement that can recognize and understand the game-saving catches, the turning point singles, the continuity of getting players on base -- the things that go missing in games that are not winnable. Eveyone sees the home runs, but most of the time, most games are won by most players being good enough to allow a win. Their individual responsibility is to be good enough for the other players, not to win the game by themselves.
The Forrester numbers superficially tell the story a little differently, but let's decode them. Given what was argued just above, they suggest that very few of every ten IT Decision Makers understand the difference between how well IT does its part and how likely it is that the IT part will "cause" a win. This further suggests low understanding of what it takes to win at productivity, optimization and innovation. That is, statistically, some of the decision makers may have given 100% credit to IT for effectiveness, but those that gave little or no credit (due to lack of understanding) dragged the Forrester averages down.
Meanwhile, the reason why batting .300 in a game is good enough is because it's enough to allow the other parts of the operation to add up to a win. Batting .300 represents about 100% of reasonable expectations, not 30% of requirements. The decision-makers who gave IT high credit likely saw this.
So the numbers we see from Forrester are not what we really want to see. Instead, we want to see the explanations given by the decision makers who credit IT with high effectiveness, and compare those explanations to the ones given by the nay-sayers.
Post Script: Saturday Night Live was a hit before lots of IT people were old enough to tell a joke. If you're older than that, you might remember Chico Escuela played by Garrett Morris, who broke the line that we cloned for the title of this article, but who for all we know now works in IT somewhere as a decision maker.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at June 14, 2006 4:48 PM