InformationWeek

February 2, 1999

Your letters to my print column and this E-mail forum ask some serious questions about managing information technology in today's world. Since today's world is essentially absurd, my serious responses may sometimes sound a little whimsical, and my occasional whimsical ones, serious. In any case, if you want to participate, write to me at lovelace@home.com. I'll respond to those letters that I can. I reserve the right to edit for size and content. Just sign your E-mail the way you want it to appear online.

Dear Herb:
I read your column "Mea Culpa! Mea Culpa!." Your troubles are over when you and your people never use the term "user" again. Stephanie, Karen, and all the other people you serve are "customers."

Ed

Dear Ed:
Sorry, Ed, but I could not disagree with you more. The only customers in a company are the people whose names appear in the accounts-receivable system. This business of internal customers has been our profession's bane and the fountain of wealth for more consultants than can dance on the head of an obelisk.

When you have internal customers, everyone focuses on making the next guy in the company happy, instead of concentrating on the people who pay the bills. Suddenly, you have people asking for all sorts of things under the guise of "Don't question my judgment, I'm your internal customer." You are much better off if organizations pull together to figure out what makes sense to increase sales, lower costs, and make people want to continue buying from the company.

Some time ago, I wrote about the idea of the internal customer and his impact on the productivity of a company, in a column titled, "When Everyone's A Customer." I suspect you will not agree with my conclusions, but you might want to look at it for the background behind an opinion that is different from yours.

Dear Herb:
I can relate to "Mea Culpa!" I've been there, Herb, and hope never to revisit that painful place.

The situation described dealt with a newly designed security system, with which people would be interacting. The bad news was that the system was designed, decided on, and enacted without the involvement of anyone outside your organization. If this interpretation is incorrect, then please accept my apology and delete this message.

Admittedly, it's been my experience that most people in a company don't have a choice when it comes to anything related to computer security. Why? If you want them to follow the security procedures, shouldn't they be involved in the process of creating this new feature? Get them involved early in the process--even if it's that painful Stephanie Stone.

Thanks for the thought-provoking article.

Juan

Dear Juan:
I appreciate your letter. If I had it to do over again, I would have asked a group of users to critique a working prototype of the security system before it was put into production. Then, I would have had the people in our organization modify it until the working group was satisfied that we had minimized the system's odious attributes. I would not, however, have tried to get the noncomputer people involved in creating the security. Why? Because they don't know enough about computer security, they are not interested in the details of it, and they have other things they want to do with their time than help us do what we are paid to do.

The IT organization has the responsibility of ensuring that the computer security policies and tools of a company protect the company and meet the standards of the auditors. I don't believe they should be designed by an ecumenical committee any more than I think the plant-safety rules or the company's sexual harassment policies should be.

Our problem was that we did a poor job designing a workable process. We compounded the problem by neglecting, in our arrogance, to get any sort of opinion about how much of a burden we were putting on people and then made matters worse by not listening, initially, to people's complaints.

Dear Herb:
I am writing to you after reading the recent article on capital allocation, "It's Good To Be The King." The issues raised in that article have led me to turn to you for your expert advice on our forthcoming project, which examines the capital appropriation and monitoring process.

Our company is a member-based for-profit research firm with membership spanning more than 300 Fortune 500 companies in virtually all industries. In a continuing effort to illuminate the issues affecting business growth, we are currently conducting research on the capital appropriation and monitoring process. The primary goal of our research is to identify the key problems that companies face in allocating and monitoring capital and to profile leading practices used to overcome these problems. To that end, we are speaking with selected members and leading thinkers who devote a considerable portion of their time to conducting or learning about capital appropriation activities.

Our initial research of secondary literature revealed a few potential niches for research:

What are the most effective evaluation tools and methodologies for ensuring successful appropriation and monitoring of capital requests?
What are best strategies to prevent "gaming" of the capital appropriation request system by line managers who may misrepresent predictions for a particular project?
How do companies align capital appropriation and monitoring process with strategy? What is the role of strategists in the capital appropriation process?

I would be very interested in speaking with you and gauging your response to our initial thoughts. Given your expertise in this topic, I am hoping to turn to you to identify the potential scope and problem areas to be addressed.

I would like to call you at your office with the hope that you might be able to spare some time to discuss the issues with me. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Kind regards,
Sam

Dear Sam:
How we justify and actually spend the money we do on information technology is a fascinating subject, ripe for good research. You raise some interesting questions and I have decided to address them in my print column in the near future.

I am sorry that I cannot speak with you directly on the telephone. As you can imagine, it would be difficult for me to compose the column with the candor that I use in telling you what is going on if I did not write it anonymously.

Dear Herb:
The issue of InformationWeek that contains "IT People Aren't Plumbers" just came to my attention this morning. (OK, I'm behind in my reading.) I was glancing through it and came across your article. All I can say is that you have hit the nail squarely on the head!

I'm a programmer (a pseudo IT professional, from what some are telling me), and I just left a good position in a company for the exact reason you stated in your column. I wasn't really looking, but was getting frustrated at management's lack of concern with the people doing the work.

The situation at my new company is completely different, as the company does show an interest in the employee as a person, rather than as a set of skills. Hey, it's less stress, shorter hours, more pay.

Anyhow, thank you for that concise article! I'm going to have to send that back to the managers of the company I came from--if I feel like helping them out.

Stephen

Dear Stephen:
I hate to be a pessimist, but you may want to save the postage. If they allowed the situation to develop in the first place, it is unlikely that they will recognize that we are talking about people like them.

Dear Herb:
I have been reading a lot of articles on knowledge management and learning officers in several trade journals, including InformationWeek.

I have been very interested in this area for a while, but I don't quite know if my skill set matches the criteria for this industry.

I currently work in system administration for a financial institution. I have developed a couple of continuous process-improvement models for use in our organization, as well as doing some training activities, but have no experience in projects related to knowledge management. Based on the research that I have done it seems as though I need to be working for one of the Big Six consulting houses in order to get the experience I need. In the interim, I am reading as much as I can on the area of knowledge management and its related components.

Can you provide me with some guidelines as to the skills I might need to get into this area and how can I go about acquiring them.

Please advise.
Ronald

Dear Ronald:
One of the problems with giving advice about the skills needed for success in knowledge management is that the definition of knowledge management is so vague. Mine is simply this: making sure the knowledge you have within a work group is known to, and available to, others in the organization.

A major reason you have the feeling you need be with a Big Six firm is twofold: First, they actually have a need internally for their consultants to share knowledge, so that they can use the work done by one person to generate revenue by another; second, they sell to their clients a product called knowledge management. They really have all bases covered. Imagine, they sell something they developed internally, and probably use it in the consulting engagement to produce the report the client buys. It does not get much better than that from a revenue standpoint.

At this point, I would recommend you keep reading. There is still a lot of confusion in the field about exactly how one manages knowledge; and, unless you want to work for a consulting firm, you may wind up with the backlash that hit some of the people who tried to install quality programs and reengineering in their companies prematurely.

Herbert W. Lovelace is CIO at a multibillion-dollar international company. Herb practices his day job under an alias and has changed the names of colleagues to protect the guilty.

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