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February 15, 2000

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:
Enjoyed your column entitled "Lessons Of Leadership." Since my current company is also showing a lack of executive leadership, I would really appreciate some mentoring from you.

If possible, please provide feedback on how you would have approached the initial meeting that Ron chaired.

Looking forward to your coaching.

Sincerely,
Layne

Dear Layne,
I am happy to provide my thoughts to you, but don't forget that one lesson a mentor should always pass along is, "This is what I would have done and why, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the way you'll want to handle the situation."

First of all, after having sat in the audience when Ron made his painful initial foray into executive leadership, I have concluded that if I had to live it over again, I would do and say exactly what I did: Nothing. It wasn't my meeting and even if it were, there was little, if anything, to be gained by challenging Ron while he was intent on establishing himself as someone of importance in the organization. Perhaps after he becomes more comfortable in the job, he will loosen up and grow into the position of responsibility. He does have talent--as well as weaknesses--and he needs to play to his strengths, not become someone he's not.

How would I have handled the meeting if I were Ron? My approach would have been suited to my personality and style of management. Before I faced the new troops, I would have sat down and reflected on my challenges:

1. My new boss has told me to be more forceful.
2. I am viewed as an easy-going individual who has avoided mistakes, sometimes missing good opportunities for the business.
3. I am seen as someone whose success is the product of my subordinates' skills.
4. The guy I am replacing was in charge for a long time and was considered very sharp.

Not exactly an easy situation to master.

Facing those challenges, I would have tried to get five items accomplished at the first meeting, each one supporting the objective of getting my new team started on becoming comfortable with the change in leadership:

1. Understand as best I can their concerns with the change.
2. Explain my values.
3. Describe my preliminary goals for the organization.
4. Communicate what I have heard are my weaknesses and what I have been told I need to do to handle the job successfully.
5. Ask them (and mean it) to come up with goals that build on all our strengths to make a more profitable and viable organization.

Ron has a tough task ahead of him. What he has going for him, however, is that most people will go out of their way to support their boss if given half a chance.

If Ron had approached his first meeting following the approach above, I think he would have won a lot more points with the troops and been on his way toward building a sound organization. As it is, he has dug himself a hole, and time will tell whether he will be able to extricate himself from it.

Dear Herb:
My wife asked me a question yesterday that I thought you would enjoy.

She asked me why every time, without fail, I read InformationWeek backwards. My reply was that I enjoy your column so much that I always start at the end to get to your column faster (I do this even when it's an odd week and your column isn't there, in respect to the almighty Secret CIO). It is the only publication I read backwards, and I read about 25 of them every month!

I was a chief technology officer for two years and walked away recently to spend time with my family and get out of the public-company circus. I firmly believe that your column is about as close as it gets to the real thing!

Cheers and good mental health to you and yours (grin),

--Evan

Dear Evan:
Good for you for deciding that your family is more important than the latest nonsense going on at work. Certainly, we should all take pride in our professional ethics. After all, none of us would want to go to a doctor who hurries his diagnosis of a patient so he won't be late for dinner. But too many of us have had a strong imbalance of our values, putting our loved ones last in line for our attention. I have a feeling that, on our deathbeds, we may regret not having spent more time with the children, but I doubt if we'll obsess over having missed a meeting or two.

With respect to your nice comments about reading the magazine backwards so that you can get to my column first: I really appreciate your enthusiasm. And you can explain to your wife that your approach is completely logical. Frequently, I feel that what I'm relating in my column actually has happened backwards from the way real life should work. Let me give you an example. We all know that the proper, rational sequence is question, analysis, and answer. As a CIO, I'm frequently given an answer: the new acquisition will be operating by June 1 (see "The Useless Estimate", and then have to work my way back through the analysis: Oh, God, how are we going to make this thing work?, to the question: Can we convert the systems in time to keep the business from self-destructing?

Dear Herb:
Excellent article, "Gimme Some Value!" Focusing on competitors should take precedence over number crunching.

Much of IT investment these days is better understood as an arms race rather than an ROI-driven financial resource allocation model. However, even when pursuing the arms race, economics is important. If poorly executed, it's not only very costly, but squanders money that otherwise could be used for a clever ambush.

Best regards,

Paul S.

Dear Paul:
Thanks for your comments. As you're a well-known expert in the field of information systems and a former CIO of several large companies, your insights are always valuable. I would add, though, that just as the military is frequently accused of preparing for the last war, not the next one, there is a major difficulty with many of the economic analyses done to justify computer systems. They focus on making change that will support the organization as it is today, or the existing competition that faces them in the marketplace, instead of anticipating what tactics and tools are available to rivals and then striking first, hard, and with massive force.

Dear Herb:
First of all: great job! As a salesperson, I really appreciate the view you provide into the CIO's world.

Question: I work for a company that develops and deploys Web-based applications that are geared toward channel sales. When I speak with CIOs and IS directors, I'm told a lot of times that their "sales and marketing departments are their customers" and that I should be speaking with the respective VP's.

Do you feel that I should be taking a different approach with CIOs and IS directors? When you get past features and functionality, what's really important is the platform and architectural concerns. With that in mind, how do I get the IS group involved initially?

Thanks!

CJC

Dear CJC:
On more than one occasion, I've expressed my opinion that the only people worthy of being called customers are those whose names appear in a company's accounts receivable system. In other words, if you aren't buying our product or have the potential to do so, you are not a customer. The rest of us are just teammates who have a particular job to do.

In today's fast moving world, it's very important that an IT leader view himself or herself as an integral part of the organization who supports and contributes to defining the opportunities available to the company. So with that attitude in mind, I wouldn't worry too much about getting the particular IT executives you're writing about involved. In fact, you should take their advice and go directly to the VPs of sales and marketing. Since they view these folks as their customers, just go out and sell the application. It will be up to the IT organization, then, to figure out how to modify its platforms and architecture to support the new system.

If you're still concerned about following my suggestion, remember that another good reason to bypass these CIOs and IT directors is that, chances are, anyone with such a limited view of their role won't last in the job of running an IT shop in this age. And why should you waste your time with someone who isn't likely to be in the job much longer?

Dear Herb:
I read your article "If I Only Had an SLA," with some amazement, as we are currently trying to establish service-level agreements for some critical applications. An SLA can be used either as an excuse to hide behind or as a legitimate tool to communicate mutual expectations. Individual motives will dictate what you want to do.

I get the impression that you have a dim view of the SLA process. May I point out that expectations not defined are hard to meet. I'll agree that if you want to paralyze an organization, a service-level contract will do that successfully. If you want to have a fair chance to succeed, develop a service-level agreement. But, if you want to make sure that everyone works together effectively, try a service-level understanding.

John P.

Dear John:
My problem with service-level agreements is that they are generally produced either late in the project development cycle or after a system has been developed--as it appears is the case in your situation. As I'm sure you'll agree, well-written specifications for operational stability and responsiveness of the software product prior to spending a cent on its development is a much better mechanism to ensure user satisfaction. Further, a good understanding of what is expected of the system in production can help produce a viable design.

For systems already in production, it's a good idea to find out if they're meeting expectations. Regardless of what that process is called, it should be done in a spirit of people sitting down and deciding whether the system is doing what it should, and if not, what steps are necessary to get there. We need to avoid, at all costs, anything that can degrade into (or be intended to look like) a formal, legalese document.

NOTE TO READERS: As I've mentioned, I am planning to put my InformationWeek columns together into a book with a little bit of additional commentary around the events and people about whom I write. If any reader would like to be notified of such an event, please drop me an E--mail. Just use the word BOOK as the subject line.

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.