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April 9, 2001 |
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Hedgehogs, Harry Truman, And IT Complexity
By Lou Bertin (Lou.Bertin@gte.net)
his column is being written with the conflicting--but complimentary, as you'll see--images of hedgehogs, Adm. James Stockdale, Occam (of razor fame), foxes, Harry S. Truman, and Job (the prophet, not my occupation) in mind.
The visions dancing in my head don't result from a late-night helping of chili dogs; rather, they all were evoked at this spring's edition of the InformationWeek Conference, which began (by pure coincidence) on April Fools' Day and whose theme was "Radical Simplicity: Conquering Complexity and Enhancing Customer Value."
The subject matter under discussion here, however, is anything but foolish. Rather, it represents what plainly is the biggest challenge confronting businesses, even during these fiscally challenging days: managing complexity. As the magnificently varied imagery suggests, achieving simplicity was, is, and ever shall be a devilishly complex process.
Author, academic and corporate adviser Jim Collins spoke about hedgehogs in his conference kick-off remarks, citing them as the critical example of the desirability of, indeed, the necessity for, simplicity. A hedgehog, pointed out Collins, inevitably wins against any and all attempts against its life by the ever-plotting fox. As Collins told it, while the fox constantly devised newer and ever more fanciful strategies and tactics aimed at bringing the hedgehog to an early demise, the hedgehog survived merely by doing the thing that came simplest: rolling up into a ball and letting the tools at its disposal (its quills) do their job.
Simple? Of course. Intuitive? Surely. Achievable by the nonhedgehogs among us? Too seldom.
The culprit, according to Collins, oftener than not is the knee-jerk reaction on the part of managers (yes, gasp, even IT professionals) to unnecessarily complicate things, whether out of fear, a reliance on what works for others, or sheer hubris. The cure, says Collins, rests largely on applying advice he learned from Adm. Stockdale, who survived the horrors of a Viet Cong prison long before he was sentenced to be Ross Perot's running mate.
Stockdale, when asked to assess what led some prisoners to survive while others didn't or couldn't, said two factors came into play. First was an unshakable belief that they would indeed survive and would someday be freed...maybe not tomorrow or next month or next year, but someday. The second factor was that the prisoners looked at their circumstances with brutal objectivity; that the worst case was what they were facing and they had better come to terms with that. The bottom line: figure out what's required of you and by you right now and forget the Pollyanna attitude.
Is that necessarily fair, at a time when IT operations are being pulled in conflicting directions by their business counterparts, and forced to subsist on diminishing budgets? Hardly. That's where Job, according to Stockdale, comes in. For all its complexity and potential, life, we must recall, isn't fair.
Conference host James O'Toole, research professor at the University of Southern California's Center for Effective Organizations, reinforced Collins' message, noting that IT, in and of itself, inevitably adds complexity to any process, even as it lets organizations add immensely to their value.
The solution, per O'Toole, is applying Occam's razor, which would trim away all that is unnecessary to any extraneous theorem (or thought, for that matter). Nice words, but how, exactly, is that to be accomplished? Again, simplicity is the key. Focus first, last, and always on what needs to be done--and why an organization wishes to do any particular thing--and not on how it is to be accomplished. In other words, strategies define tactics, not the opposite, which O'Toole (and this itinerant scribbler) believes too often is the case.
In a perfect world, O'Toole said, Harry Truman's belief that anything worthwhile needs no explanation would carry the day. A description that leads to an "Aha!" reaction should be the rule, not the seldom-experienced phenomenon it has become.
So...are those among you who are responsible for shepherding organizational IT strategies (and tactics) the blameless victims of the complexity of challenges and their potential solutions that are constantly being shoved at us? Not by a long shot, according to Scott Dinsdale, executive vice president for digital strategy at the Motion Picture Association of America (no complexity in that job, is there?).
Dinsdale, never reticent, was passionate in making the case that IT professionals must be "our own best critics" and need to acknowledge that "we have been responsible for leading our companies down the garden path on too many occasions, and have overspent on some things." Tough talk, but with more than a few echoes of Stockdale's advice plainly evident.
Take heart, though. As one of my old pals said to me, one whose own head is (as are so many others) uncomfortably close to the chopping block, "Ah, if it were easy, anybody could do it."
All I need to figure out now is whether the bravado was genuine or if he was whistling as he walked past the graveyard.
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