Performance Measurement
Managing the Polarity of Information Technology User vs. Purchaser Desires
0I have written previously about how polarity management needs to be a core competency of Information Technology Professionals.
Information Technology (IT) Management (ITM) requires polarity management to balance the needs of users as well as those of the stakeholders who pay for new and upgraded IT systems. Most users really don’t care what their IT systems cost. They desire ease of use, performance, individualism, and aesthetic. The parties responsible for resourcing IT systems, on the other hand, usually value cost efficiency, standardization, simplicity, and longevity. Both of these parties have requirements that are desirable, admirable, and valuable. Unfortunately perfecting providing for either group is impossible and mutually exclusive. Hence the definition of a polarity requiring management vice a problem deserving a solution.
My point is not that one of these attributes is more important, desirable, or better than the other. I see a lot of IT Departments that are obviously aligned much more in favor of one than the other. Most of them don’t even realize that they have slowly drifted there over time with the best of intentions. As you look at your work sites or organizations, which rings more true? Are the IT Departments running themselves ragged trying to meet everyone’s individual hardware and software needs? Or, is the Help Desk more closely regarded as a plane of hell by the employees? Is there an “us vs. them” mentality present? Is the CIO constantly trying to explain to the other C-Level execs why he is spending so much money or is he constantly touting new cost savings measures? Are the questions on the user questionnaires so bland as to elicit no input or suggestively brutal? Does everyone have the same machine on their desk or is there a mix of brands, colors, and sizes? Are users constantly logging into publicly available web based services to “get work done” or are they using local applications?
A great book that describes the proper frame of reference is Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems by Dr. Barry Johnson.
The Learning Exchange has a great summary of Polarity Management:
“Polarity Management is powerful tool that leverages the best of apparent opposites resulting in win-win solutions. Many challenges are not problems that can be solved with either/or solutions. Rather, they are dilemmas or polarities to be managed. Polarity mapping provides a complete picture of the interdependent opposing forces that often create gridlock. Working with the upsides of both poles, predictions can be made for the types of change that will result from any strategy.” (link )
Polarity Map
You should think of user needs and system resourcers as trying to move the positive poles of two magnets near each other. There is a stable resistance point where they will stay, but if they are forced any more closer they deflect and end up ruining any hopes of stability. Like the author says, there is no such thing as being only in the state of inhaling or exhaling, you need to always be in the perfect balance as you manage the breathing polarity.
I think that IT Departments fall into this predicament for all the right reasons by either thinking of themselves only as customer service agents (i.e. Help Desks) or utility providers. Obviously, you need to strike the right balance for your organization. If users run the place, you will lose cost controls, create unnecessary security risks, and be constantly fighting configuration management challenges. Of course, if money is the only metric, your users might as well not have computers if the ones provided don’t meet their needs for production and support that is not, well, supportive, might as well not exist. My overall comment, is mainly, that as a leader, you often need to frame issues correctly for your teams, supervisors, and users in order to begin to manage them correctly. The issue of user needs vs. corporate needs is a polarity to be managed — not a problem that can be solved. The sooner that all parties come to agreement on that and start seeing the challenge for what it is, is the sooner that your information technology systems begin to be contributors to your competitive differentiation and stop being hurdles to both your corporate bottom line and users desires.
Do you think that I characterized this challenge of the IT Department correctly? Do you know of any case studies showing success? How does your organization balance this issue?
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for July 24, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin.
Image Credit: polaritymanagement.com
What Is The Right Percentage Cost For IT?
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One professional task that I perform frequently is estimating the cost of information technology for a given organization. Routinely the leaders of the group that I am advising are surprised by the size of my numbers. Unfortunately for them, I find that my estimates are usually in the ballpark of their final needs. I have gotten to the point that I have developed some thumb rules for the process.
- For an average new office building, the initial IT costs will be 5% of the total construction cost.
- For an average knowledge worker based organization, the annual cost of IT operations including maintenance, technical refreshment, and personnel will be 8% of their annual operating budget.
- For an organization who desires to or whose function is to exploit information for competitive gain, they need to plan on spending more than 10% of their annual operating expense on IT and reinvest more than 10% of their profit in it.
Now, I acknowledge that I have little scientific basis for these thumb rules, but I challenge you to prove me wrong. More over, these thumb rules completely discredit any expectation of saving money through IT or recapitalizing resources based on IT investment. Do note, that I am only addressing knowledge work based endeavors and organizations here. In industrial age based manufacturing and some service based transaction fulfillment firms other rules, including cost savings, would apply.
You can see why these parameters would surprise many. I am suggesting that a small group with a $5 million dollar operating budget would need to spend $500 thousand a year or more to effectively improve their productivity through information systems. What happens if you spend less than 8%? Can you get by like that? Sure you can and many organizations do. They just fail to gain competitive advantage, market dominance, and accelerating excellence in their value proposition through information use.
Those are my rules for IT spending. What are yours? Do you agree with me or have other suggestions? Can you think of knowledge age organizations that prove or contradict my thumb rules? Please share them with us.
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for May 15, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin .
The Best Enterprise Operating System – Flexibility
0This is my second post in a series discussing desktop operating choices for Enterprise use. Follow this link to the last one in the series.
Last week we discussed how, today there are only three viable choices in desktop operating systems: Microsoft Windows, The Apple OS, and Linux. As a reminder this series of articles will explore the reasons that I can think of and that you, my readers suggest to help you decide which is best. It is not my goal to evangelize one operating system or company over another, but instead to understand for myself the justifications for the choices that these large organizations have made. I will strive to be fair and balanced in my analysis.
Remember, for simplicity in comparisons, I am considering Microsoft Windows XP (with Service pack 3), Apple OS 10.5, and Ubuntu Linux 8.04 as the baselines. My reasons for this are contained in the introductory post. Also, in the interests of full disclosure, I use Windows at work. For my personal computing, I prefer the Apple OS. When the Apple OS is not available, such as in a netbook, I use Linux as well as Windows. Basically, I am proficient and familiar with all three.
First we will consider flexibility. I define this as the ability to make the desktop environment do whatever it is that your organization needs. I think that the gold standard would be an operating system that allowed you to run any piece of software that you desired regardless of age, language, or version.
Windows XP. There is no doubt that Windows runs more commercially available software than any other operating system. It is backwards compatible with some software that predates Windows at all. It has also remained the number one version of Windows for over five years meaning that most software released today and even next year (after Windows System 7 ships) will remain compatible with it. While, no operating system can run every piece of software, you are certainly very likely to easily find a compatible piece of software that meets your specifications if you are using Windows. In the event that you cannot find the software that you need, the huge market share for windows means that there is a plethora of trained Windows programmers ready to create any application that you need. Their large numbers means that their services will be the most affordable based upon competition.
Apple OS. The Apple OS may be beautiful, elegant, fast, and Unix based, but it certainly is the least flexible of the three choices. There is a ton of wonderful software for the Mac and while you can almost due anything that you want, there will always be some things that just cannot be done. There will also always be some hardware that is not compatible with it. It should also be considered that today’s Macs can easily run most Windows software through virtualization alternatives. Based upon market share, you should expect to have to search and pay a premium for custom solutions. A good example of the challenge with Macs, is that you can usually get 90% of the Windows equivalent, but not get to 100% no matter what. A good example of this is macro support within the Microsoft Office Suite. While MS Office is nearly a business “standard” and Office 2008 is available for Macs, it does not support macros at all.
Linux. Out of the box, Linux is capable of doing anything that a skilled operator or programmer can conceive of. Unfortunately, while there are hundreds of thousands of open and closed source applications that run on Linux, there are few commercial programs. If your needs are completely internal to your organization, I believe that you could locate applications to meet any need. If you must work with any commercial packages, you must check carefully. A good example of this situation is Adobe Photoshop. There are plenty of alternative, nearly equivalent solutions for Linux, but if you must use Photoshop, then you cannot use Linux.
I conclude that in the category of Flexibility considered alone, MS Windows XP is by far the most adaptable, customizable, and expandable operating system for an Enterprise Desktop Operating System. I would place Linux second and Apple OS third.
Please continue to come back over the next few weeks as I consider the remaining specific points outlined in the first post that influence this decision. I plan to cover one at a time during the coming month. The next one up is Software Availability.
How important is flexibility to your operating system choice? On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being most critical) how does it rate? Did I adequately define this attribute? Please share your thoughts by leaving comments below. Happy Thinking…
That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for April 29, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin.