Sunday, January 21, 2007

Codes of Ethics - What History Has To Offer

I have the good fortune of working in a company that has a code of ethics (or conduct). It is also a multicultural, multiethnic company. It is a company which prides itself on its environmental awareness and its commitment to business and personal integrity - in other words, a company of which I can be proud.

Corporate codes of ethics, as well as many statements of principles in government organizations, bills of rights and freedoms - they all generally state their belief in equality and their opposition to discrimination. But we all know that nation states, companies, and individuals in even the most inclusive and tolerant societies harbor racist and bigoted attitudes. It's not just that a few people disagree with the bills of rights, but keep that opinion to themselves. The far more insidious problem is that the vast majority consciously agree with the statement of principles and yet unconsciously display racial behavior and stereotypical opinions.

Jared Diamond believes that education is the solution, especially a large historical overview of human civilization. Education, in this case, means being very clear about the nature of the problem and offering a logical and satisfying answer.

Here's part of the problem. We all know that Eurasians conquered the known world in the last 500 years. Does that mean that Africans, aboriginals, and native North Americans were somehow inferior? I mean, why didn't they beat back the invading European colonialists or cause epidemics to decimate the conquerors rather than the other way around?

Technology is one answer. Those who won had better tools. But if we go back, say to 11,000 B.C., every human society had roughly the same technology and sophistication. Why, over the course of 13,000 years did the Europeans advance so quickly? Historians generally don't have anything to say about this because they are afraid of being labeled racist. But the problem with the silence is that most people assume the answer must have something to do with biology or average IQ level.

This is tough stuff! Diamond believes that the reason racism continues is simply because nobody is proposing a better answer to the often unspoken question. But in his view, advances in our knowledge of molecular biology, plant and animal genetics and biogeography, archeology, and linguistics supply a far more satisfying answer, one that offers the prospect of providing the context for our honorable national and company codes of ethics.

Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction for his book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies in 1998 which outlines what I find to be a very satisfying answer. It is not a definitive answer, mind you (I am finding recently that a theme of good enough or asymptotic reasoning has emerged in my research and writing), but an indicative answer and one that may prove to be more compelling that the lower IQ, less-gifted assumptions many people hold.

Here's the short answer: it's an accident; it's all about luck. There is no inherent superiority among the world's races. Instead, the reason why Eurasians were so successful so quickly is because they had an abundance of domesticated crops and animals and because the east-west orientation of the land mass made the transfer of animals, crops, and technology easy. Bill Gates offers a summary review of Diamond's book which is easily consumed in a few minutes of reading.

My point here is simply to suggest that codes of ethics are important, but more important still is a broad understanding of the history of technology which illustrates how luck and accident account for those distressing inequalities which our codes of ethics seek to mitigate. And, as Bill Gates says, in our age of information technology, luck and accident are not nearly as important as intelligence, skill, and leadership.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Making IT 'Good Enough'

  • I've been guilty of this before, and I'll undoubtedly be guilty in the future - going for the gold standard, striving for excellence, discovering and emulating best practices. But maybe in IT, doing so isn't always appropriate. Maybe it can be a misguided approach.

    Here's just one example. In the past few years, IT gurus have developed process frameworks and control frameworks in order to provide all companies - big, medium, and small - with best practices for IT management. All conscientious IT managers and CIOs want to be part of the select group of businesses who are doing IT right. It's a matter of professional pride and the automatic assumption that best practices will improve not only IT management but business performance too. From CoBIT to ITIL, from security mantras like "defense in depth" to regulatory compliance like SOX, IT managers are bombarded with calls for better management. Often, we assume that means best practices. But that assumption may be part of the problem.

    Best practices are, by definition, ideals. But when money is tight (and when isn't it?), doing more with less may mean going for bronze rather than gold. Sometimes, it makes more sense to aim for a 7 rather than a 10. Sometimes, taking steps to go to the next level just isn't cost-effective. Sometimes, aligning IT with business objectives means intentionally going for the good-enough solution rather than the perfect solution.

    CoBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology) and ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) provide so many markers for IT performance that IT management can become disoriented and lose sight of "key" performance indicators. These frameworks can still be useful, but leveraging them may mean incorporating home-grown measures and concentrating on fewer key performance indicators.

    The IT Controls Benchmark Survey, for instance, provided some surprising results. The smoking gun for top performers could be found in 2 measures, measures that the best-of-the-best were almost all doing and that almost all the also-ran were not doing:
  • Monitoring systems for unauthorized changes, and
  • Defining consequences for intentional unauthorized changes.
    What this means is simply that, while ITIL and CoBIT give a lot of good measures to consider, the biggest bang for the buck comes from concentrating on doing a few things well.

    The survey also showed that in manufacturing, the top performers were about twice as productive as the low performers. But in IT, the difference was five to eight times. It is a case of the 80/20 rule again. Eighty percent of the benefit on process and control frameworks come from twenty percent of the measures.

    With survey results like this, achieving excellence in IT may be more about being "good enough" than in following "best practices", or at least about doing a few key things really well, and the rest just good enough.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

The Invasion Continues

The Economist had a very interesting article in its Work-Life Balance Computing article of 19-Dec-2006 entitled "Consumer technologies are invading corporate computing."

The gist of the column, like so many articles over the past few months about the impact of consumer computing on IT, is that corporate computing departments can't hope to keep up with the advances in consumer electronics, web-services, and other consumer-focused technical advances. This time the case-study involved a forward-looking IT Manager for Arkansas State University who moved student email from the university servers to Google.

65,000 students are having their email accounts transferred at the rate of 300 per hour to Gmail while retaining the university's domain of They get web-based email at no additional cost to the university, along with instant messaging, and shared calendars. Not a bad deal!

But what really sets this IT Manager apart is his rationale for the move. He knows that the pace of consumer-driven technical change isn't something that corporate environments can match easily. But companies like Google can introduce web-based services like Google Apps for Your Domain (which, by the way, is still in beta), and then add new services like word processing and spreadsheets, or wikis and blogs without requiring the legions of technical support staff that rolling out new services like that in a corporate environment would require.

What about security and backup? Again, corporate IT departments need not worry. One of Google's data centres burnt to the ground - but nobody noticed! Because the other data centres picked up the slack and continued to provide the service required. Massive redundancy and massive storage capacity means that Google can offer these web-based services without compromising security and backup.

You can bet I will be watching developments like this very carefully over the next few months!

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

iForgot Who iAm

It's been fun to read the various news articles and blog entries about the Computer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week as well as Macworld in San Francisco. You might wonder why Apple would decide to host its conference at the same time as CES, but then all you have to do is ask yourself what the biggest consumer electronics announcement of the week was - that's right, the iPhone and iTV. In addition, Apple dropped the word "Computer" from their corporate name this week.

Clearly, Steve Jobs and Apple are moving the standard markers for the company and are seemingly successful in doing so. If the pundits are right about what the future will bring for IT managers - consumer electronics, applications, and sensibilities into the corporate environment - then, Apple may simply be on the vanguard of that movement. Still, the phrase "stick to the knitting" comes to mind, meaning businesses should normally stay with the brands and business for which they have become known. In Apple's case, that would be personal computers for the "creative" and "artsy" end of the market.

Whatever opinion you might have about Apple and its future, consumer electronics is obviously changing our vocabulary. There was a recent comical example of that on the television hit drama House in which the character played by John Larroquette wakes from a coma and is reading about something he has never seen before, something called an "iPod" (which he pronounced with a short i).

Even if you've never been in a coma, even if you've merely been asleep for a few hours, chances are something new in consumer electronics has happened overnight that your teenagers can tell you about. My sons, for instance, stay up much later than do I each evening. In the morning, when I drive them to school or university, they usually have something new to tell me about from listening to a podcast or watching a technology show on digital television. It's a rare morning now, when I can surprise them or I don't hear a new word entering our vocabulary drawn from that massive realm of consumer electronics.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Stay Tuned

2007 will see me assuming some additional responsibilities at Pano Cap. I will be assuming roles as editor for a resurrected internal newsletter as well as web master for our corporate web site. I look forward to both. Although our Pano Post Newsletter is for internal consumption only, it will be a welcome improvement in communications. I'll also enjoying stretching my skill set into print publication software as well as refreshing my editorial experience, something I haven't done with any frequency since my graduate school days.

The Pano Cap Canada web site, partially because it is directed to both an internal and external readsership, will be more of a challenge. We have been somewhat negligent in keeping our corporate web site current and dynamic. That will now change.

I have developed and taught courses at Conestoga College in creating and maintaining database-driven web sites, but it is has been quite a while since I've had hands-on web-master duties to perform regularly. Again, I anticipate not only helping with content creation but in learning about the most current tools and techniques available for web site design and maintenance. One piece of software I will probably try out during the next month is Adobe's Dreamweaver 8. Right now, it's a toss up whether to go with this standard in web design or whether to try Microsoft's most recent professional entry into this market - Microsoft Expression Web.

Suggestions are always welcomed.