This week, I started work on my article presentation. The article is "The Right Mindset for Managing Information Technology." The article is riddled with holes, mis-understandings, and mistakes. Since my job for class is to present the material in my presentation (not to argue it's flaws), I'll use this media to present my thoughts.
The article compares Japanese IT management to US IT management and can be broken down into five main points:
- investment in IT follows a logic of strategic instinct rather than strategic alignment
- Focus on performance improvement as a benchmark rather than ROI
- Don’t adopt technology for technology’s sake.
- Focus on integrating the IT people into the business, and the business people into IT
- Don’t focus on eliminating the user, focus on enhancing the contribution of the user
Starting with the idea that IT should follow strategic instinct rather than strategic alignment, we have problems. Broken down into it's fundamental parts, this is an argument to be reactive rather than proactive with technology. The case present a couple of success stories to demonstrate the validity of their points, but they lack a critical understanding of each of these situations: reactive IT strategies based in short-term improvement of operational goals require less investment, less redesign, and have stronger support of upper management. It's like comparing LSU's chances in football against Auburn or Alabama to LSU's chances against a team like UL-monroe. It's a compelling, but incorrect use of statistics. The proper first step should be "Get upper management's support."
The second point involves focusing on performance improvements. While more legitimate than the first point, it too involves a massive misunderstanding of the IT function. The best IT should be invisible to the user; constant IT changes don't allow users to learn the system and hinder productivity. In addition, many IT processes don't contribute to productivity at all, but rather prevent breakdowns. How do you measure the performance improvements a disaster recovery plan adds to the company? How do you calculate the performance improvements of improving the scalability of an enterprise system for a company that wants to expand but hasn't yet? How do you quantify the performance improvements of replacing soon-to-be-obsolete parts to prevent future breakdowns? Most of the IT functions should be invisible to the user and focus on maintenance rather than performance improvement.
The third point is one of the worst, don't adopt technology for technology's sake. The very nature of capitalism demands that people dream big and pursue those dreams. A manager in the west doesn't adopt technology for technology's sake, he listens and shares a vision with the inventor. In seeing a potential competitive advantage, he invests in bringing it to fruition. Many of these attempts fail, but the same can be said of any R&D field. Should the pharmaceutical industry stop investing in research because most of it doesn't make it into a drug? No, because the pay-off of inventing the next Lipitor is worth it. The authors hide behind the idea that we can just do what the Japanese do, adopt technology later in the product cycle when it's not cutting edge. They are correct, except for the fact that technology is not a natural occurrence. If companies don't invest in developing this technology, it won't come to be for the japanese to piggy-back later. I read an article reviewing a state of the art technology a few years back, the author astutely stated, "When I hear complaints that it’s too expensive, I grin and hope that all my competitors feel that way."
The fourth point is the only correct one of the group, but not for the reasons they explain. The article talks about getting the IT managers more familiar with the business. This is a definite short-coming of the field, but I look at it from a different angle: get the business people familiar with IT. Business managers today are intimidated by IT; they don't think about how to use IT to improve their productivity. No amount of "business seminars" or "organizational bonding" is going to get a computer engineer thinking about the business side of the organization. The people that go through the steps of the business process on a day-to-day basis need to be thinking about IT, automation, and redesign. They don't need to know the how of IT, they just need to know what it can do. The article unwittingly supports this point of view. It explains that the Japanese rotate business managers through the IT function, they would then take that know-how into every other position they hold.
The last point takes a limited view of technology in saying don’t focus on eliminating the user, focus on enhancing the contribution of the user. The ideal IT solution is a fully automated system in which your vendors put inputs in the right place, out pops a finished product, and your distributors come and pick it up. Everything in the middle is superfluous. In our society, it has become so taboo to focus on eliminating the need for jobs, that a point such as this one is heralded as "common knowledge". In reality labor is expensive and often inefficient. The primary thing that separates the abilities of a worker from the abilities of a computer is judgement and strategy. Since our computers are imperfect right now, systems should automate everything it can, and enhance the contribution of the user in the other areas. Just because a computer can't do something right now is no excuse for ceasing to move in that direction. I'll refer you to a computer chess program. Twenty years ago, it was foolish to think that a computer could possibly beat a good human player. Today, we have chess games that routinely beat the chess grand-masters. Technology is ever-evolving, don't use current limitations to limit your belief in what technology is capable of.
