Law of the Hammer

In formulating responses for a predicted future, IT is particularly vulnerable to suffering from "the law of the hammer": that is, the tendency of those holding a hammer to think everything looks like a nail. For IT, that hammer is the computer, Brown says.

Take the infamous case some years ago when the US cruiser Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner while on patrol.

The Vincennes, as an Aegis Class cruiser of the US Navy, is totally computerized. It was the computer that examined the approaching aeroplane after it was picked up by radar, analyzed its intentions on the basis of its approach, speed and other factors, and came to the conclusion that it was hostile. So too, it was the computer which ordered the Vincennes' missiles to shoot the airliner down.

"This took place while the aeroplane was nine miles away," Brown says. "A sailor with a pair of binoculars could have gone out on the bridge, on the wing of the bridge, looked at that aeroplane and seen right away there was a commercial airliner and would have known not to shoot it down. That was a dreadful mistake costing a lot of lives in addition to being a public relations disaster for the United States, but it happens all the time in combat. In modern warfare a lot of casualties are caused by what they call 'friendly fire', because the automated identification systems are imperfect. And yet people don't question them because the computer today is the new God."

Again, investments in IT, by virtue of their size, are considered to have to work. Why do so many software implementations fail? Brown says one major cause is the simple fact that such investments are typically so great that the company finds it impossible to walk away from the sunk costs. Management looks at the numbers, at the sunk cost, and it does not consider the opportunity cost of abandoning it.

Conventional thinking would have CIOs considering new tools to replace those failed investments. A better approach, Brown says, is to consider how they might solve the problem if they did not have that tool.

CIOs should also challenge conventional thinking by constantly questioning their assumptions, he says. What if everybody is wrong? Why are we doing it? Why do we still do these things? Do we have a good reason for doing them? What if we did not do it this way?

Era of the Hyborg

Brown believes finding the optimum architectures and solutions for IT is becoming increasingly difficult at a time when there is no longer any such entity as the typical organization. Instead, organizations of all sizes are diversifying and multiplying and morphing into what the authors call the aforementioned "hyborgs": hybrid organizations with inner and outer workings in common with few others, perhaps only themselves.

To illustrate, Brown makes the point that operational structure today can include any permutation of:

• centralized versus decentralized control

• virtual versus permanent versus contract employees

• intangible versus tangible assets

• in-sourced versus outsourced work

• wholly-owned subsidiaries versus majority stakes versus minority stakes versus joint ventures versus strategic alliances versus licensing versus leasing

• local versus national versus regional versus offshore versus transnational versus global operations.

"Businesses less and less resemble each other or the models taught in business schools. They are more and more ad hoc and fluid, each one creating its own unique template, which can transform itself into something else as circumstances require," the authors write. "Auditing such organizations, especially when they engage in questionable practices, as Enron showed so clearly, demands an ability to think outside the box and a clear-eyed capacity to see the differences between today's and yesterday's business organizations. Our comparing and controlling systems cannot go back to where they were. They will continue to be inadequate until we devise new ones that are calibrated to a unit of one."

So just as researchers are working to evolve medicine to address each person's specific genotype (with individually timed and targeted pharmaceutical delivery and diagnostic processes), so too will management and technology and law and accounting principles be required to focus on the specifics of the hyborg rather than a generalized class of organizations.

That is going to increasingly force organizations to build, take apart, rebuild and reconfigure their structures even while having to react fast to feedback that is driven by success rather than processes.