A Culture of Complacency

When I look back on my last dozen engagements - heck, when I look at any five issues of CIO - it's not the nuanced, subtle or unexpected issue that typically derails that mission-critical implementation; it's a predictable problem that's freakin' obvious. Even worse, everyone knows it's obvious.

Why don't senior-level executives do obvious well? Because the obvious is, well, so obvious. If I'm really smart, I know the obvious. Been there, done that. That's what smart means, right? Consequently, please give serious consideration to what I modestly call "Schrage's Law of Organizational Obviousness": The smarter the organization thinks it is, the more complacently it manages the obvious.

In my experience, the complacency of "smart" managers is the greatest source of IT failure. My current favourite example of this is the brouhaha that's surrounded the FBI's failed Virtual Case File (VCF) software. This system was supposed to make it easier for the US's counterterror law enforcement agency to collaborate and share information. The $US170 million program - trust me, it's cost more - and prototype is a widely acknowledged mess. And the FBI's failure has hurt US domestic security.

Was the FBI's VCF program too ambitious? Too innovative? No. Those are highfalutin words to cover up the shameful truth. "Smart" people at the FBI and its vendor didn't even ask the obvious questions, let alone answer them. For example, the FBI never addressed how its agents currently used technology to manage their cases, and how the new software would modify and improve that process.

Why not? One computer analyst who has studied the FBI's technology efforts told the Los Angeles Times that the agency's problem is that FBI officials thought they could get it right the first time. "That never happens with anybody," he said.

Nasty congressional hearings revealed a design and development process utterly divorced from how the FBI actually deployed and used software in the real world.

Needless to say, Science Applications International, the VCF vendor, told Congress and the media that the FBI was changing the specs all the time. Are you surprised? Everyone reading this magazine knows that endlessly shifting specs is the surest symptom of a client who is going to discover the obvious the hard way. The point is not to proffer sympathy to an incompetent vendor; it's to excoriate both sides for spending over $US170 million on software designed to foster collaboration in a bureaucracy plagued by fiefdoms. Complacency, not complexity, explains the failure.

I've lost count of the number of organizations I've gone into where senior-level executives can't answer the most critically obvious questions about their business. For example, sales and marketing executives who can identify their top 10 revenue accounts but don't know the 10 most profitable. Supply chain managers who can't tell how last-minute design changes affect key economics. Departmental managers who can't describe the processes they've implemented to run their functions.

Does that make them incompetent? Of course not! But it is impossible (not unlikely, impossible!) to design and implement cost-effective CRM, supply chain management and process management systems without learning such obvious information. IT executives who feel otherwise don't understand either the business meaning or design implications of the obvious.

Knowing, grasping and even celebrating the obvious should be the single most important spec in every IT initiative. The CIO's great sin is leading as if the obvious is second in importance, behind the complex, the nuanced and the unknown.

Think you're managing the obvious well? Ask around. You may well be breaking Schrage's Law. If so, you'll pay big-time. Now, that's obvious.

Michael Schrage is codirector of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative