IT - Really?

This blog is supposed to be about information technology and capital. More specifically, it's supposed to be about the use (and abuse) of capital and information technology. For the last couple of years, I've been exclusively posting about capital markets and finance. I'm going to try to return to information technology when I can and this post is as good a place as any to start.

Clay Shirky (at http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/) has an excellent post about the testing failures of the recently rolled-out Healthcare.gov. My purpose in linking this is not to wax philosophic about Obamacare but to use it as an illustration of a management problem I've seen for all of my 30-plus years in IT.

Clay makes some excellent points about non-IT management's willful blindness to requirments, testing, and adaptation. Here's my favorite.

Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.

What is Clay getting at here? Let's pause for a moment and think about one of my favorite analogies for a go-live for a large system, the Valley of Despair. I have a chart graphic somewhere, but not at my fingertips, that shows the productivity losses at the cutover to a new system and the long, usually gradual, climb back to productivity and eventually to improved productivity. This slide into chaos is the Valley of Despair. (If you've been part of a large project, you know of which I speak.)

My own personal favorite was a company president's response when we were discussing the impending go-live of an enterprise system. I described to him the challenges his people would be facing and the struggles they'd have in getting productivity back to normal. Then I used the term Valley of Despair. His response was, "We're not going to have one of those ... are we". It wasn't a question.

It was also a blindingly obvious example of executive management refusal to deal with truth.

Clay's web post has some excellent observations on this management behavior. Don't think about his post as a critique of Obamacare but rather think of it as a warning on management and management's view of information technology. Read the whole thing.