Humour

Bafflees and their ways

T A Balasubramanian explains why it is wrong to presume that IT buyers are clueless and baffled

Did you imagine that all IT buyers make impartial, rational decisions based only on pure benchmarks and IDC reports, calmly evaluating vendors, those tech wolves of the IT jungle, with a cool and detached eye? It just goes to show how deceptive appearances can be.

On the other hand, it may be equally misleading to imagine that the savvy and smart IT buyers of this world are more like clueless, baffled sheep (or bafflees, to coin a new word) who are reduced to a state of fear and submission by slick marketing maestros and jargon-spouting snake oil consultants from the vendor camp, ending up buying super-duper technology toys and machines that they (and their organisations) truly do not need.

The truth, if you notice, could be somewhere in between. It takes two to make a company or tango, just as it takes three to make a crowd. The cynic’s view is that bafflees are born every minute, which is why IT vendors never run out of business. It also explains why waves of new technology keep washing up each year, accompanied by a tsunami of jargon.

Bafflees are defined by their behaviour. A good bafflee is one who would buy a screwdriver for hammering nails into wood, and pay someone who once met a carpenter to instruct him further. He is truly destined to become easy prey for the baffler wolves lurking out there.

The problem is not only of being clueless, but in getting the right heads together behind the scene. Imagine this view of IT Paradise: here, instead of being at loggerheads, the IT Head and the Business Head are crystal clear about what they want in their plan, and know how to get it. They work together in miraculously professional style, jointly deal with the suppliers with open and fair service level agreements, and end up with a successful implementation.

This, of course, is pure fantasy. Every story that one hears (involving IT projects with bafflees driving them) has always had a ludicrous ending. The bafflees always seem to get the raw end of the deal because they are, well, as incorrigible and capricious as goats.

The legendary mismatch between business goals and IT goals has a genuine foundation. Mostly, corporate IT is a long, long way from what the business is trying to achieve. There is no single reason for this, but one may notice a few common traits that boil down to the following oversimplified (and hopefully, instructive and stimulating) stereotypes:

Bafflee Castle Greyskull

This is where the Silicon Masters of the Universe live. Business-He-Man is battling it out with CIO-Skeletor for control over the minions of the corporate galaxy. As a humble minion, or anonymous user, don’t even ask for anything, or they’ll use the Sword of Power on you, and that can be fatal.

Papaji’s IT Bafflee Shed

“Don’t bother me, beta, I’m busy setting up the application infrastructure for the computational matrix.” These mysterious IT bafflees are running a lot of complex projects with no deadlines, but no one knows what they are. There is also a lot of cable lying around the place, dozens of open cabinets that look like a typhoon has ripped up all the computers around, and scotch tape covering everything that has not been welded together originally. Do not bother these papas, they will evict you from the shed.

The ET Bafflees

When the resident bafflees are ETs (Extraterrestrial Techies), the laws of physics no longer apply. Space and time have been distorted to accommodate their technical fantasies. There is no machine in the world (not even Cray or Param supercomputer with performance in gigaflops) big enough to match their requirements for what seems to be a mission to the nearest galaxy. Do not approach these creatures for anything; they will just blind you with science and disappear into hyperspace.

The Lunching Bafflee

Their first question is “Where are you taking us for lunch?” They just love vendors, or at least their credit cards. Success is measured by the number of concurrent procurements that are under way. Don’t ask for anything. Well, not in the lunch break anyway.

The Ancient Bafflee Shop

This is all about keeping the old generation as long as possible, until legacy becomes antiquity and even the spiders have got used to Cobol. A slightly musty, dusty atmosphere. Cosy and friendly, and everything is stacked up on desks all around you. A well-meaning but ultimately hopeless old gentleman is in charge of a merry band of ex-IBM fanatics from the earliest mainframe era. Don’t ask for anything, they’ll never find it anyway.

Bafflee dominion does not end with dancing with the wolves. Quite a lot of corporate IT heads may look perennially baffled, but they are territorial terrors. They have the idea that buying the latest computers and doing research (surfing the Web) is not something that anyone in the organisation should do apart from them. Users, who, if you think about it, are the real and present bafflees at the end of the food chain, are treated as an irritating irrelevance who don’t even know the difference between EBCDIC and ASCII.

A typical bafflee would go thus: “How can you give the freedom of dealing directly with vendors to these users? Some of them even want to buy their own computers—should they be let loose in organisations?”

One of the new solutions (that wonderful baffling term again!) thought up to bring IT and the business closer together (rather than just actually getting people working together) is to invent new jobs. Don’t believe it? Here’s a real quote, talking about a guy who, on an organisation chart, has nobody reporting to him but is probably paid (a lot) more than someone who saves lives every day:

“The strategic nature and complexity of our project portfolio warrants an effective and dedicated programme management function. This role features a combination of coordination, business model alignment, supervision and synergistic value extraction.”

Not intelligible? In most companies, job descriptions of technical or managerial positions are far more baffling than this. And after all these exertions, would it be possible to finally have the tech wolves being tamed at the corporate gates by agile IT honchos holding hands with eagle-eyed business guardians? That’s a question only bafflees can answer.