Humour

Rule play in corporate stables

T A Balasubramanian reveals the secrets of riding through changes in the IT business.

This is the third part of the guide to polish some equestrian strategies for surviving changes on the IT racetrack.

Doodh Byramji, also called Doodh, or Doodhi, carries on with his investigation into the secrets of riding through changes in the IT business. Doodh, whose job as design engineer makes him the roving eye of his company, has been assigned the current task by his CEO, Baidyanath Baffle, the Founder and Owner of Baffle Technologies, or Baff-Tech.

1:30 pm: Here I am, still listening raptly to the words of racetrack wisdom coming from Nawab Ghoda Ghallstone, Founder of the Royal Ghoda Surf Club, or RGSC. After a delightful lunch, which includes oat cakes and jaggery balls with lentil soup and rice, we are strolling on the cool lawns of the RGSC farmhouse compound, where the Nawab still maintains a few colts, presumably for nostalgic reasons.

“We were talking about the first of your four rules, Nawabji,” I say, as an opening gambit. “New ponies, old tricks. But does it mean that most CIOs are reluctant to let go of the past? Don’t they eventually learn from their experiences?”

“Ah, jolly good point, Doodh,” says the Nawab, puffing on his cigar. “The operative word that you have chosen is actually the most important clue: eventually. That’s where I have found my second rule in action: I call it ‘throwing good grass after bad asses.’ This happens over and over in information technology shops.”

“And how does it work?”

“Well, many times a CIO commits to a certain technology choice, betting on what he sees as a sure winner, and then scrimps on the initial implementation or poorly scopes the project. Maybe he is under a severe budget squeeze, or is simply unable to anticipate the size or complexity of the project accurately. In either case, the company becomes wedded to it, and then the only choice a CIO has is to throw more money and resources into the heap to help get what he originally wanted.”

“Sounds like some shaky marriages I know,” I say.

“Ah, you are a sly bandicoot, Doodh. Some marriages, as you observe, go that way. In the case of the big ERP investments, clearly ‘throwing good grass after bad asses’ was true when the packages turned out to be something less than the hoped-for racehorses. CIOs had taken a major bet on these applications under some pressure or the other—for example, some were forced by Y2K to replace old COBOL programs—and now they were held hostage by this new ass that consumed valuable grass interminably.”

“It seems to me that a smart CIO would see soon enough that he’s wasting the grass,” I remark. “Why wouldn’t he cut the ass loose and save his own ass …I mean grass?”

“Well, Doodh, that seems the logical thing to do, eh? But tell me, which CIO would admit that he let himself buy an ass instead of a racehorse in the first place? Appearances are vitally important in the corporate stables, as you might have noticed.”

“Yes, Nawabji. You have a point there.”

“But even with bad asses, you don’t know, you could actually turn them around by feeding them a truckload of good grass. Bringing new technologies into an organisation is actually tricky, which is why it brings out the conservative tendencies in most commercial cultures. They resist change, but that is no excuse for a CIO to not take a risk and stick his head out, like the rare A-type innovators do. There are usually no signs to show whether you are on a winning track. Unfortunately, most companies have no prescribed method for doing this in a meaningful way.”

“What about tapping the experience of pathfinders? The A-class innovators?”

“Ah, but how do you get those innovators to come around helpfully and talk to you when you are a risk-averse B-class trotter? They’re not sitting on the grass waiting for the wind to blow.”

“And how does RGSC come into the picture?”

“Jolly good question, Doodh. The RGSC is a laboratory for kicking those very tyres that the innovators are kicking in other places. We make these experiences accessible to the B and C types—our trotters and trotters. Very few companies have anything in-house that comes close to approaching the RGSC, whose mission is to investigate and report back on new innovations and their relevance to business. So we do it for them with something we call thunderware.”

“Underwear? As in inner garments? Lingerie? Chuddy?”

“No, no. Thunder, not under. And not what you wear, but spelled out w-a-r-e, as in software or hardware. It’s a new class of IT solutions.”

“Ah, so you have created something as striking as Superman’s red briefs?”

“Well, you could say that,” says the Nawab, laughing. “Though we don’t encourage you to wear it on the outside like he does. Our brand of thunderware is called Jockey, and you can see how that could only have been conjured up by a pukka red-blooded Ghoda like me.”

“Indeed I can,” I say, brightly. “So what exactly does Jockey thunderware do?”

“Well, Doodh, you could say the whole class of thunderware solutions is about outsourcing your innovation response management to RGSC. Many enterprises experiment with new technologies inside different ‘wannabe innovator’ teams in their IT group and their activities are kept hush-hush for obvious reasons. The most popular cachet for this activity is the ‘architecture group,’ populated by enthusiastic ‘home-grown archies.’ It’s not that they have nothing else to do, but if any technology is to be adopted then the trotter CIOs find it easy to let loose the archies within their current IT eco-system in harmless ways. It’s a play-safe option and one that is usually adopted where the culture is rooted in conservatism. Now these archies, being technology geeks who have no idea about costs and etiquette, can be pretty rigid about what can and cannot be supported. Their attitude, bordering on megalomania, has helped create a reputation for IT people having jobs that involve saying ‘no’ a lot.”

“I know exactly what you mean, Nawabji,” I sigh, thinking of my reputation in Baff-Tech and even outside. “I’m almost an archie myself.”