I was pleased to join a Major Tech Company’ (MTC’s) Data and AI Summit as the keynote last month. It has taken me some time to reflect on what I learned. In particular:
- MTC client attendees are hyper-focused on keeping short-term costs low.
- The short-term focus may prevent them from seeing ways to create longer-term savings and position themselves for the future (e.g., AI).
- While I’m a firm believer in “efficiency,” in my view “effectiveness” must come first. And “do we understand and are we meeting our customers’ needs” was not discussed.
- These points suggest a larger issue–lack of trust between IT and its business counterparts that can do enormous damage.
Let me expand. This conference was for MTC’s largest customers, with about forty in attendance. To be clear, I’m not a techie. I advise companies on data quality, which often puts me at the nexus between business and IT departments.
The MTC presentations were outstanding. After three or four I spotted a pattern–everyone was focused on how customers could use MTC’s latest tools and technologies to cut costs. On one level, Moore’s Law implies that companies ought to get more for less from their tech investments. And, since the publication of Nicholas Carr’s provocatively titled, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” some companies have come to see IT as less strategic.
I had expected the conference to include topics on innovation, platforms that could make experimentation with AI more effective, and tools to speed newly-developed AI models into production. I asked around–both attendees and MTC hosts. All confirmed my observation–Tech departments focus obsessively on keeping costs low today! MTC in turn, works hard to understand their customers’ realities and innovate to help them do so.
I’ve reflected on this for some time now and concluded the laser focus on short-term costs is not healthy. First, the short-term focus means companies miss longer-term opportunities. For example, “technical debt” (or “data debt”) is spinning out of control. Technical debt involves the expenses associated with maintaining multiple copies of data and keeping them aligned. MTC sources cite six to seventeen copies as typical and up to a few hundred in extreme cases. Multiple copies allow each silo to control its own copy. After all, possession of data conveys a sense of power!
But c’mon!
Slowing, stopping, and eventually reducing technical debt is a better way to take meaningful cost out of IT. Doing so means the department can respond more quickly to requests for new features and it frees up money to invest in AI and other technologies. MTC introduced a concept called “data gravity” that aims to move work to the mainframe as one means to do so. It is well worth exploring!
Second, the laser focus on cost obscures attention to effectiveness. Business opportunities and risks change all the time, and IT must respond. If dialog is not continuous, gaps between what the business needs and what IT provides only grow. This is not in anyone’s interest!
I fear the short-term focus is a symptom of a larger problem–mistrust between businesspeople and their tech counterparts. Businesspeople don’t understand enough about what IT does to know whether it is worth what it costs, and IT doesn’t know enough about the business to provide more value. Both sides, and business performance, suffers.
Trust problems take consistent effort, over a long period of time, to resolve. When I encounter them, I usually recommend “pizza diplomacy” as a first step. The idea is simple: Call your counterpart and say, “I think we need to talk more and to get the ball rolling, let’s do lunch. Attilio’s, the pizza place, is nearby. But if you’re short of time, tell me what kind of pizza you like, and I’ll come to you.”
Other than a boss’s “get in my office now,” it’s harder to turn down a “pizza meeting” than almost any other. The next best alternative is, “Can I buy you a drink after work some evening?” (though technically different, I still call this “pizza diplomacy.”)
The objective, of course, is to lower the barriers that keep people apart. Don’t start with, “Kelly, our departments are at each other’s throats. Your side is wrong and I’m here to get your side to stop.”
Start instead with an icebreaker, “Kelly, we’ve got some serious issues to discuss. But let’s not go there right now. Instead, let’s get to know each other a little bit. Tell me about your next vacation.” Then let the conversation follow its natural path. And no matter what, end with “This has been good. Let’s plan on doing it again in a couple of weeks.”
I’ve become a big fan of pizza diplomacy. IT sorely needs it with its business counterparts. And, by the way, I’m from New Jersey. We like thin crust!
