CIOZone.com - Professional Network for CIOs and IT Professionals

Reprinted from Keep the Joint Running.

A good debater, I'm told, can successfully argue either side of an issue. I've also been told, mostly by debaters, that this is desirable ... that learning to debate is an excellent way to create fair-minded citizens.

Being debaters, they do an excellent job of making this case. Ironically, they do not seem able to argue the other side of this issue very well. And as it's a proposition that has left the realm of evidence and logic and entered the realm of "everyone knows," they don't need to.

And yet, it's a dubious proposition, unless you think arguing the merits of both the round-earth and flat-earth theories of planetary form with equal success is a sign of wisdom.

Debaters are, culturally speaking, lawyers. The point is to win. Which side of the issue is correct doesn't much matter.

When I listen to a debate, at the end I'm only persuaded as to which of the two opponents is the superior arguer. I'm not convinced one position is superior to the other because the whole point is that the superior debater could just as easily persuade me of the opposite proposition.

Compare that to how research scientists approach the world. They certainly spend a lot of time arguing with each other, face-to-face and in published journals. The difference: When scientists argue, they're trying to understand the evidence, the implications of each others' theories, and what additional evidence they need to collect to find out who (if anyone) is right.

So when I read, say, Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics (2009), it's clear Susskind and Hawking had the same goal -- to better understand how the universe works. Their arguments were all intended to further that goal.

Few people have the gifts necessary to understand in even the most superficial sense that the universe is a hologram, with information at its boundary creating the illusion of matter and energy in its interior. I'm not one of them.

Most of us, though, have more than enough mental horsepower to understand how our IT organizations work, and how they could work better. This doesn't take genius. An understanding of how scientists go about their business might be useful, though, seeing as how it has a centuries-long track record of actually working.

Here it is: Scientists understand they can't ever prove a theory. All they can do is try to disprove them ("falsify them," according to the vocabulary introduced by Karl Popper, the epistemologist who first explored this subject in depth). Fail to falsify one enough times in enough ways and researchers start to gain confidence that they're on the right track.

The way they try to falsify a theory is to explore its implications. Some of those implications result in predictions -- that under a specific set of conditions, the researchers should be able to observe a specific phenomenon. The researchers then either create those conditions or find them, and either observe the predicted phenomenon or something different. If they observe something different they've falsified the theory.

Let's take an example -- the popular theory that running IT as a business is "best practice" and doing so will lead to IT delivering more value to the enterprise than it otherwise would.

To be considered scientific, this theory has to lead to testable predictions. For example, if IT organizations that are run as a business deliver more value than any others, then companies within which they are run this way should be more successful and profitable than competitors that don't.

Except this would be a bad test. The theory isn't that running IT as a business is better than the average of all other ways. The theory is that it's best practice -- that it is superior to all known alternatives.

So a better test would be to compare running IT as a business to a specific alternative. Here's one: Integrate IT into the enterprise, providing strong strategic business leadership and disciplined governance. Compare the success and profitability of companies that use the two different approaches and you'll have made a start.

You'd think that given how many industry pundits have promoted running IT as a business with perfect confidence, at least one might have performed a comparative test along these lines.

Maybe they have. I've seen no trace.

In The Devil's DP Dictionary (1981), Stan Kelly-Bootle proposed that computer science is to science as plumbing is to hydraulics.

It appears the same is true of management science, only more so.

 

---

 

Robert Lewis is president of IT Catalysts, Inc., a consultancy focused on improving IT organizational effectiveness and integration with the enterprise. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

 

---

Copyright 2010, IS Survivor Publishing, all rights reserved.

Comments (1)

	1. 01-26-2010 11:31
	An interesting preamble (but, perhaps as ex-PFC Wintergreen wrote to Colonel Cargill, "your prose is too prolix").    To the core, is running IT as a business within a business best? Unlikely. I suspect your integrated model is best (though admit to not having empirical data).    I can say I worked at Nolan, Norton in the 1980's. NNC was one of the places that the business-within-a-business was formed. My view is that a metaphor morphed into a dictum.    The metaphor says measure your inputs and outputs in business terms and, more importantly, how the business views them. When determining "what next" do it within a business framework, with business participation, not a technical one as an IT function separate and distinct from the business.    But people get excited by what sounds good, what clients want, what will sell. Soon enough CIO's run for-profit businesses and are tough internal negotiators (for their profit) etc. What any of that has to do with helping ABC Co. succeed has always been beyond me.    In one sense IT is properly managed as a business in a business. There are non-technical measures you should manage to. For instance, you can and should measure IT spending over time, its rate of change, what business purposes its used for. You can and should measure the business/user quality of systems in use and the scope of the business they support.     You can and should understand the non-IT portion of the business, their ability and willingness to help lead and participate in projects with IT content, etc., etc.     But IT is part of a business, not a business unto itself. Its not a profit center. Its a set of professional disciplines and people in support of a company. It says so on our paychecks. Registered

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.