Five Things a CIO Hates About Information Technology

Once on a great visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, I got my first chance to see pieces of history from our nation’s space program.  Two pieces of history are pictured here – a slide rule and a pneumatic tube cylinder.  At first, I thought it was so impressive that we could get to the moon without all this fancy technology.

  How could a CIO be so biased against technology?  The pneumatic tube was the Internet of its day.  And what cool smart geek back in the day didn’t calculate their logarithms using a slide rule?

Why are we so biased against technology today?  Here are five reasons why.

The Scarecrow Effect.  If something goes wrong on your desktop, you may call for a desk-side visit from a technician.  It never fails that it never fails … what I mean is that when someone comes by, and you attempt to re-create the failure, it doesn’t fail at all. Of course, when they leave, the failure recurs.  This is a proven effect!

Murphy’s Law.  Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And it often does.  A corollary to this law relates to the demons of demos.  If something works hundreds of times flawlessly, it will fail once publicly in front of hundreds of people.  This is a proven law!

Moore’s Law. This law is loosely attributed to the prediction that computer hardware doubles its performance every 18 months.  That’s wonderful.  Except this makes whatever you have obsolete in about 18 months.  With more and more capability being delivered in software, end-user environments will become bloated and screech to a halt – into you finally sell out and upgrade.  Just wait long enough, and you’ll see this truth.

Tonjua’s Law.  Tonjua is an Enterprise Architect.  She knows technology and she’s a good mother.  Her daughter Jewel is safely an adult so it’s probably ok to let this secret out.  Tonjua always had a challenge disciplining Jewel.  She was generally well-behaved and never a demanding child.  I remember that Tonjua tried hard to get her to like the technology of video games, so that she could restrict their use as a punishment.  Many industries do this to us. Just as we get used to something, it’s “taken away,” perhaps replaced by a newer version or a newer model – sometimes not replaced at all.