I was just thinking about terrorists, because I read a provocative article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. And before that, I had been thinking about auditors, because my job involves working with people who worry a great deal about what auditors think. And I was thinking about Thinkpads, the laptop made by IBM.
I am still reading the small, intense book about terrorism that I bought at a bookstore in London while we were on vacation, yet in a way I think that I learned as much about why terrorists do what they do from the NYT article, written generally on the topic of the hideous actions taken by kidnappers and terrorists in Iraq. The article is well worth reading, though intense (at one point, about three quarters of the way through, the writer says 'if you're still reading....', because he knows that this is not light stuff, not something that people enjoy having with their Sunday morning breakfast). He goes on to make several key points (not gainsaying all that went before); terrorists who perform and record hideous acts are doing so for two reasons: it raises their credibility with people who are moved by that kind of activity (raises what used to be called 'street cred'), and in so doing it makes them more of a 'player'; further, it brings others into their camp, if not up to their campfire, and inseminating them with the thought that truly, anything is permissible. And the other thing they do is present us, and any who have proclaimed a desire to eliminate them, with this conundrum: if you are seeking to eliminate the swamp rats, you'd better be willing to get face-down into the swamp. High tech, long distance weapons do not kill cockroaches; immediate, on the scene in-your-face actions do. In so saying, they are betting that a civilized nation will recoil in disgust from what is found to be necessary, and retire from the battlefield, leaving them the victors; if they do not, then they become ideologically the same as those they wish to destroy, losing any mantle of righteousness. I do not like this argument, as it is akin to 'yadda yadda yadda..and the terrorists will have won', but it seems to have several kernels of truth, to me.
Auditors -- well, one connection is simple: Auditors are corporate terrorists. And I would guess that they get the same message: truly, anything is permissible. Now, I don't deal with auditors routinely, but I do deal with and work for people who do. From that, I get the message that all bets are off. Used to be, you could be audited against general standards. Accountants had (and still have, I guess ) Generally Accepted Accounting Principles; doctors and lawyers have professional standards; other professions do, too. So your performance in what you do could be checked against those standards, however vague they might be. Over time, standards got tighter, thanks in part to our pals at, say, Enron (who recently filed to have their case moved out of Houston due to inflamed passions there -- said they couldn't get a fair trial. As if that were ever at the top of their personal accountability list. Or even on the list) and WorldCom and all of their ilk. Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley, referred to by the cognoscienti as SarBox or Sox, came, intending to hold those executives personally liable for the integrity of their financial statements. Okay, thats fine. But now, apparently, we have auditors with a licence to kill. Not literally -- not yet -- but in all practical purposes. I recently was briefed on the results of an audit wherein the auditor wrote up things that he felt were 'inefficient'. Not wrong, not questionable, not opening a liability or exposure -- just 'inefficient'. And the corporation (for which read, the peons in my department) had to scramble before deciding that they could ignore the comments, this time.
I think what's happened is two things -- first, the people affected by the auditors and the audits directly, having to sit with them, spoon feed them information, and cosset them, are distant, organizationally, from the people who direct that they be sat with, fed, and cossetted. They simply don't know what its like. And second, the auditors are being told, find dirt. There's always dirt; if you can't find it, you're not any good at what you do.
This isn't the way it ought to be. Auditors can provide an honest, unbiased, standards-based look at how an organization performs, but they're being turned into corporate assassins by managers who believe that by unleashing auditors without restraint, they are crafting a personal and organizational defense, should legal liability ensue at some point. How could we have known about (fill in the blank) -- we let the auditors see all they wanted to! In essence, they're outsourcing insight of their own organizations, and the devil take the hindmost.
And as we know, corporate executives surely do know how to outsource.
Thinkpads -- well, maybe they don't know enough about outsourcing. I've got a Thinkpad that was issued to me by the company that I work for. Its an acceptable machine -- not as sleek or light as the Dell laptop that my wife's got, and with no where near the battery life (the battery meter was built by IBM's marketing department, I think; in one on-battery editing session, it went from '61 minutes left' to '49 minutes left' in about six minutes. And isn't that what marketing people do -- say performance is going to be about twice as good as it eventually turns out to be?) It's a slow, cranky machine, too -- waiting for it to boot all the way up is about a 5-7 minute process; I sometimes imagine little gnomes inside, down in the engine room, swearing as they shovel coal into the boiler that's being stoked to provide power. I half-expect to hear a steam whistle blow, hear a slow chuff--chuff--chuff.... The Dell comes right up -- not instantly (which is what we all want, I think), but in about half the time. Its nice.
I do know that I have unreasonable expectations when it comes to PC software. I expect elegance and functionality. I get good enough, with bells and whistles. Sometimes the bells and whistles are appreciated, and sometimes -- as in the case of the latest release of Quicken -- they annoy and irritate me enough that I delete the product and swear in the general direction of California (which, last I heard, was where Intuit is based).
Take mainframe capacity planning, for example -- a subject about which I know a little. I think that for, oh, seventy or eighty percent of it, doing the planning is pretty straightforward. Put the numbers in, turn the crank, look at the output for reasonability. That kind of planning should be readily accessible to anyone with an interest. Does such software exist?
Hah.
Once you add the complication of performance -- not just 'will this workload fit into the space that's open in this box' but also 'will it perform to these standards', then you start getting in to modeling. There are some very bright people working in modeling of computer software, and they know buckets of interesting things, including things that perhaps are only of interest to other modeling geeks. Poisson distribution, anyone? So I would understand that software for them would be more difficult to understand and to use. But I've seen some of it, written by some very bright people, and I've been told by others that this is truly excellent software. Which has led me to the conclusion that either I'm not as knowledgeable as I think about it -- totally possible -- or the emperor really doesn't have any clothes.
I know, I know -- if I'm so smart, why don't I write some of this stuff?
How does inability, so I can't, and lazyness, if I could, hit you?
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