How Much Is Enough?

Beware the technology that makes us more efficientit actuallymay increase inefficiency and defeat the business purpose.

BY PAUL ROLICH

Call Me Ishmael

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. It was the best of times, it wasthe worst of times. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyedby madness. What do we have here? We have some of the best knownopening linesthree from novels, one from a poem. Authors and poetswork for years to find the perfect opening line, the line that notonly will grab their readers attention but immortalize the author.So, after endless agonized hours, do these bits of glory springforth from a gin- or drug-induced genius insight? Or are they justhappenstance? Is inspiration really necessary? What if we couldautomate the whole process? You knowuse a computer to write somegreat literature. After all, we live in an age in which we areasked to create computer systems to automate all human tasks.

Automate This Process!

The longest quoted line above is only 60 characters long. Tomake things easier, we will allow only 30 distinct characters(lower case alpha, space, comma, apostrophe, question mark). Thatmeans if we created every possible 60-character opening line, wewould have 4.2391288 combinations. Now I know that is a pretty bignumber. But in present day computing terms, it isnt all that big.Last November, the 40th known Mersenne prime was discovered. (AMersenne prime is a prime of the form 2P-1. The first Mersenneprimes are 3, 7, 31, 127, etc. There are only 40 known Mersenneprimes.) That number is 220,996,011 -1. Now that is a bignumber6,320,430 decimal digits.

So, lets assume I have designed a system that will create ameasurably infinite number of opening lines. I have developed avery sophisticated algorithm that eliminates a lot of themeaningless nonsense a true random character generator willproduce. We could be, of course, really pedantic about this wholething. We could populate columns number 1 through 59 with a andthen run column 60 through the 30 possibilities. Then kick column59 over to b and continue the process. Such a process ultimatelywould produce all possible combinations, but even in geek think itisnt very efficient. There are literally thousands of rules we canapply that will make the task much less onerous. For example: Wewill not allow any character to be repeated more than twice in arow with the exception of the space character. The opening line ofMoby Dick will contain more spaces than alphas. As the finishedopening lines come rolling out of the system, they will be fed intoa spell checker (for right now, we will deal only with AmericanEnglishnot to be jingoistic but practical). They then will beindexed and stored in an Exabyte Raid 5 array. (Exa means 1018 justas Tera means 1012.) Now I am in business. I am ready to market myproduct.
Some well-healed poet who desires to write the definitive poem forhis or her generation will come to me for help. He or she gives mea few key words, and for a fee, I return a reasonably perusablefinite selection of opening lines. He or she can spend a month orso sorting through them and pick a winner. If the first batch isntfruitful, we always can deliver another few hundred thousand.

The uses of this thing actually are much more significant. Infact, we can recreate all past, present, and future Englishliterature with my little machine. In The Library of Babel, JorgeLuis Borges used a similar premise to create the universal library.Each volume in his library contained 410 pages. I am dealing onlywith 60-character segments, but we theoretically can string those60-character segments together to create it all.

Gimme a Break

OK. So, now youre thinking I finally have gone over the edge.How can this possibly relate to your need to maintain an efficientand useful data processing (or information technology) division ina 21st-century insurance enterprise? The answer lies in theanalysis of how we can use technology efficiently. We are operatingin times where we rush to quantify and digitize everything thatremotely can be considered useful data. Then once we have thatdata, we struggle to build automated computer systems to dosomething useful with that data. The business folks, thenontechies, look to us for solutions to their business problems,and it is our responsibility to provide those technical solutionswhen they make sense. It also is part of our job to push backoccasionally and point out circumstances where applying technologymay not be the best solution. My first- line generator may seemridiculous, but in this business, we all are asked routinely toprovide similarly ridiculous technology solutions to commonproblems or processes.

Sometimes Manual Is Better

How often does someone in your organization crank up MS Word,type in an address, select the envelope and label tool, and figureout how to feed an envelope manually into a printer all for thesake of printing an address on an envelope? Is that really a gooduse of technology? If an old IBM Selectric were available, the taskcould have been completed in a quarter of the time. It also ispossible to write addresses by hand. Too often we want to use acool tool when we dont need to. I think it makes perfect sense touse Word to create bulk envelope addresses or labels. I dont thinkit makes any sense to use it for a single mailing.
You think I am being trivial? My group recently was creating aseries of high-value opt-in e-mails that were being delivered todifferent groups of customers and distributed via an in-house bulke-mail system. There are a half-dozen steps involved in using thesystem from creation of the message to selecting lists to testingto release. Some of the customer groups had thousands of users. Onegroup had seven users, and one had a single user. Did it make senseto use a complex system to send e-mail to eight addresses? I dontthink so. I could be wrong. (We used the system anyway.)

Enabling Technologies

I think we all agree e-mail is an enabling technology. It oftenhas been called the killer application for the Internet. Enablingtechnology has become a terribly overused buzzword. It is appliedto everything from XML (as in XML is an enabling technology) tocorporate intranets. Lets use a high-level business definition andsay an enabling technology allows us to fulfill some businessrequirement more efficiently than we did before the technology wasapplied to the process. By that definition, we probably all willagree e-mail is an enabling technology. It provides for documented,instantaneous communication both within and without ourorganizations. We all agree we could not do our jobs withoute-mail.

So?

So, I picked a day at random last week. During my regularworking hours, I received a couple-hundred work e-mails and foundit necessary to send 70 of my own (mostly in reply to the inboundmessages). That is insane. And it doesnt even account for thethousands of spam and virus-infected e-mail our IT guysautomatically filter out for us. Believe me, I am not thatimportant. Seventy people do not need to hear from me today viae-mail. Nor do I need to be sent an e-mail that is actually a trainofe-mail that goes back for weeks and that I am expected to read,digest, and respond to in the next few minutes. Then there are theindividuals who feel it necessary to copy at least six people onevery e-mail they send to me (always making sure to include myboss). I presume the intention here is to tell everyone thisparticular e-mail is really important (and, by presumption, all theothers arent). This isnt enabling technologythis is irritatingtechnology. Dont get me wrongwe need e-mail. It should be a trueenabling technology. The problem is we havent yet learned how touse the technology properly. I suspect in reality we waste asignificant amount of work time with this and other enablingtechnologies. How about the guy who always responds to your e-mailin five seconds? Do you think maybe he isnt as productive as hecould be?

1984

Then there is another use of technology automation that lets ussee what our employees really are up to. Say you publish allprocedures and policy information on a corporate intranet. Letsassume this information is updated regularly to comply with themyriad government, regulatory, and compliance rules we work with.All employees are expected to be current with new regulations.Senior management executives decree you need to start tracking whois reading these things regularly. Moreover, they want to knowwhich sections are read the most and at what time of the day. Isthat really a useful business process, or is it playing bigbrother? If your organization finds it necessary to spy on itsemployees to determine whether they are doing what they aresupposed to be doing, maybe the organization has the wrongemployees (or maybe the wrong managers). Cameras in cell phonesseemed like a pretty good idea for a minuteuntil they started beingused for immoral and illegal purposes.

Once a Geek

Dont get me wrong. I love technology. I was that kid who couldbuild a radio or a rocket (real rockets, not those off-the-shelfsafe rockets) from junk I had in my workshop. Technology is in myblood. But that doesnt mean every use of technology is good. Try tokeep your organization from using technology to enable inefficiency(or foolishness). My first-line generator was a stupid idea, but itreally wasnt all that wacky. Lets accept the fact not everythingcan (or should) be digitized and processed. I have said it before,but I will say it again: There are no IT decisionsonly businessdecisions. Make certain you are a part of the businessdecision-making process, and then you can ensure the technologysolution is the right one (or, at the very least, not the wrongone).

Its Up To Us

We may be technologists, but we shouldnt be just technologists.We should be leading our business in the proper use of technology.Sometimes all we need is to suggest guidelines: If you cant saywhat you need in two or three lines, then maybe e-mail isnt the wayto go. If the technology solution costs more in time and resourcesthan the process it replaces, then it definitely isnt thesolution.