Weekly dose of IT related problems

According to news here in Finland every employee uses 53 minutes every week on average for solving IT related problems. Taking into account that some of us do this for work, and others even seems to work to create problems with IT i'm surprised the figure is not bigger.

The figure comes from research commissioned by Microsoft and performed by TNS Gallup in small or mid size finnish companies. The original press release can be found here, if you are interested and know finnish.

What the press release brings forward as noteworthy is that of the 22 % responders saying that they experience lots of IT related problems, being among the smallest and newest companies around, e-mail and office programs was causing most of the problems... The research however fails to state how many of those experiencing the problems use Microsoft products already or if there is any correlation.

One hour a week is reported to be a significant number. In Finnish small medium size companies that hour translates into 340 000 man days wasted per month as reported in the press release. That number seems already big and frightening, but in reality it is perhaps not all that much. 53 minutes every 5 days is 636 seconds per day, or between 10 and 11 minutes a day, that does not sound that much, or? Comparing 636 seconds to the 27 000 seconds spent at work every day is not a big deal, its just 2,4 % of the time.

Lets try to verify the calculation... Research stated that IT problems causes people to user 53 minutes every 5 days, fair enough, that would be 636 seconds per day. Assuming that every month has 21.5 working days, in reality it will vary between 19 and 23, depending on month and what kind of days off we have during a month... So, if we take 636 seconds, times 21,5 days per mont and multiplies that with 717 000 people working in the small medium size companies according to the source mentioned in the article, we get 9 804 258 000 seconds wasted per month, which sounds big. if we divide by 60 to get minutes, and further by 60 to get hours and again with 7,5 to get days i arrive at around 363 000 days wasted per month. Well probably the researcher calculated this some other assumption, perhaps taking vacations or holidays into account... Figure is well in the same ballpark.

I guess this could be compared to overlong coffee breaks, lunch breaks and other breaks with the difference that experiencing IT problems is not fun. A motivating work atmosphere was however mentioned as the most important factor making people efficient in their job for 95 %. Perhaps having long coffee breaks and lunch breaks or whatever gets the motivation into the work place is what we should consider. I guess workers simply compensate for the time taken by IT problems to some extent.
The research does not state how much of that time is unpaid overtime. Im however somehow doubting that Microsoft selling more Exchange or Office would decrease the time spent dealing with IT related problems in small or midsize companies. I feel the real issue here is the frustration and demotivation experiencing IT problems is having, not the time spent as such.

Estimating risk

Humans are not very good at estimating risks. Our life seems to be more focused on estimating medium size risks such that we need to avoid every day. Small risks can be seen as unproportionally big, or big risks can be seen as negligible.

Risk of events occurring more or less frequent is seen out of proportion. A risk occurring with low frequency will however be common if the number of possible situations where the risk can occur is very big.

Ending project failures

Seems like the idea of killing off projects looking like failures early on seems to be catching on according to recent blog entries like this one from Michael Krigsman.

Cancellation should however not be the primary mechanism for controlling projects. Every project should first be designed to succeed. For some projects only constraint given is a time table and a wish to either succeed or fail on time. Applying a cancellation to a poorly initiated project like this may not be the right thing to do.

Just because killing off a project was the right decision at one time does not mean that it is right to kill off every project in trouble.

Doing what you know or doing what is right

Often people do what they are used to do, without any reflection. If it has worked once people tend to hope it will work again. Stopping to think and gathering and looking at evidence is often ignored in favor of doing the normal thing. Since conditions will vary, what was done previously may not be the right thing to do.

When you are hired you are asked for experience, measured as number of years working with a given technology, indicating that you are expected to do the same over and over again what you are experienced at, regardless of what the conditions are.

There is also a second kind of experience, where you have seen lots and lots of different things and you know that doing what you are used and expected to is going to go in the wrong direction. There may not always be very much you can do the improve the situation.

A better approach would be to practice an evidence based approach. If there are no evidence, you need to first run an experiment in order to obtain the data needed to make a sound decision.

Efficient architecture

Architecture should not only state how parts relate to each other. Architecture should also describe the forces at work and how the particular tradeoff manifested in the selected architecture has been reached. Further more, information on what options has been discarded and why can be more valuable for understanding the solution than any description of relations.

In my opinnion architecture is about communication of the desired and undesired facets of our IT systems. A obscure arbitrary stack of boxes in a powerpoint picture does not realy provide all that much insight.

Presenting numbers

According to an article in Journal of Extension numbers are understood differently based on how they are presented. Apparently percentages or simple frequencies (1 out of 10) are more intuitively understood than a large absolute frequency (or number like 5 million each year) even though the information is the same. For indicating a small thing an absolute frequency will appear greater in magnitude. Hence an absolute frequency may appear more persuasive.

Personally i prefer using graphs which can convey both kind of information at the same time, as long as the graphs does not get too crowded or too simplistic.

Benefits from ignorance

There seems to be more to the saying "No news is good news" than one would first imagine. In a recent paper titled "Influence through ignorance" two researchers named Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo suggest that peoples decisions can be influenced simply by controlling the availability of further information. When no new information becomes available current views will hold, even though absence of recent information should signal caution. The decision maker wishing to influence (or sales man?) can then, when he has the suitable data to verify his view, simply stop investigations generating more data. If generating the data is expensive, complex or in some other way highly regulated, the chances are good that the decision maker/sales man will get away with it.

I guess this can also help explain some reasons why some poorly suitable IT systems are obtained by customers. Since NDA:s (non disclosure agreements) ensure that information is not freely passed on to the public only the message from the vendor is publicly available, and it is most certainly not in the vendors own interest to make negative information available for potential customers. On the buyer side all information can be argued to be valuable, since it gives the rational buyer more sound picture of the product to base the decision on. Some buyers will choose to disregard all information and just go for the decision, like a predator attacking a prey, but nothing can help them. We others can perhaps better try to estimate what the "silence" or "no news" being given us means with this model in mind.