No one--not even you--believes that IT is good.

Even if you like IT and think it has benefits, there are doubts--many doubts. From the PC guy in the Mac ads (who doesn't just represent Windows but all of IT) to IBM's often funny but incessantly negative ads about IT haplessness, we just don't believe that IT has performed up to expectations. I hate to use mass media advertising to back up my argument, but precisely because I think mass media is so shallow and panders to our most primitive impulses, I think it is our best barometer in this context. We all have a core belief, affirmed by mass media, that IT is fundamentally bad--with a hidden (or not) subtext that IT people are inferior and that IT is a drag upon the world's success.

Don't discount the role of primitive impulses in our view of IT. We are ruled by our emotions first and reason second. Most philosophers agree with John Locke, who said that anything that we associate with personal pleasure is categorized as good. That which gives us pain--or has the potential to--is classified as bad or evil.

IT is bad.

Look around you. For all the business book bromides that appear every year espousing the supposed success of companies using lousy data and anecdotal wisdom, there is a cottage industry in explaining--with equal doses of bad reasoning and data--why IT has failed to live up to its expectations.

But we wouldn't be so interested in books about IT's failures if it didn't strike at something deep inside us. The fact is that we are trained from an early age to think that IT is bad. Tell me you don't have negative bias about IT lurking within you somewhere. The negative association is probably hard wired in school, where some or all of the people you knew who liked computers had a negative physical appearance, or were socially clumsy, or otherwise ranked lower in the social order--remember, it just takes a vignette of negativity to color the whole picture. The association in the greater world is negative, not positive.

The perception carries through to adulthood and the adult version of a peer network, the company. IT is a service function and IT people are not trusted to understand the business or be socially adept enough to find out what business people really want from an IT system. IT has been unable to break out of its status in the corporation that was blueprinted when IT really was a service bureau and played a small role in the company--the place you went for a report. Today, IT is completely integrated into every part of business, yet the corporation hierarchy has changed not at all. It's not that IT has failed; it has succeeded, but our primitive impulses won't let us pull IT out of the basement.

The psychologists have an explanation for this kind of unrelenting negative association. They call it the "devil effect." It's our tendency to take a single negative trait and apply it broadly. For example, in psychology experiments, people deemed unattractive were thought to be less intelligent and capable than the good looking ones. Sadly, it's long been the basis of political campaigning, too. Find a negative trait in your opponent and push it until it colors voters' overall judgment about the candidate. The devil effect is just one of a long list of what psychologists call our "cognitive biases."

Turns out we have a hard time holding conflicting bits of information in our heads at once--we want it to be one way or the other to stop our brains from hurting. If one of those bits of information is deeply held, it becomes even harder to dislodge. In extreme terms, it's the Jim Jones effect: This guy must be offering me poison Kool-Aid for a good reason; I've come too far to believe otherwise.

Similarly, all those negative perceptions built up over time about IT make it difficult to believe that this perfectly normal looking, seemingly competent IT help desk employee is somehow going to screw things up. And it's not all about people. Think about the reams of negative press about Windows alone (lately much deserved: Can you imagine expecting a granny to know that she needs a discrete, 256mb video card in her new computer to run Vista in 3-D? Absurd.), or the complexity of user screens in enterprise software. This all balls up into a huge wad of negative karma.

Of course, IT really does fail. It really is complex. It really is expensive. But perception matters. And human perception--which can be completely whacked even when we think we're being totally rational--has to play a role in these outcomes. Did the system fail because it wasn't integrated correctly or because everyone assumed it was going to fail? The latter probably plays a larger role than we think.

The corollary to the devil effect is the halo effect--in which a positive trait is applied broadly. The halo effect applies in many different areas and can even affect history. For example, a research study demonstrated that in the days after 9/11, President Bush's approval ratings shot up--from 51% on September 10th to 86% on September 15th. But the same effect could be seen in areas that had little to do with crisis leadership, such as his handling of the economy.

The halo effect is especially important in business because it is a core part of marketing. The iPod lifts all of Apple's apples. The Indy concept car on TV makes that ugly family sedan on the show floor seem just a little less crappy.

But for the halo to shine brightest, it has to apply to the way the car company does business, not merely to its products. What I will call the business competency halo is what gives the company the kind of image that makes Wall Street analysts swoon (and give the company a break when its results stumble). The business competency halo also shines brightly on all those managers, consultants, analysts and academics who spend time working for the company or who point out how competent it is when others don't notice. What hiring manager doesn't view someone who worked at a company with a famous business competency halo--GE, IBM, etc.--with just a bit more interest, whether consciously or not? The candidate may have had nothing to do with GE's success, and may even have been among that cursed 10-20 percent of employees who supposedly get fired every year for bad performance.

How else could GE get away with firing 20 percent of its employees every year if it didn't have a halo? It has to be one of the worst management ideas ever perpetrated; few rational human beings who want a life outside of work can live under GE's Damoclean sword for long--but then Jack Welch freely admitted that he didn't consider whether anyone who worked for him at GE had a life outside of work. Yet employees are more likely to accept the constant threat of elimination if they figure that even three years of hell at a company so revered as GE will help them get a better job somewhere else.

IT won't shed its horns until it is allowed to come out of the basement. For years, analysts and CIO magazine have tried to browbeat CIOs into doing internal marketing to increase understanding, awareness and appreciation of IT. But I don't think things will really change unless the business makes a clear statement that it views IT as an equal partner.

Here's a radical idea: Start sending the CIO to the quarterly calls with Wall Street. Having the CFO there is redundant. CEOs should know the numbers. If they don't, having the CFO there probably isn't going to help. Having the CIO there instead would be more informative. Financial analysts don't know anything about IT, but would start learning. Change initiatives, which are almost always based on IT these days, could be highlighted to show the world how the company is changing to adapt to new challenges or bounce back from poor performance.

In fact, the CEO should have the CIO at his or her side whenever possible. Consider this interview with McKesson, the health care services company. The CEO didn't need to do it this way. IT is not wrapped up in the identity of the company as it would be for Dell or Apple, nor is an appreciation of McKesson IT necessary to make a judgment of the current or future performance of the company--at least as Wall Street defines performance today. But how much better the company looks and how much smarter the CEO seems by pairing up with the CIO.

This is how IT begins to lose the horns.

What do you think?

You do not have flash or javascript support.

Average (3 votes)

Reply