by Michael Warden (a not-too-distant portfolio manager for MSIS)
Apologies for the poetic license, Bill:
To tolerate, or not to tolerate, that is the question—Tom - I appreciate your thoughts on the blog and you take an interesting perspective on this one. Should we tolerate investments? Is there something better we can do on behalf of our customers? What would that be?
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
I don't believe we intend to use the word Tolerate as an act of submission to fate and to the interminable status quo. As part of Portfolio Management within MSIS, we are using Tolerate to expose a decision that is being made. We want to be sure we understand what is happening with an investment. It should make us queasy. It should make us uncomfortable. It should make us wonder if this is the best situation. All of these are good questions to ask, and our Tolerate portfolio action is intended to draw these questions out to be sure we are delivering the right value for the organization.
Let me step back: Broadly you are referring to our chosen dispositions for investments within MSIS, which fall into the rubric of TIME - Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate. In your outline you reference four options - however they don't match to our 4 dispositions within the portfolio. Each of our Portfolio Owners are working with MSIS to make discrete decisions about our best path forward given a scarcity of resources. There is more demand than we have supply - so some places require resources to sustain them in order to prevent them from failing.
In your 1-3 (build, refactor, buy) are all variations of 'Invest' - meaning we are going to put more resources into this area than others as chosen by our Portfolio Owners. Your #4, Tolerate, is a choice our Portfolio and Investment Owners make - to put the minimum necessary resources into an investment to keep it operational.
It's important to note that these are temporal decisions - to Tolerate 'for now', generally a period of at most 6 months before we revisit that. These are better than the past because we are making conscious choices. We used to give a perception of constant investment everywhere and under-delivery due to that being unreasonable. This was not due to lack of architectural design or tooling, but a lack of focus within the same scarcity of resources we face today.
Consider, however, that there are two additional options when choosing how to handle our investments:
- We can Migrate the investment to an existing solution that meets their needs. (Note that this is specifically one of the MSIS IT Principles: 'Leverage existing platforms'. ) We can often help someone use something else simply by helping them realize it is available.
- We can also Eliminate our investment. This is a choice made by our portfolio owners - not by us - but we have a role to prompt an honest discussion. Just because we 'can' use IT to solve something doesn't mean we 'should'. We often don't expose the resources it takes to use IT to solve a problem vs. the resources it would take to do the next best alternative. This may be the best option - to set them free and be honest that it isn't the best idea to have us solve their issue.
By choosing to Tolerate, Migrate or Eliminate we are seeking to expose conscious choices and business decisions - recognizing that often we - and IT in general - may not be the best way for the Medical School to solve a particular challenge. And that raises the broadest question - how are we expending the resources of the school to deliver value? Does it require us to Invest to achieve the best value to cost balance? Should we help them to Eliminate or Migrate that investment to something else? It takes time to figure this out, and it takes time to understand our options - until then, it is appropriate to make as transparent as possible that we are going to Tolerate the investment until we have enough information to determine the right trajectory for the investment.
Let us be careful, though, not to let conscience make cowards of us. We use these TIME dispositions to direct action - and that action is really what I believe you are calling for. I agree - wholeheartedly - that an orientation toward action that is in the best interest of our customers should be a quiet, persistent impatience within us all. Let us take that action - enterprises of great pitch and moment - and continue to make the Medical School great through our efforts.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,And thus the Native hue of ResolutionIs sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,And enterprises of great pitch and moment,With this regard their Currents turn awry,And lose the name of Action.
Michael, having read your rebuttal, I'm not sure we have much to disagree about. My point, and again it may well simply be a semantic one, is that "tolerate" is a passive form of "accept" that does not imply any active analysis. We may tolerate a noisy neighbor or a bad driver because we make a choice not to invest in researching possible resolutions.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to our coworkers, work environment, work output, and customers, I don't believe we should passively accept (i.e. tolerate) situations that are less than we think they could be. That is not to say that after proper engagement with the right stakeholders on a particular topic, we might not decide to accept the status quo, but I don't believe this is "tolerating" and I don't get the sense that you do either.
Your counterpoint clearly suggests that that "tolerate" is an active process, which doesn't square well with the dictionary definition or what I consider to be common use of the word. Maybe changing the term to "Maintain" would be a better characterization of what we actually do when we choose not to invest in product enhancements.
As an aside, although I did not emphasize it in my post, we should not tolerate bad behavior either. Confronting it may be uncomfortable and may even have short term negative consequences, but in the long run, if handled in a mature manner, results in a healthier organization.