42

Ignorance is bliss

I don’t see much enthusiasm for my geeky posts, but I have to post here just one more before we can talk about their generalized relevance.

Back in my large IT outsourcing company days, it happened to me about once a month that I got a call from the “business development” team with a question formulated somewhere along these lines:

“We are bidding on a new contract. I cannot tell you who the potential client is. There is about 6,500 users and they are using Microsoft Exchange. How many FTEs (full time employees) do you need to support it?”
Then the conversation went as follows (starting with me):

Me:
I don’t know, it depends. How many servers do they have?

BD guy:
I don’t know.

Me:
How many sites, how many mailboxes?

BD guy:
I told you, 6,500 users.

Me:
That’s not what I asked. We have clients where the number of mailboxes is twice the number of users. What version of exchange are they using?

BD guy:
We only know the number of users. I think they are on Exchange version xxxx but they want to migrate.

Me:
So let me ask you a few more questions, tell me if you have answers to any of them:
How many servers, what type of servers, how many physical and administrative sites? Do they have fax servers, archiving systems, media servers, Unified messaging servers and messaging hygiene servers? What is in-house and what is SaaS? Do they have a proper high availability setup? Do they have BES servers? How many mobile users they have and how many corporate applications do they have on those devices? How many systems will use the Exchange servers as a relay? What kind of reporting will they require? What is the nature of their business? How sophisticated are the users? Are there labour unions in the picture? I could go on, but this would be a good start.

BD guy:
I don’t have that information, but you are the expert, you should be able to give me a rough estimate. This is a very competitive bid and it is getting a very high level of attention from (….) and you should be able to provide an answer based on your experience.

Me:
In that case, the answer is 42.

If you do not know the meaning of the answer, watch the short clip from the movie and watch the whole thing when you have the time. Most of the time, our conversation ended with me explaining the meaning of 42 followed by giving the desperate salesman a bogus number. If we were both in a good mood, I would gave him practical examples (as I could to you) of the implications of any of the above questions about the environment.

I went through so many of these exercises that after a while I had to ask myself how much the answer really matters. If I worked for an enterprise that actually cared about such details then maybe, but I had so many other uncertainties about any of the clients we managed that these actual questions about the actual environment dwarfed in importance next to them.

The bidding process

I also felt sorry (sort of, not really) for the salesmen. I believe that they are under pressure, I believe that there is high level attention behind every major bid. I also know that the process is competitive. The only thing that matters is winning the bid, which is a mostly self-referencing process.
What determines the bid is the assumptions about the other bids, not the projected cost of providing the service, which, as I tried to illustrate, is not based on any real knowledge. Lots of magic goes into the process, the presentations are filled with tables, numbers and cost projections, but ultimately, they are just a guessing game. Trying to guess the actual cost to the enterprise at the moment of seeking an outsourcer as well as the guesses of the other bidders to the same project. The last element is the contract. How much money the outsourcer can make on the contract depends greatly on its ability of fuzzy up what the contract covers. If the salesman had precise information, the bid would likely be too high. The more remains uncovered, the more opportunity there will be to get more money out of the client.
The only function of the salesman asking questions from the subject matter experts is to cover his own behind, not to find any answers.

The work

The unpredictability factor is just as bad when it comes to the work. I lived through times when my team was cut in half while at the very same time our workload was increased by about 10% and management philosophy took a 180 degree turn. How can it be done? By doing less work. No reporting, no documentation maintenance, fewer health checks, fewer improvement recommendations, more pushbacks on borderline cases, more ticket ping pong and a lot more stress, but it can be done. To a great extent, service work is flexible.
Knowing all the details, having all the answers to the questions like the ones I outlined above would be very beneficial to the people doing actual work, but not for their management. Analysts want to manage their work, management want to manage the analysts. Their goals are not compatible and management have a lot to gain from willful ignorance.

The clients

The organizations who turn to outsourcers are fooled into thinking that they will save themselves some headache and even some money on the top of it. Information technology can be quite overwhelming and the IT leadership of these companies seek outsourcing as a pressure valve. If they can hand over some of the decisions to supposed experts, to those whose business is dedicated to information technology, they can relieve themselves of the burden of minute decision making. They just don’t want to bother dealing with the details. The clients are actually seeking the luxury of ignorance.

Considering all these drivers it should not be surprising that every new client brings a new set of surprises, that no transition is ever smooth and that by the end of it everybody involved has a bitter taste in their mouth.

Outsourcing is faith based computing. Ignorance is by design.

In information technology outsourcing, 42 is the answer sought.

Let me illustrate with this fantastic little comedy sketch:

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Writing posts like these last three here on the company’s internal blog led to my eventual dismissal into early retirement. With this post, I am done with the geek talk, but I will try to expand on their lessons in upcoming ones.