The Internet doesn't make people stupid. Incompetent education makes people stupid.

Here's something that must be true.  I just read it on the internet.  Ivan Schneider's article does not really say that the internet is making people stupid, although one could read it that way.  What he really means to say (and does so) is that the internet facilitates a number of social disruptions and people need to be made aware of that potential so they can guard against it.  However, that conclusion is only half-complete.

You'll probably want to know how this topic is related to the overall topic of the blog. Well, if Mr. Schneider is correct, the quality of governance decisions is going to suffer pretty badly if the rising generation of leaders has been made stupid by the internet.  First, let me say that my recent few months of extended exposure to the start-up community allowed me to meet a great many young coders, sales people and business founders. There are a great many pretty smart cookies out there.  You'll be working for some of them soon enough.

But for the moment let's swallow the conventional wisdom (gained, no doubt, from the internet) that there are a scary number of brain-dead employees and voters out there.  You cannot simply blame that on the internet.

The real symptom is that people (some stupid, some just cynical; you can be the judge on that) say stupid things in a public forum and other stupid people read and believe them. That, of course, has been going on for millennia; the Roman emperors felt that they would remain in power as long as the kept providing the people with bread and circuses. Today, the internet provides these already-stupid (or cynical) people with a wider range for their pronouncements and provides other already-stupid people with greater access to those other stupid people masquerading as educators, journalists, (ahem - bloggers) and of course politicians.

The real way to solve this is not to try and educate the already-stupid people (who have already demonstrated resistance to conventional education) on the internet's dangers, which are already widely known to those who are not stupid.  The way to solve it is in the problem statement: if we can prevent people from being already-stupid in the first place, then they will see these politicians, analysts, journalists and other con artists for what they are.

How do we do that?  We can't do much about the varying levels of gray matter that nature furnishes us with, but we can help people make the most of what they have.  Let's start by stopping trying to convince children and young adults that they don't need to use their noodles at all because someone will make sure they come to no harm.

We need education that includes critical thinking that enables a student to start connecting the dots and, most importantly, to identify when something is poorly supported or biased.  Education that requires some degree of real learning of useful information and requires retention of that information.   Education that does not depend on children to somehow come up with knowledge as a result of group learning exercises.  Education that does not permit the dysfunctional few to impede the progress of the vast majority of future employees, entrepreneurs and taxpayers.  Education where an A is not given just for effort or for having a compelling background story of social deprivation, real or imagined.

This isn't a rant about teachers, for the most part.  Most the problems can be laid on the institutions within which the educators labor despite the obstacles placed in front of them.  We need education systems that do not cocoon the actual educators in layers of union protections that enforce mediocrity - and does not treat and compensate the educators as unskilled labor.  The fact is that most school districts and colleges take in more than enough money to compensate teachers and professors fairly (meaning commensurate with the tremendous responsibility we wish them to shoulder), but it is wasted on layers of bureaucracy and on capital expenses that are more for the sake of competing with other wasteful institutions than for adding any actual learning.

It seems doubtful that the political system, which more than any other depends on feeding rubbish to the masses, has any intention of improving the situation. Anyone think otherwise?

Strategy - just enough to understand is the way to go

My first assignment as a contractor was to write the Strategic Plan for the submarine fleet computing capabilities.  As a former Army officer, about all that I knew about any of that was what Tom Clancy (RIP) had just published in the Hunt  for Red October (yes, it was many years ago), which the Navy acknowledged represented an accurate picture of their capabilities ... 10 years earlier.  Meanwhile, the rest of us had just taken ownership of the IBM AT, the first PC that you could actually use for business in much the way we do today.  It was very hard to imagine where they should be in 10 more years when we could not really absorb where they were now.

Your first opportunity to "do strategy" may have seemed just as high of a cliff to climb.  My boss showed me a process for coming up with a strategy, which I have used several times since, but I recall thinking "is that all there is?".  Of course it is not that simple.  The template is not the strategy.  The hard part is having the expertise, vision and intuition to come up with the right answers to put into the framework.  That skill is what those massive corner-office salaries, bonuses and stock options are supposed to be paying for.  The consultant's role is to help focus the executives' attention long enough, in a structured enough manner, to get those highly-compensated neurons firing.

There is no shortage of books on how to "do strategy" and no shortage of consultants willing to do it for you. You cannot outsource ownership of the actual strategy.  It's fine to get a facilitator, and a graphic artist to sex it up, but a successful strategy is not something people read.  They need to experience the executive team living it, 24 x 7.

A "good enough" strategy makes it easy for everyone in the organization to understand and internalize:

• What things will look like when we have achieved our definition of "success"
• How we will accommodate the significant changes we should expect to run into between now and then
• The few (4-10) major initiatives will we undertake to get there? 
• Are they realistic (do they match the culture and knowledge that we have, or could realistically get)?
• Are they allocated reasonable levels of resources?

If the strategy makes those things clear, then it is good enough.  Everyone will understand, at all times, whether the thing they are doing right now facilitates or impedes the strategy.  If it cannot make clear what the few important things are, then more detail is not really going to help.

Having developed a strategy that is good enough, the organization has to have the will to follow through on it.  If that is the issue, your problem is not strategy but leadership.

Update on Windows 8 internet access stability

Isn't it embarrassing to convince the family to invest in the latest must-have technology and then not be able to get it to work?  As we learned last month (thank goodness I tested before exposing it to the crowd), your nice new Windows 8 machine has the potential to embarrass you mightily.  Before you jump too quickly to revisit some steps you might have to take to get your nice new holiday computer working properly (i.e. accessing the internet, a pretty much indispensable requirement), here's an update on that story.

Many of the steps I took last month came from a host of different websites in search of a solution that would work.  By now I'm not sure whether some particular actions actually made no difference, but the combination lasted for a month, even getting me through a real-time programming class requiring internet access in a large university lecture hall.

Over the holidays the glitch was back, or more specifically I couldn't get on the internet.  At first I thought it might have been because the whole neighborhood was at home and logged in, but since my tablet was working just fine I reckoned it was the computer.  Theorizing that perhaps the wireless adapter wasn't properly installed (which I am told is fairly common) I took it in to the Geek Squad to see if they could either put a meter of some kind on it, or perhaps just re-seat it.  As it turns out, modern computer design does not envision component swap-out so they just replaced the whole box.  (Hmm . maybe another post is forming on how the entire computer industry is rejecting the business models that made it a multi-trillion dollar industry).

Now for the good news: Microsoft and/or Best Buy have updated their configurations in several ways and very little needed to be done to keep the new box on line and productive.  The security systems do not seem to be in conflict and the power setting that turns off your wireless adapter to save energy has been removed from the default settings (although you definitely want to check that one).  And of course to do so you need to be able to find the Control Panel.

This you can do via <Windows key>-<D>, which gives you the alternate command "charms" (what were they thinking about with different command menus for different views in a system that actually has no documentation?).  Flip the charms out of the right-hand side of the screen (no idea how you do this if you don't have a touch-screen), choose settings, and at long last the Control Panel appears.  Choose the Power setting and make sure this option is turned off in your active power profile.

The other way of doing this is to download the classic shell, i.e. the Windows XP or Windows 7 "start button" which returns control of the process to you, the user.  It also allows you to have more than one window available at a time, and really if that doesn't seem important to you then you'd be much better off with a tablet.

Those minor fixes aside, the new computer has now been running for a couple of weeks with no difficulty and seems to be quite happy.  The good news about Windows 8 is that it boots up really fast: the computer beats my cell phone by a mile in a boot-up race.

Relieve major source of holiday stress caused by your new Windows 8 PC

Call it a supreme act of public service.  You don't really want to spend the holiday season, and the weeks beyond, trying to make that nice new computer work properly. If you're running a business, this could save you many hours of downtime. [PS - here's an update].

I want you to know that this post is not an Appleholic rant; I am and remain a Microsoftie by preference.  I must be, as I have now invested some 24 real hours (not just 2 calendar days) working out how to get my nice new laptop to work.  Not "as I would like it to" - in the internet age (and computers that come without any DVD-ROM drives, a computer that cannot connect to the internet basically does not work at all. And that is what awaits the recipient of the gift of that nice new Windows 8 computer.

Whether you like it or not, you will have to get into Windows 8 soon enough.  I could deal with the reliable XP operating system going out of support, but not with Microsoft's parting gift being a patch that causes intermittent blue-screen-of-death failures.  And considering the age of the beast, it might be that I had a bad spot developing on the drive.  So Windows 8 it is.  Fortunately, most new laptops also have touchscreens so the tablet-like interface will not make you completely crazy poking your finger into a non-responsive monitor. Better yet, although not revealed in the non-existent documentation [tip #1 - get the book!], one can bypass the tablet look and get back to an operating system view that is a whole lot like Windows 7.  Once you have found that view (use the <flying-windows-button><D> command) you can now get to the Control Panel inside the Setting ribbon that pops out from the right-hand side of the screen.  [The Settings ribbon doesn't work that way in Tile World, the main Windows 8 screen].  But there is no program control button (the old Start button that we all hated and now want back) so anything you cannot do from the Control Panel you'll have to find in the program file folders somewhere - or better yet, download one of several freeware that put the Start button back in play! Are you with me still?  Welcome to Tile World) ...  Get the book ...

Until you get your Windows 8 machine tamed, if you have a tablet, it's a good idea to keep it handy so you can tell whether the wireless service is actually down, which does sometimes happen.

I can't say that the following actions will completely eliminate your issues, but at last I have 2-3 days of stable operations now.

1. Download Windows 8.1.  Make the store do it to save yourself a few hours of aggravation with monster download.  And don't let them put just any old virus package on there; the package must disable the Windows security packages (Defender and Firewall) or it will be a waste of money (see below).
2. Preferably before leaving the store, go to your wireless adapter properties (in Device Manager) and under the Advanced tab, in Power Management, un-check the block that allows the system to turn off the wireless adapter as a power-saving feature. Now at least 30% of the time you won't get disconnected from your perfectly-functioning router.
3. Download another browser while you can.  Better yet download 2, just in case.  but... much as people love Firefox, it has a problem for this purpose, which is that it calls on services actually implemented in Chrome and Internet Explorer. Since IE is helping to create the problem, and there's no point in calling Google is the system isn't letting Chrome operate, Firefox just adds layers of complexity at this point.  Besides, I didn't find too many posts on how to fix this issue in Firefox, just Step 2, which is only part of the problem.  But suit yourself.
4. Go into your new browser and if it is also new to you, then let it pick up your IE bookmarks (before you uninstall IE in step 6).
5. If your browser of choice is Chrome, then in the settings Advanced section disable the option for predicting the next screen {huge difference]. 
6. In the control panel, go into Add/Remove Programs and disable Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, you cannot uninstall it, nor can you replace it with a working version of IE (such as 8 or 9).  [If you are stuck having to use the 2 or 3 sites left in the world that only operate on IE, all of which are operated by the government or by Microsoft, then you'll have to leave it in place, but it appears to me that disabling IE-11 and therefore all of the other windows activities that default to IE-11 was one of the most successful steps].  Now go into Control Panel again and set your other browser as the default for "all of functions that it can perform"; just setting it as the default browser when it installs only reallocates about 1/2 of the functions.
7. Your browser still will not open websites that your tablet tells you are working just fine. Download another firewall program.  I can't vouch of which ones will or won't work but one of the problems appears to be that Windows Firewall is set up to block everything except what is on its VERY short white-list, which basically translates to *microsoft* and *msn*.  You don't really want to have to enter every site you might want to visit before you visit it.  Nor do you want to get into the actual rules engine behind Windows firewall.  I am not flacking for AVG here, just telling you what worked for me: AVG is working just fine, and it has the advantage of disabling Windows Firewall as part of its install. Otherwise you have no GUI checkblocks to disable Windows Firewall, although you can open up the console and turn off the monitoring, which may or may not have the same effect.  While you are at it, disable Windows Defender (through the Control Panel programs section).  Now you won't have a collision between security systems.  Now install the new security system.
8. You may still find sites that will not open.  A number of sites open as regular HTTP but somehow switch themselves to HTTPS and these seem to have difficulty opening. In the Windows Internet settings (from the Control Panel), open the advanced security settings and enable SSL 2.0. Doing this seems to work, but MS turned it off as a default for a reason; I am sure the CISSPs will have a cow over this idea and your comments are welcomed - the blog could use some flame traffic!  
9. After all this, your computer may still be dropping off the network randomly.  Go to the computer manufacturer's site and get their version of the driver for the wireless adapter.  It may be older or newer,never mind, just do it.  (You could do this step earlier but the downloads can be huge, as you often don't get just the one driver in the download). Then launch it manually (which will override the Windows build that your store did).  I learned in this process that the Window's "search for latest driver" button always responds with "the best available driver is already loaded" if it finds one, and it will not find one that is inside a zip folder.  In future, whatever your system tells you based on Microsoft suggestions, always go to the manufacturer's site first; sometimes MS enhancements are too generic for your particular model.

After step 9 I have achieved 36 hours of stability and good speed.

If it saves you the days I have put into this issue so far, and helps you avoid looking like a tool while the kiddies are whining about not being able to use the new computer, then it may be worth it.

Meeting Minutes: As-Was or As-Is?

Considering that "making a record of what happened" is core to so many PM processes, it is always surprising to see how many PM-related meetings go by with no record.

There are a least four schools of thought with regard to minutes:

1. Minutes should be in sufficient detail that key stakeholders who could not attend can still get a good sense of what happened and why
2. Minutes should be very abbreviated, conveying little more than a listing of what topics were discussed and a record of whatever decisions were made
3. Minutes should reflect for future generations what was eventually arrived at and not why. Therefore, not only should they be abbreviated, but meeting members should be free to amend (and if necessary reverse themselves) after the fact 
4. Minutes are just another waste of time.  If anything really important happens, w can put it on an action-items list. 

Items 1 and 2 are the mainstream options, with Item 2 bring (in my experience) what most people do

Personally I believe in Item 1, consistent with my corporate slogan, "It does matter how decisions get made". More importantly, for future stability, it is also important to understand why a decision was reached and the points of view that the "no" votes might have offered.  Not so that later on we can point fingers and say "I told you so", but rather so that much later yet, another PM reviewing the record has the insight to avoid going down a particular path for the right reasons.

Reasonably detailed minutes have the following advantages:
(a) Most of the people in the meeting won't write anything down. No wonder actions don't get followed up on; why should they? Nobody remembers what they were ... until the next meeting, when they remember things rather differently from what they did agree to and everyone else already starting acting accordingly.
(b) One of the key people will likely not be there. Life is that way. Decent meeting notes will let them know where everybody moved to while they were out.
(c) At some point in the future there will be turnover. A quick read through of the notes of actual meetings, even of 50+ weekly meetings, will bring a person up to speed much faster than poring over dense and probably unused policy manuals.

In addition to the detail, check out Greg McKeown's post on the 30-second retrospective. And make sure you add whatever action is required to move forward on the the important point to your calendar.

It would be so tempting to dismiss Item 4 out of hand this line of thinking -- but it seems to be so prevalent. In fact, we'll spend another whole post on why so many people disagree with this ... and then do it anyway.

Item # 3 may seem facetious, but my very respected colleague Vic Rosenberg, a former CXO in a major company and executive coach, tells me that it is quite frequent, especially in (oddly) more mature organizations.  Since the formal meetings are somewhat pro forma (you don't go to them hoping to get approval, but to ratify what everyone already agree to), does it really matter who voted for what when, as long as the record is that "it was agreed" to do X?

What has your experience been on this?  Is Option 3 really all that prevalent?

Governance: where's the beef?

Alas, I betray my age by referring to a TV commercial that in its day everybody recognized instantly.

Most people in the IT consulting business know about Gartner and Forrester, the largest IT advisory services that I know of. When I worked at Gartner, I was always amazed at the volume and quality of the material and analysis that was available. Indeed, my role was to make it more accessible to clients so they would appreciate the value of their subscription, and a full-time role it was to ferret out all the nuggets that were sitting right there. My particular role was in the area of enterprise architecture (EA), which usually evolved quickly into other governance areas as well.

What struck me was how few successful companies are actually using that advice. I don't mean adopting blindly and wholesale, but at least taking at least some significant aspect of it and tailoring it to their situation. Gartner's maturity model, mapping to SEI-CMM practice, established a 5-point range where 1 is a freebie (i.e. "clueless") and specifically means the organization has nothing is place but has decided to conduct an assessment. So really 2 is the lowest score you can get. Their practice indicated (then, anyway) that in each sector of the governance business, their clients consistently average a score in the 2.x range out of 5, and their respondents seldom get above 3.x. And these are the larger and more successful companies on the planet.

If this governance business is all it is cracked up to be, surely an organization not using it would fall into chaos immediately?  Conversely, if hardly anyone is doing it, surely the company that decided to actually do it would shoot rapidly to the top of their pyramid?  If each of these governance disciplines is truly capable of generating meaningful bottom-line impacts, either by enabling new capabilities or at least making a dent in operating costs, how high could profits go?

Yet this is not done. I venture to suggest with some degree of inside knowledge of several august organizations, even by the very companies that sell these processes to others. Are these processes really engines of productivity, or just a consultant-industry self-employment scam?

If your company is one of those that does not, I imagine you'll be unwilling to say so in public, in which case you're welcome to tell me off-line why not, and we can add it in to this topic. Otherwise feel free to comment here starting with "Some organizations find that ..." :-)

If your company is one of those that has instituted on or more governance functions and sees it as a success factor, please let us know which ones and how they are working.

** Caveat: IT security is undoubtedly being practiced in most places, at least after some fashion, but even so it would not be wise to say what you are or are not doing. Organizations frown on this because attackers would love to read about what your security protections are and are not. So please stay away from that! **

Keep it simple is not for the stupid

We all know the KISS acronym. Keep it simple, stupid.  Carrying that out is -- well, not so simple. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, "I wrote a long letter as I did not have time to write a short one". Even a simple communication, such as this blog, can get longer than readers might desire. In case you don't get to the end of it ... does anyone have an example of a concise yet robust process for governing IT investments?

There is always the temptation to add a bit more detail in order to assist the end users in carrying out their responsibilities. Quite often what we really mean is the unspoken add-on: "the same way that I would have done it".  And even, "to make things easier for me". Even when our intent is truly to assist, it is almost impossible to provide for every contingency and the documentation required to do so often makes a rather simple primary process look formidable. Often, it is better to make clear what is desired and treat

Governance can also benefit from brevity. Elegance is nice, but it may take a long time to get agreement and much, much longer to get conformance even if people are trying to comply - and that is a big if. It is much more important to get some useful and truthful information in front of the governance board. Once they have that, the board members will start asking much more probing questions that introduce more sophistication into the process without the PMO having to mansate anything. That is handy when one has very little authority to issue mandates anyway.

Another key reason for trying to keep things simple is that thry need t fit into limited available time. One of the most important artifacts in the initiation of govrrnance processes is an integrated calendar. Like it or not, your topic area is only one of many competing for executive attention. The executive board is not going to meet weekly, probably not even monthly, to address your issue. Take a look at an integrated calendar - one that accounts for all the organization's major business processes - and you'll soon appreciate the value of getting even a quarterly dedicated timeslot.

One can overdo this. The recent fiasco with the Obamacare website gives clear evidence that a governance process that is fed inaccurate or incomplete information, and lacking the interest or know-how to identify obvious weaknesses, will lead to serious failures.  The hard part about making things simpler is retaining the critical essentials.

So the challenge: who has a good example of a concise but robust process for governing the selection or oversight of IT invedtments or programs?