Deep Throat

This chapter was in many of the drafts but didn’t make it to the final book. I hope you enjoy it – David

“We tried to build an ontology but ended up with a schema,” he said, his voice low, so as to not draw any attention to his cubicle. “It gets tedious to keep reminding people to connect their metadata and maintain the relationships. It’s been hard enough to figure out what the question is, let alone find the answers. We’re underutilizing our information, that’s for sure. We have no idea what we’re sitting on. We have tens of thousands of employees in this organization, and we just can’t find the documents we need when we need them.” I didn’t have to prod much, he just kept talking.

“Name spaces? Are you kidding? We have six names for many of our parts, because we have so many systems they go into! We didn’t have a mandate! We needed a mandate, or no one would comply! Everyone’s got a sacred cow here. Every manager gave me the same story – the costs of compliance come out of this year’s budget but don’t pay off until next year. Who’s going to go for that?

“We brought in ontologists – we had ontologists running around here like mice! But it’s hard. I couldn’t sell people on the ontology idea. We brought in the standardistas, and they lasted about two months – they got people to adapt to the new system, but then they couldn’t keep up the momentum. People went back to their old ways. A guy who works for me says, ‘it looks like doing nothing has the biggest market share.’ Maybe I didn’t prep them well enough. It’s all more of a vision than a reality.

“Supply chain? We have a metadata supply chain. We all pass Excel spreadsheets back and forth, and they’re all out of date. Who can keep up with the evolving details of all the parts that go into our products! Every description changes monthly, and there are millions of descriptions! We could never design a database flexible enough to keep adding the new information. We tried to shut down for a week, just to update the metadata, but people kept working instead.

“We have systems. We have more systems than I can count. When we implemented SAP, we ended up with the world’s most expensive check writer. We have the license to the software, but we don’t have the people to input the knowledge to get it to work. Most of our systems reached the point of rediculousness long ago, so we had to do something, but then they ended up automating everything they did wrong before. We didn’t think about how fast processes would need to change.

“ROI? How can I show the ROI? It’s like showing an ROI from doing exercise on your health for 40 years – how can you know? There are too many moving parts! The hard part is integration. You can do all the pilot projects you want, they don’t show the costs of integration. I should have tried to quantify the payoff better, but we have more suppliers than I can even count. How can I know if the benefits of a pilot project will scale? What I needed was commitment from the top. It has to be enterprise wide, not department wide. Departments don’t have the ROI. Departments are scared of losing their budgets. It’s an integrated issue, not a program issue. Pilot projects have to be at the corporate level. You have to tell your suppliers, not ask them.

“Forget the material costs – the money’s in the information. I’ve got more machine shops and tons of materials than I can count, but the information is the bottleneck. I can build a wheelchair that would let Stephen Hawking do the tango, but I can’t find the drawings for all the parts! I spend half of my week chasing down specs that are in some electronic repository, using some number that’s in one of these binders. I send Gracie off to find me a spec from two years ago, and she comes back three days later! Once you learn how to move the information, the material flows.

“You know what this is about? Job security. If you’re the application owner, you’re attached to your application. We tried to draw a map of our systems once and gave up. We used Protégé and built some ontologies, and then at least we got a good view of the mess. We could see how our systems worked – or didn’t work – together. It was expensive but worthwhile. But then we didn’t take the next step and try to simplify, because people weren’t sure what would happen to them.

“If I could do it over, I’d focus on buy-in and build up more political capital before spending money. I’d start by educating executives on the technology and make the business case all the way to the top. I’d try to find other companies solving the same problem and start a dialogue. Going it alone is impossible.”

<BUSINESS DRIVER> Leaders will reap the benefits and gain market share.

<RISK FACTOR> Spending time and money doing too much without a clear business case driven from the top.