There are constant opportunities and threats that have the potential to change the way a business operates, however little or great their impact. Businesses need the capability to handle complex, interconnected and unpredictable events. Organizations must quickly set up, detect, and analyze the information they need to ensure the action they take is timely and relevant. Have we mastered the art of identifying and addressing complex events that are either organic or man-made? What are the recent challenges and innovations that can help business get a better grip on complex events?

Contributor

• • Alex Pettit, Chief Information Officer and Secretary, State Information Technology and Telecommunications
    

Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:27]:
Good morning and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, #ctrlive and today’s topic is Handling Complex Events and our guest for today’s show is Alex Pettit, who’s the State CIO and Secretary of IT and Telecommunications with the State of Oklahoma. Good morning, Alex. How are you? Very good. So summer treating you well?

Alex Pettit [00:00:58]:
So far so good. We were glad to get through the month of May. Oklahoma had a tough May, so we are glad to be in the summer high pressure that we usually get so yes,

Sanjog Aul [00:01:10]:
Very good and I know a lot happened in your state and perhaps we can touch some of that during our discussion today and see how are we handling mother nature’s forces and do the best we can so basically this topic is about handling complex events and those happen in our business, in our lives and things which we truly never are able to predict or in some cases we try to predict, but it’s almost like predicting weather. So coming to the first question here, that if we always knew that this is not totally controllable, but still we want to have a better handle on how complex events happen and how do we perhaps get an inkling that this is going to happen and we get a better way to process it. What is the primary driver? Because this has always been the case. It’s nothing new. But why are we investing more? Why are we even thinking that we should go to this next level? And do you think it makes practical and financial sense?

Alex Pettit [00:02:13]:
I think that in a lot of cases we struggle with doing risk assessment or really fully understanding and handicapping the risk that we face so the things that the number one cause of problems in IT is overly optimistic estimates before starting the project and so when you get into any kind of an implementation, an IT implementation, a lot of times you’re not really, you know, is the implementation of a new desktop Windows platform more or less complicated than the implementation of an application that those child support payment system for the state of Oklahoma and you just, you have a tendency to allow things either because they’re vendor or from a reputable vendor or something like this, that you tend to downplay the risk that’s associated with it and so we really don’t have a very good way of. We’ve had a difficult time truly understanding what risks there are that we face and how to go about understanding and appreciating and mitigating those risks or accepting them for where they are and moving forward on it.

Sanjog Aul [00:03:30]:
So interestingly you used risk as the main driver. Is that always it or is it something where we take a more positive spin to what complex events are doing to us? And if we could get a better handle, we get, you know, we are ahead of it in some form of fashion, it could give us a competitive advantage. I know government doesn’t really look into competitive advantage, but frankly the citizens satisfaction and how you handle natural disaster and many other things, those not everything has to be a risk or not everything has to be looked at it from a risk standpoint because otherwise cost justification becomes tough because you’re almost selling insurance.

Alex Pettit [00:04:17]:
Well yes, and in government in particular, it’s really about the efficient use of resources it’s more about we really have a moral obligation to efficiently use the resources that we are entrusted with because they’re not really our resources it’s not quite like the private sector so to a great degree that is our most important charge is to make sure that through collaboration and innovation we most effectively use the resources were given and I do agree that in the private sector there’s certainly a statement or a view to it that you want to be agile and you want to take advantage of things first mover advantage you want to get, if you’re into Roger’s diffusion of innovation, you want to get those early adopters and you want to get that going and what have you but the other side of it is truly the project management practices that address change control. You know, a lot of cases we have substituted agility or we think agility means that we just allow folks to adapt to change as best they can

Alex Pettit [00:05:27]:
and we’ve had a tendency, I think we’ve had a tendency to force more and more of change and adaptation and the responsibility of change management onto the end user and we don’t really appreciate enough that as the providers of the systems that we own, that’s a big part of user acceptance is how well the change control is managed and whether or not we take responsibility, we as the implementers take responsibility for that. An improvement or a change that’s done very quickly, regardless of the return on investment or any of the other net present value calculations you want to go through and use as far as advantages for the organization to be the first mover or what have it don’t matter if they’re not adapted. If we’ve alienated the user and they fail to adopt our innovation, then it simply doesn’t matter.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:23]:
So in your context, when you talk about complex events and you’re talking to the big boys up there and the directives, are they more that hey, you can win a few battles but you cannot win the war, so do the best you can, or you have very clear cut hard dollars or specific directives which say you got to tame this beast or else.

Alex Pettit [00:06:46]:
Well, you know, for us the three things, and again, I can only speak for the state of Oklahoma in my charge, we do three things, we’re charged with the effect, with the reduction of the size of government that’s number one. We are charged with we’re asked to improve transparency and to give insight into what it is the government’s doing with the resources that we’ve been entrusted with, financial and physical and what have you and then to increase the accountability of those folks through metrics and through performance reporting of those people who are entrusted with those resources and make that available in a public forum so that’s really what we do. The IT projects that we as an IT group initiate must fall on one of those three legs of that stool or at least support one of those

Alex Pettit [00:07:38]:
it’s got to be one of those things if IT is going to promote it. Now there are other IT programs, of course, that are specific to agencies, mission and vision and what it is that they are supposed to be doing and we support those as well, and we provide those services and they have their cost justifications and their metrics for performance and they do it for their reasons, for public safety reasons or for citizen support reasons and what have you but in the end, really it’s for those projects that are IT initiated projects they must be one of those three things that’s really our charge.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:11]:
So if you were to inventory the top three to four complex event categories, which, if a project falls under and you try your best and it doesn’t really become successful, you and, or your cruise job is not in jeopardy.

Alex Pettit [00:08:26]:
Oh, I don’t know that I would say that. I would say that. You know, of course we have a, we have a responsibility. The hardest thing is to truly articulate ahead of time what risks are there that could derail a project. What are the things and what are we, and have we done all the things that we can do? Do we fully understand what it is we need to do to mitigate those risks? And in some cases it is a Learning process. There are some risks. So, for instance, one of the things when we were doing the recent events that happened in Oklahoma with the tornadoes, one of the things that many homeowners here have done, have built storm sh shelters generally in their garage. But we built storm shelters.

Alex Pettit [00:09:06]:
And so people go to their storm shelters and ride the storm out there. And these are generally underground, usually cut in the slab where the garage is. And it’s about, you know, they vary in size, you know, but the family will go down there and what have you, depending upon how many folks they got, and then just ride it out. Well, we received a call at the Eocene. I’m sorry, at the dps, they were searching for these shelters. I saw this on the television news and they were going through and they were trying to search for where the location of these shelters were and where people had holed up. And one of the things we came to realize that we did not have an authoritative inventory of where all of these shelters were located. So in some cases, if people have taken shelter in a garage and the roof of the garage has collapsed in on it, they’re.

Alex Pettit [00:10:00]:
They’re trapped. They may be safe, but they’re trapped within that. And so you have to get a bobcat or something in there to pull the debris off the door of the thing to let people out. And so without that, and because we’ve allowed the municipalities and folks to. They’re the ones that contract, they’re the ones that permit these where there are permits required, what have you. The state really doesn’t have any insight into where those are. So one of the things we’ve identified is to say, all right, well, we’re going to set up a repository, we’re going to set up a database of these. We’re going to ask people to voluntarily register that they have a shelter and where it’s located is in their backyard, is in their garage, what have you.

Alex Pettit [00:10:39]:
And then once we know that, we’ll associate their address to lat long coordinates. And then if the street has no identifiable markings anymore like we saw in Moore in the first tornado, then we can, we’ll be able, with a handheld device, identify a lat long position and be able to get those people out of there and know that there’s a shelter that we need to check, let’s put it that way. And so, you know, those are the kinds of things. So when you talk about mitigating risk in a lot of cases, we don’t really know what risks we face. And until we’re faced with them. It is very difficult in foresight to have to know what it is that we need to mitigate the risks that we face. But it is our obligation to do absolutely the best that we can.

Sanjog Aul [00:11:27]:
You very rightly said that we definitely cannot plan for all possible flavors of risks and or events that could happen. However, as a government and your whole department, including technology folks, are they required to always remain structured in their approach so that whatever is in front of them as a scope is what you think about and or plan for or you would rather have a fluid which will also have the creative element and a foresight and maybe some whiteboarding and sandboxing that is happening on a regular basis so that we don’t say after an event such that basically the kind of events that happen at Oklahoma, in Oklahoma and now we are seeing that, okay, we never had that application which would allow people to find those shelters. Do you think we now are waking up or we will again perhaps God forbid, if something else happens, we will learn then and then we try to say we will be ready for the next mishap. But hold your thought. Let’s explore this area and see how organizations and basically government departments, et cetera, are structuring themselves to be able to effectively handle these situations going forward. Please stay tuned.

Sanjog Aul [00:14:01]:
Welcome back. So structured versus fluid sandbox and creative thinking. Do you think that’s something which is something a thing of the future or Alex, do you think your own organization that is IT and also fellow departments have started thinking that we got to plan a little more versus just reacting to what happens?

Alex Pettit [00:14:23]:
Well, at the risk of being divisive, which I don’t wish to be, I believe that Agile is having an effect on us, that it does make us stupid, that we substitute the pursuit of agile for alignment and we think that by responding quickly to requests for things, for novel things, for the implementation, the next toy or the next gee whiz thing or whatever it is, that we think that is what constitutes alignment and it really doesn’t. What we tend to stray from when we become as we begin to focus more and more on agility and the quickness of the response is it’s our quality which suffers and forget that in the end quality does matter of what it is we put up. Incremental delivery is no excuse for not having a good quality product that you’re putting out over repetitively. And although we can say that some things don’t have to be perfect or don’t have to be complete, not every function point needs to have everything addressed in it and it has to be completely without error or has to completely meet the user’s needs and I agree with that.

Alex Pettit [00:15:31]:
The other side of it is you can’t just throw something out there and say, oh well, that just, you know, we’ll get to that later and be sloppy about it. There’s no excuse for departure from how we understand how things, how projects should move forward, how things should be, how we have to have sign off, how do we have to have testing, we have to have user involvement at the sacrifice of agility.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:56]:
So you did mention this agility is very interesting that you mention agility. So do you think that if an organization just pursues timeliness or agility, do you think there is an automatic offset of effectiveness? Because who cares what IT is doing behind the scenes if a person who is stranded in such a storm is not able to find the shelter, it comes down to the basics. So if you’re not able to do it, how fast you did it would not matter.

Alex Pettit [00:16:27]:
That’s right. Or if you do it poorly, that’s equally as bad in many cases so back to the shelter example, if we do not, if we do not execute well on that, we could cause more harm than good. So one of the things that we were able to do, we did have here in the state is we know the attendance of the children in the schools by 10 o’clock. Attendance in public schools is reported to the state department of education and when the tornado went through more, we were able to provide the first responders with the list of children who were in attendance at the two schools that that had been affected by the tornadoes. It’s important to have accurate data, it’s important to have accurate solutions.

Alex Pettit [00:17:11]:
Giving them an inaccurate solution, giving them an inaccurate listing of students, let’s say, or locations of shelters or whatever, that is simply not acceptable and that to provide them with a list that is incomplete or that is erroneous and to get it to them within say an hour of the event occurring that is actually causing more harm than good and I think sometimes that we forget, we think that the response is what important. It’s not just the response, it’s the quality of the response.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:45]:
So you mentioned accurate data and if you were to qualify across multiple agencies, maybe beyond going your government or even in the business world, do you think these complex events are not handled properly because people have eye on the wrong target?

Alex Pettit [00:18:03]:
I think there is a tendency, and I don’t think this is universally true, but I have seen a great deal of it, that our dedication and devotion to agility and to agile itself and trying to get things out and trying to get and show progress for our efforts and our energies and start getting that feedback. I do believe that feedback is the single greatest determinant of human behavior and agile and agile processes tend to give us very rapid feedback and so we can course correct and we can get to the user’s desire, get to the user’s needs and meet those needs and requirements more quickly. I think that’s, I don’t think that there’s. I’m not saying that that’s wrong, but I’m saying that in that process you cannot sacrifice the quality of what it is you’re doing and very often what I’ve seen in a lot of instances is that we sacrifice the quality of our work, of what we’re trying to put together for the sake of meeting our release deadlines.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:04]:
If suppose your different departments and government officials dole out a bunch of projects and say, Alex, I’d like you and your crew to figure out how to handle this. Do you think you would want to first turn around and ask a few questions to see if the organization itself is ready to adopt? You can build a very sexy set of tools and processes and everything else. Do you think adoption is a problem with the complex events getting handled effectively and timely?

Alex Pettit [00:19:33]:
I do, and I think Agile helps a lot with that. When you’ve got something complicated or sophisticated that you’re bringing in and it is going to change fundamentally the workflow process and how work is done and how things are completed, that it is important to have user involvement in the development and in the incremental release of things. I think that helps enormously with the user acceptance. User acceptance is even in mandatory use organizations where, okay, I’m rolling out this application to do accounts or expense management and you have to use this expense management module so we can say that and they have no choice but to adopt it but I think user acceptance is still enormously important insofar as productivity and getting the best use of the tool and getting the best, the most accurate data entered and what have you. So, so even in mandatory use environments, user acceptance is key. I just don’t

Alex Pettit [00:20:29]:
and Agile helps to do that a great deal and incremental delivery helps to do that a great deal. I think though that we underestimate or we under, we don’t appreciate enough just how many things are affected. When we tend to look at things in isolation, we tend to limit our thinking in terms of when we’re bringing an application in, we’re thinking about it in terms of just the, this very narrowly defined business process that we’re improving and we don’t look at it in the context of the entire organization, the entire, if you will, enterprise that it’s a part of and we don’t appreciate or even anticipate how this change is going to affect overall the structure, the architecture, whatever word you want to use of the organization itself.

Sanjog Aul [00:21:22]:
Now let’s compare any handling of complex events like an orchestra and if everybody has to be super coordinated and have automatically are expected to change their DNA from someone who is an order taker and or follows just set of instructions to be ready with a split second to move the ball to the next person. That’s way too much to ask from people just because you have a business initiative so what is the journey like? You cannot change people overnight, you cannot change the way their interdependence overnight. You cannot change the overall team dynamics overnight.

Alex Pettit [00:22:04]:
And I think though that you can show them. What you’re really talking about is improvisation within an orchestra, right? We’re asking people to adapt to changes or changes to things within a, within the construct of an orchestra. So they have their sheet music and they have to file the conductor and they need to do certain things in order to make music that you can listen to and for it to make sense. However, we’re not automatons and even within things like I used to be a musician many, many years ago so within jazz there are still rules to improvisation. Within jazz, you simply don’t get up there and start blowing notes randomly. You have to follow certain constructs, certain rules around that. So if you’re going to ask people to improvise in an orchestra that can work, but it still requires rules, it still requires quality to be followed

Alex Pettit [00:22:56]:
otherwise it does decompose into chaotic noise. So there’s I would say that this improvisation that we’re talking about asking people to do, to adapt and to take things on as they come and what have you, and to modify from the script or whatever as they need to, as long as it’s within certain bounds or as long as we’ve defined that we have the system boundary defined as to what it is they can do and can’t do, then that works quite well, and people are certainly entirely capable of that and if you want to get even a little more abstract about it, I think that it provides more meaningful work than simply becoming an automaton.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:36]:
So what are the prerequisites, if you were to lay a few out, to say, this organization, of course, had been doing just transactional things and now they want to evolve to a next generation and not purely for agility purposes, but there could be other agendas, like getting competitive advantage, etc so you have technology coming to support you but overall, for an organizational readiness standpoint, what would be the prerequisites you would like to say? Let these be met before we charge ahead to handling complex events.

Alex Pettit [00:24:08]:
Well, I think one of the biggest things that I’ve seen is a lot of project managers, and I’m speaking from my own experience. I don’t know if this is universally true. I’ve never seen any studies around it or whatever but I do believe that management practices tend to conceal problems from management and from clients and from whatever. So as we’re walking and rolling along and we come across a problem in a project, we come across something that’s giving us. We have a tendency to try to minimize what the impact is, or we try to deal with it ourselves internally or within the IT group and we don’t. We don’t tend to communicate to the rest of the organization or to other folks what it is that what’s the problem? What’s the impact we’d rather work on? We have a tendency as a discipline, we would rather fix the problem than notify people that there is a problem and try to

Alex Pettit [00:25:01]:
and take the time to explain what it is and to have them so they fully understand what the problem that we’re facing is and we view that as a waste of time. Very often we think that that time communicating could be better spent working on and addressing whatever the problem is. I think that that’s the single greatest. I don’t know what to call it here, but tendency or flaw or whatever it is in project management implementation is our desire that, we do not communicate problems and that we, we try to and I don’t think it’s necessarily that they cover them up or whatever, but we do conceal the problems that we have and just focus our time and effort on mitigating them or addressing them and not enough time on communicating and being open about and transparent about. Okay, this is a problem we’ve run into

Alex Pettit [00:25:57]:
these are the things we’re going to try to do about it. This is where we’re at on it we have a tendency to believe that, that management doesn’t want to hear about it and our customer doesn’t care and that’s not really the case. I think that we need to be more collaborative in how we approach these things. I think that’s one of the problems that we’ve faced in it is our reluctance to collaborate with our partners, with our management, with our customers, with other folks. I think that’s a real handicap to our discipline.

Sanjog Aul [00:26:27]:
So you actually faced very recently the real test of how it within its own team, as well as how it works across the room with the business users to together make this whole storm that you had experienced how to handle it effectively so that citizens eventually were able to get to where they were supposed to safely and securely. So if that is the time when you need people to be resilient emotionally and physically and you want them to be truly motivated to do the best they’re supposed to and finally also have the appropriate training that if something like this happens, this is what you’re going to do. You’re going to do almost like, you know, trained drills, etc so motivation exercises and, or training and then all the education and the camaraderie all have to come together. So if you were to go back and look at how things happen, do you think that complex event, and you have to finally rate how those complex events were handled which were brought about by mother nature. What was that journey like? Let’s listen to you. Please stay tuned. Listeners will be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:03]:
All right, so Alex, let’s relive basically what happened in terms of when the disaster you had experienced there. The different teams, they had to come together, they had to show the emotional resilience and intelligence and then they had to have some sort of training beforehand if something like this happened, how each person is going to perform when they are also worried about their families and other near and dear ones. How did they all come together and basically helped handle this problem, not necessarily solve in this case and where do you think the lessons were learned which could be done better next time?

Alex Pettit [00:29:43]:
Well, there were a variety of things. Obviously those that were directly infected and there were within the IT group here, there were about a score of folks who were personally affected by the events and more and when I say personally, I mean either their property or their immediate family were affected by it here and so there were and many, more were affected by indirectly, of course, people they knew and people that they had relationships with. Have you that were affected but the answer to your question is of course, those that take care of those what you got to take care of your family you take care of first and so that was our emphasis there insofar as people knew what it was that needed to be done and jumped in and started doing what they had to do and again we have the drills

Alex Pettit [00:30:36]:
we know how we have to do things. We got the OK strong website set up very quickly and that was where set up for our communications portal so that people could come in and you saw that evolve over time as we identified things that we could use or what we could help with. One of the things that became apparent to us early on was that we had a lot of bottled water that was donated, but we didn’t have hand sanitizers so we needed hand sanitizer and there were none to be found and so we set up something like a bridal registry where emergency responders could post things that they needed and then members of the people of the public or organizations or whatever could then just like you would. A bridal registry. You would go through and say, okay, well, I’ll donate. You know, they put out a thing.

Alex Pettit [00:31:22]:
I’m making this up, of course, but, you know, you put out 12 shovels and you say, well, okay, I’ll donate six of them. I’ll pick them up on my way from the house here, and I’m away from the office and I’ll buy them and I’ll deliver them to this location at this time and whatever and so you put a hold in there and if by that time they didn’t show up, or by the next cycle they didn’t show up, we post it again and if they did show up, they’re okay. Instead of 12 shovels, we need six now, or whatever it was. So doing it as a bridal and I know bridal registry probably isn’t the right way to describe it, but that was what came to my mind as we were talking about this in the cabinet.

Alex Pettit [00:31:54]:
Governor Fallon had called an emergency cabinet meeting right after the event and I got the opportunity to listen to some of my other. My fellow cabinet members and hear what things they were, problems they were running into, challenges they were faced with and things that they were needing and it was and that gave us the. That gave me the opportunity to. To understand what it was that needs were. And then I could direct or focus resources on addressing those things.

Alex Pettit [00:32:24]:
It was through that and then even with the following. The Cabinet meeting that we had the day or two after the first cabinet meeting that we went through and talked about the recovery and how folks were going to have a couple of weeks to go through the debris that was in their yard. One of the comments was, the debris that’s in your yard isn’t your debris, it’s your neighbor’s debris. Your debris is scattered a mile away or whatever. So how are you going to know. How are we going to bring people back in touch with us? So using a Pinterest solution model, we were able to. So if you find something in your yard that looks like it would be of importance to somebody else, take a picture of it, you can put it on the. The website and somebody else can go out and look

Alex Pettit [00:33:09]:
and then if it’s theirs, if it’s a picture or something, they can go and they know who to contact and how to get their property back or whatever. So those kinds of things were things that evolved out of the communication, the collaboration. I think the most important thing that I can say as far as how that journey went specifically was it is so important to have collaboration to be able to listen and to be open to and to understand what the needs are and what the challenges are and as you do that, you’re able. There are some things that are routine that you know, that they’re obvious. Providing the listing for the students that were in those schools, that was obvious. Other things like providing the Pinterest vial for the debris thing or the pet connect or what have you, those things were not as they weren’t as apparent to us right away, but we were able to very quickly identify that need, articulate the requirements, bring an application up in an agile development and get it operational to provide to service that need and those were very important to do.

Alex Pettit [00:34:23]:
I guess in the end though, it really comes down to how well your leadership and how important your leadership vests in collaboration and Governor Fallon has put an enormous amount of importance, ascribed an enormous amount of value to the collaboration of her cabinet and that’s really been a hallmark of her leadership and that I think more than any other single thing is what enabled what provided the opportunity for us to support the way that we did and for all the agencies to respond as well as they did to the emergency.

Sanjog Aul [00:35:04]:
So let’s draw a parallel with an airline. So suppose an airline has of course, a bunch of different planes flying around the country or internationally and such disasters or other natural things happen. Let natural events happen which make them reroute planes and do other things and what they have been doing is they have been using these complex events processing tools which would allow them to map that these are the things that are happening and if everything is smooth, then this is the process but if there are any hiccups, then these are the different parameters you will consider and based on that, you will automatically read out the plane from here, here and here versus banking on a human brain. Do you think something like that could be retrofitted if you had such tools? And could you first of all practically handle a situation like what you had in your state effectively? And secondly, do you think that is you can reliably have a tool handle how a state government is going to handle a natural disaster? How much reliance can you put on a piece of software?

Alex Pettit [00:36:20]:
Well, I would say there’s a good deal of reliance you can put on software. Heuristics are an enormously beneficial tool in the toolbox for doing things. The problem is in the more unstructured events that you have, the less valuable heuristics are going to be to you so many years ago I worked for SC Johnson Wax and they were working on a software solution to automate the mold changes for the caps so I was a part of the group that was doing the management of the cap production for off and raid and favor and glory and glade and pledge and all of that and so you would think that in an MRP system, you could forecast things like mold changes and you could automate a lot of that. So you could automate the work tickets based upon the demands that were coming in from the product managers that they were going to run 1,000 cases of pledge and so you knew you needed 200,000 pledge caps of yellow color and whatever by the state to run it to support that.

Alex Pettit [00:37:22]:
Well, that was fine but the problem became, or the issue became, we had demand that we did not always anticipate sometimes a store would run a sale on pledge without our knowing it, and we would find out after the fact, or they would give us very little notice that they were going to run as their loss leader to bring people in. They were going to run pledge as a discounted item and so we would find out, oh, gosh, we’re going to need to run a quick thing of pledge here so that we can support their distribution of it. I mean, we wanted to be good partners with them. Well, sometimes those things didn’t come in until very late and you would hear about it or you would understand that there was the possibility that this was going to happen and they say it’s a pretty good possibility this is going to happen.

Alex Pettit [00:38:10]:
So we’re going to need that. Well, pledge caps only ran on one of two presses at that time. So if I knew that there might come up, there might pop up, might pop up this demand for 200,000 pledge caps, then I knew that I wouldn’t schedule. I would leave that press open. There were 20 presses that were available. I would leave that press open in anticipation of this short order coming in and sometimes it would happen, sometimes I’d be right and sometimes I’d be wrong but it was more important to be right than wrong because I had to make that.

Alex Pettit [00:38:42]:
I had to be able to meet that. We didn’t want to stock out a pledge that was our bread and butter. That was one of our bread and butter products at Johnson Wax. So I knew that and I understood that, and I understood what the mission was. I understood that stocking out of pledge had a higher cost to the organization and I know you can program this in heuristics, but until or unless you really, I’m not sure you can program with artificial intelligence and decision models and things like that. If you can truly program in, what is the vision, what is it that we’re really trying to do here? And do you understand what it is we’re trying to do? So in the event the tornado, we ultimately, what we were trying to do is mitigate the human suffering, right? That’s what we were doing. We were dealing with human suffering on a very real level

Alex Pettit [00:39:32]:
and so what was it that we could do to take care of those things? What are the things that are going to be important to people? Pets, mementos, where to get help, where to get. I mean, those were how to communicate, posting messages and expressing support and what have you and so when we got, when we started to get into this, we knew what the goal was. It was very clear what the goal was that we were trying to accomplish and then we knew what actions and why we were doing things and not only why we were doing things, but what else we could or should do in support of that goal. I’m not sure that through heuristics you can do that. You can do that in normal situations, in operational situations.

Alex Pettit [00:40:13]:
It’s not clear to me that in, in extraordinary situations, and I think as a discipline in it, we sometimes forget, we lose why it is we do things. When we had, when Governor Fallon so I was appointed by Governor Henry, I was reappointed by Governor Fallon when Governor Fallon came in and reappointed an entirely new cabinet and many new agency directors and so on. Not a single requirement of a single project that was going on that was happening an IT project changed, none of our requirements changed and it’s because we’ve so focused on the out of context deliverable of what it is we’re doing of supporting that business process and Governor Henry was a moderate Democrat and Governor Fallon is a conservative Republican so it was a significant change in leadership and in all of her appointees

Alex Pettit [00:41:05]:
and yet all of the application deliverables, none of the application deliverables change of any in flight projects, of any projects that were being teed up, nothing changed and it’s because we’ve lost the linkage very often. I think we’re a discipline of reductionism and we have lost the connection between what we’re doing and why it matters so why it matters is over the top and we call that enterprise architecture, and we call that all kinds of alignment. It goes by a lot of different terms at a high level, but we’ve lost that connection between what we’re doing in an out of context sense, in a narrowly defined sense of what it is we’re delivering on this application development or implementation or whatever it is and overall what the goal and the mission is because the mission changed significantly from one administration to the other and yet what our activities were, what our requirements were, what we were working towards did not change and that delay I think is really emblematic of that we really don’t always have that linkage between what’s the vision and what we’re doing

Alex Pettit [00:42:13]:
and so I’m not sure that heuristics can help us with that. I think that they can’t. I don’t know that they’re. I think if anything they may inhibit us from being able to make that change of being that agile. If you’d like.

Sanjog Aul [00:42:26]:
Let’s take a quick break listeners. When we come back, Alex, the fact we are talking about the different variety of events and we can totally turn blue trying to envision every type of complex event that can happen and try to prepare for it. So how would you prioritize that these are the 10 that we should work towards and then rest? We will have to see what else or what different flavors we see happening and then we will take care of them later so that we are not investing way too much in anticipation of some things which may be looking very remote, like remote possibilities. So let’s explore this when we come back. Please take.

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Sanjog Aul [00:44:27]:
Welcome back. So Alex, we could have a bunch of different complex events that we can think we might encounter and start planning for them. How do you sift through all the ones which are either very small so that we will see what’s the roi? Not exactly ROI in this case, but how will you mitigate Risk versus the big ones and how do you kind of put them in a portfolio that these are the ones we are going to attack? And do you think there is any possible chance of that becoming a false positive where you thought it is actually going to be a problem and it is not? Well, and you work towards it.

Alex Pettit [00:45:03]:
I guess being in the public sector, we do have an advantage that many private sector organizations do not have in that it’s very clear why we exist. States exist to serve human needs that’s what we do and in fact, to make a quote from Cicero, from Roman statesman there, he said that the safety of the state is the highest law and so, you know, when we look at things and as we look at things and prioritizations of things, you know, safety and if you look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and what have you, you know, safety is a fundamental need we’ve seen this over and over again in Iraq, we saw it in Afghanistan, we’ve seen it in many different places until you establish a safe environment, nothing else is of any,

Alex Pettit [00:45:48]:
everything else is of less importance. So, you know, when we look at things that we need to do, you know, like a radio system, a public safety radio system, that that’s a very high priority need for us and that’s something that we’re putting a lot of effort, a lot of energy into that and when it comes to triaging of events, when it comes to like the events that we had out more, I mean, those are the kinds of things that guide you, that becomes your lodestar, your vision for what it is that you’re trying to do and I think very often we, as an it, as a discipline, we in it forget how much we contribute, how important we really are to the achievement of the mission of the vision of the organization, how much we contribute to them. We have a tendency, very often, I see it, people will almost reduce their employment. They think of themselves as a guild, they think of themselves as a trade and that they’re just doing what they’re told to do and their requirements that they’re meeting and they’re out of context, deliverables and what have you. They don’t see the linkage between what they’re doing and overall how important it is that they do and how much they serve to help those organizations, help the state, for instance, meet those human needs.

Alex Pettit [00:47:04]:
So when you go through and you look at things, you’ve got to be able to understand what need is it that you’re really supporting? What is it that you’re doing and what are you supporting and to your question regarding how likely is an event going to happen? Not only the likelihood of the event, because some events are less likely than others, of course, but they may have greater significance and so you may choose to mitigate it anyway because of the, even though it’s unlikely, the delay would be painful. So a fiber link, so we run a lot of fiber around the state and we look at, we want to have those links available as much as possible and so to the health department, we have redundancy where we have it, but is the redundancy of the health department’s network and the ability to make sure it’s meeting five nines of availability, is that more or less important than the Department of Public Safety’s radio system redundancy? Well, obviously the radio system is of higher priority so given the two options there, we’re going to gravitate towards if we have to suffer, if we risk suffering, in both cases, we risk suffering a four hour outage because somebody cuts a fiber that’s underground and it’ll take us four hours to locate it and resplice it and get it back in operational. Four to six hours is about the amount of time. Well, four to six hours of no health department stuff.

Alex Pettit [00:48:25]:
Well, that’s bad and I’m not saying it’s not bad and some of that, but based upon the likelihood of that event occurring, that’s something that the business may choose to say. You know, we’re willing to accept that risk. That’s something that we’re willing to do. On the other hand, for public safety radio, a four hour outage or six hour, you know, that’s not acceptable. Right? And so that’s not so it’s both a combination of the likelihood of the event and the severity of the event and I think both of those need to be taken into consideration.

Alex Pettit [00:48:52]:
I think very often we, we tend to look too much on the likelihood or the remote possibility of something happening and we forget that the impact that it’s going to have on what it is that’s really essential and important to us. Overwhelms, eclipses the likelihood to a certain degree that this is such a big deal, we have to address it in some way. We have an obligation to.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:15]:
Now, do you think you have the blessings of your officials to have an endless funding resource in order for you to be able to handle complex events?

Alex Pettit [00:49:25]:
No, there’s always in government the question is what good for which people, at what cost? I mean, that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to figure that equation out. What good do we provide to which group, which population, which part of the population? Because very often it’s not going to benefit everyone, it’s only going to benefit a small number of people and at what cost to the rest of us to provide that benefit? So we have to work that equation out and our charge is to make sure that we are doing that in the fairest, in the most just, in the best possible way so to take all the resources that we need and devote them to any single interest would be unfair to everyone else and so no the direct answer is no but that doesn’t make it wrong or bad. What it does is it means that through our collaboration with one another as public officials, that we understand and we can discuss what are our priorities and through the governor’s guidance, we can appreciate what it is her priorities are

Alex Pettit [00:50:32]:
and then we can find the most effective way, the most efficient way that we can meet those needs. That’s really what we do.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:41]:
So one last question. Do you see the technology solutions that are being offered any good or are they getting better? What’s happening in terms of innovation and what’s your message to the rest of the world in terms of the leaders, technology and business leaders, so that they can handle these such complex events effectively?

Alex Pettit [00:51:01]:
Well, I think in application development we’ve actually seen, and I’m not sure if it’s advertising or if this is really what’s happening, but we’ve seen a number of shops who, their CMMI rating, their Carnegie Mellon rating for being able to develop software has fallen, generally there are fewer level 5 shops than there were in the year 2000, there are certainly more level 3 shops so there’s fewer level 1 and level 2 shops, but there’s been a decrease in the number of level five shops. So when we talk about improvement in quality, when we’re saying generally that it’s improved, I would say yes, that our methodologies, that our practices, that overall as a group have improved, but those that had been higher level shops had been more mature shops, that that has fallen back and in some degree it could be because of cost considerations through the recession and some of the events that had happened, that we’ve seen those we’ve seen a focus on, well, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be good enough and that could also be an impact on the agile movement that we’ve seen but I think overall, yes, I think that tools are improving, certainly our general quality is improving, but there are still a lot of organizations out there who do software development that do it without, good without good quality control tools and methodologies that do it without.

Alex Pettit [00:52:28]:
We’re still in the Wild west in many ways as far as application development is concerned, so I think there is room for improvement.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:38]:
On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you, Alex, for sharing your thoughts on how the rest of the world can strive to bring their resources, the mindset, the leadership to effectively handle complex events.

Alex Pettit [00:52:51]:
Thank you very much for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:53]:
Thank you so much again. And listeners, please keep coming back to us like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio and be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul your talk show host till next week. Take care and God bless.

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