Which are the most important projects on your to do list? For example, do your most important items include deciding where Internet or Intranet technology may add value to your business? Where and when new web applications make sense? What about security? Do network computers have a place in your shop? Looking at data warehousing and data mining tools? Upgrading the help desk to deal with new technology? Need to understanding how multimedia can be used to boost internal productivity or increase sales? Deciding whether objects or Java should be part of your future? Need to resolve the confusing tangle of alphabet soup acronyms such as ODBC, OLAP, SQL, OOP, etc.? Integrating computer telephony applications? Worrying about the year 2000 problems in your applications?

I've written before about the fact that the pace of technological change has been accelerating recently to the point that it is nearly impossible for anyone to keep up with it. We are literally learning to live on a new time scale – web time as they call it, but its’ effects go way beyond the internet and world wide web.

For example, have you read the article about the brewing year 2001 crisis in the January 27th Information Week? The back page article "Secret CIO" outlines, in humorously but with some serious overtones the sequel to the year 2000 crisis. By now, everyone should be familiar with the year 2000 scenario – computers through out the known world will go on strike on January 1st, 2000. This will be caused by the propensity of the (prematurely old) mainframe designers to be short sighted and (then young) Cobol programmers to be lazy when they use 2 digits to represent the current year. Well, cutting them a little slack, their applications were being designed and created twenty or twenty five years ago!

Yeah, that was a really tired attempt at humor as most of our Pick applications date from the same era when absolutely nobody was even thinking about the existence of millennium bugs! And yes folks, Pick applications are at risk from this problem. Look through your back copies of N&R to see why this is true and what to do about it. The cost may shock you – the big boys are estimating total costs of $0.80 to $2.00 per line of code to solve the date problems! Yes, we most fervently hope it costs a lot less to fix a Pick based application, but even $0.50 times 250,000 lines of Basic code + dictionaries + Procs is a lot of money in most of our budgets! Make a quick estimate of the total number of lines of code in your applications and then call your local mortgage broker. Also, the time available may be much shorter than you think -- I've already heard of stores that cannot accept credit/debit cards that expire in the year "00".

Once you get around the year 2000 problems, what is this new talk about the year 2001? Well, the "Secret CIO" make a good point that there will be numerous problems in the applications introduced by the attempt to fix the year 2000 problem. Most companies (including yours?) are starting substantially too late to address the problems rationally, so there are going to be a large number of latent disasters built into our applications over the next several years in the name of problem solving. The solution he suggests, is to apply a little common sense and work only on the obvious, critical business problems. Ignore the report that will look a little funny but doesn’t really matter, and be prepared to solve the big issues you will inevitably miss.

I think this is a highly valuable solution to many more of our day to day problems and priority conflicts than we recognize. It is a tried and proven technique in the medical community for decades. There it’s called triage. The practice of quickly deciding which people (projects) should be dealt with immediately, which can wait a while, and which it would be simply wasteful to put energy into. We all do it to some degree, but without looking at it formally we often tend to make sub-optimal decisions. We all have a propensity to tackle pet projects with substantially less business relevancy than other projects, or to work too long at one problem or be too thorough in the pursuit of a perfect system.

With the number of new technologies and the rate of change today, the really great CIO needs to be able to quickly determine which technologies might have value to their business and which of those are stable enough to begin working on today. They need to look further forward than their existing projects. Spending energy on marginal MIS projects saps badly needed resources from the ones that might really make a competitive difference for your company.

How do you know which technologies and which projects are right for your company? Unfortunately, I don’t have the exact answer for everyone. If I did, I’d be retiring a rich consultant. There isn’t even a single answer – the most important issue for you may not matter at all to your neighbor in a different industry or company. Instead of offering exact answers, I’ll suggest several open ended techniques that may help.

First, I’ve been writing for years about the size of the information overload in terms of the number of diverse and valuable trade publications available. It’s always tough to find the time to read 8 to 12 periodicals a month, but if you don’t know about a new technology you can’t evaluate it. Second, don’t sweat the little stuff – most of the time small changes request yield small returns. By this I don’t mean that you shouldn’t strive for excellence, of course you should, but at some point every project should be "finished" or your development people get caught in the past and can’t begin the next project. Take a life cycle view of an application and avoid putting excessive energy into end of life applications. Lastly, don’t be afraid to innovate, but do control your risks. Find the one or two projects where new technology will dramatically improve the companies return on investment and then manage those projects to completion before starting new ones. This process will undoubtedly require participation from other departments in the company, but MIS can and should be the instigator.

Finding new opportunities and bringing them to the company with a solid business case makes you the hero of the day. And in today’s competitive environment, we need all the heroes we can find.