By Andre Griffith
The year was 1993, I was a first year engineering intern at a small company that produced digital signal processing based products for industrial customers. Sharing a workspace with me was a second year intern from the rival university across town. We were two out of a staff of about forty odd predominantly engineers and computer scientists. Intel Corporation had just released its newest, fastest processor – the 486DX2-66 and computers based on this ultra fast wonder chip had just hit the street. Our company was about to take delivery of two of these computers and both of them were deposited on the desk of my second year colleague intern who was judged to be the most deserving recipient of them based on the job he was doing at the time. I have yet to see anything paralleling this type of thinking in allocation of resources in my professional life in Guyana. There were other things in retrospect about this company and the way it did things that may seem remarkable to us. For example, out of those forty odd staff, there were only three who were not engineers. These were a receptionist, the secretary to the president of the company, and a logistics staffer. Only the first two could truly be described as ancillary staff since the logistics agent was in the core of the operations. It was he who sourced the required materials for the on-site fabrication group and it was he that dispatched finished products to customers. This meant that in numerical terms, less than five percent of the staff were non-core. Another thing I remember was routinely standing next to the President or the Vice President for R&D at the central printer waiting for printouts from the central printer on our floor.
Fast-forward to the year 2008 in Guyana where in many agencies, its just about the time when they have just about completed the annual ritual of partially justifying why they should get their budgeted amount next year. That is to say, they have just tried like the devil in these last couple of weeks, to exhaust the budget that they have been gaping at all year. Part of the purchases would have been on computers and now they have to decide who is going to get them. Now in a perfect world you would profile your users to arrive at categories which broadly speaking have the same or similar needs. For example you could have a group of users that comprises mainly clerical type users who do mostly data entry (think cashiers, finance clerks, statistics clerks etc.) Among these users those users such as secretaries, may also do minor word processing tasks such as typing memoranda. If the secretary’s boss is a Luddite, then he or she may do slightly heavier word processing tasks such as type reports which the boss has written in longhand. Another type of user could be described as a “power user” and these would do heavier word processing (writing reports, concept papers, requests for proposals, complicated contracts etc). Your power user might also do some fairly sophisticated modelling with spreadsheets, use presentation software and various specialised pieces of software specific to their profession. Yet another group could be what I refer to as “Engineering” types, these would include users of resource intensive applications such as computer aided design (CAD) packages, and in some instances, users who themselves develop software. A last set could be the mobile users whose defining characteristics should be evident and will in many cases also be either a power user or an engineering user. In your perfect world, armed with your categorisation of users you would then proceed to allocate your machines accordingly. In the real world right here in this republic however, things are not that simple. Your allocation is more likely decided by more earth-bound realities. First up, the boss has to get one of the new computers and in this day and age it has got to be a laptop. That’s just the way it is. Accept that and move on. If you are the IT manager, then obviously, you are in technical control of this process and the only way that new computers are coming into the company and you aren’t getting one is if you got yours yesterday. Now there are always more people who allegedly need a new computer than there are machines coming into the company and it takes the hassle off of your back if the powers that be actually decide who gets what. Then you can look at all of the allegedly needy and say “well take it to the boss”. Unfortunately, this also creates trouble for you down the line. An actual, honest to goodness guide that I received to acquisition and allocation of equipment read in part “All staff grade XX and above shall receive laptops”. This leaves a lot of occasionally-used machines in the hands of happy executives, but leaves you fielding a lot of support calls from the engineer who uses his beat up old machine to interface with the plant every day, or from the training team whose machine breaks down every time they are about to do a presentation. So maybe its not a good idea to use the cop out of “The Boss’ Decision”. Printers are another nightmare. Unlike the case at my old company, where everyone was happy to use the central printers, I can safely say that in over a decade of working as a senior IT staffer in Guyana, I cannot recall meeting the executive who did not believe that it was his divine right to have a printer on his desk to save him what was probably the extreme physical exertion of lifting and carrying his posterior to the printers used by the plebs. This leads in part to an unmanageably large inventory of cheap printers, designed for occasional home use, which break down with depressing regularity under the strain of office-level usage.
The above is hopefully a somewhat light-hearted look at what actually is a very profound problem which is a culture (as opposed to individual acts) of profligacy. It may not be apparent, but I have seen that the same attitude toward acquisition and allocation of computers, applies to cellular phones, to vehicles, and to hiring of staff. The case of the Chief Executives of the so-called Big Three automakers, dramatically illustrates that this type of behaviour can also extend to acquisition of fleets of private jets with shareholders’ money. In fact there is seemingly no end to this type of behaviour which is the subject of much attention by researchers under the heading of “Agency Theory”. At the end of the day if agency costs, get out of hand, a company will fail.
To return to the company that I referred to at the beginning of this piece, some two years after my stint with them, they were named one of the top fifty companies in Canada (my friends suggest that there is some nexus between my departure and the sudden takeoff of the company) and a quick check on the Internet verified that they are still trading today – some fifteen years later. Mere survival beyond three or so years is an enormous achievement for a start-up firm (as that one was in 1993). Survival into fifteen years with sustained growth is even more difficult. While there are many factors that will determine whether or not a given company will be successful, I can’t help thinking that part of that particular success story would have been the discipline in all resource allocation decisions. That discipline is what dictated that the fastest computers of the day be allocated to the most junior of staff for no reason other than that they were required for him to do his job. We need that type of discipline starting today.
