Making good decisions

Picture the scene: you’re sitting in the boardroom representing the mainframe team, and sitting with you are the new cloud team, and the established distributed team, and there’s also some people from finance, and even a couple of users. The meeting starts, chaired by the CEO, who wants to get involved in such an important decision for the organization. Maybe you’re deciding on the best platform for some new application that’s going to be used. Perhaps you’re making choices for what should be included in next year’s budget and where it should be spent. Or maybe your company wants to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) in all its customer-facing applications. Or, it might be some other big project.

I would guess, with very few exceptions, you’ll be championing the mainframe as the best platform to use. However, the other IT people will be championing their platforms equally enthusiastically. How does the CEO make a choice with the conflicting expert advice he’s getting and with his own biases?

Let’s look at cognitive biases first. These are biases people have (like thinking vaccinations are bad for you, or a political party is always bad, or mainframes are always best) leading them to draw erroneous conclusions. Your CEO can overcome his own biases by getting information from a variety of sources.

The CEO’s decision-making process means that they need to weigh up the various options and determine the best course of action. That means the mainframe guy (you) needs to come to the meeting with more than your gut feeling about what’s right and your natural biases. You need to bring some real-life examples. You need to be able to demonstrate where other mainframe sites have successfully implemented whatever is under discussion – or, at least, something similar. If no-one else has done something very similar, it might be possible to break down the task under discussion into smaller component parts and illustrate where they have been successfully used on a mainframe, and where they have been unsuccessfully used on any other platform.

The next stage for the CEO is to analyse the arguments that are being put forward by the different groups at the meeting. He needs to interpret what has been proposed, and then draw conclusions based on the information in front of him. He needs to judge the information’s merit, accuracy, and appropriateness. He needs to check that the information is from a reliable source – just on being the Internet may not always make it reliable. The CEO needs to identify any assumptions made by the people putting forward different proposals (such as “the cost of cloud computing is likely to remain low over the next three years”), and also identify any biases in individual’s arguments. This can be done by him actively questioning proposals or arguments being made.

For many big decisions, there is plenty of data available from different sources that can be checked for reliability (accuracy) and then analysed. The information drawn from this needs to be valid, relevant, and significant. This information can be used to support the claims or assertions of the different groups at a meeting.

Lastly, the CEO needs to summarize the arguments that have been put forward, ensuring that he has understood them completely. We all know companies that have moved applications off their mainframe hardware because the cost of software is much cheaper on distributed systems. It’s only later that they find they not only need to spend more on hardware to run their new software, they also need more people to run the additional hardware. In the end, their off-mainframe budget can be higher than staying on the mainframe. It’s looking at all aspects of a potential solution that’s important at this stage. The evidence put forward needs to be from credible sources and needs to be complete.

The mainframer at the meeting needs to be a good communicator in order to put forward well-reasoned arguments for their particular point of view, and argue against other opinions.

The CEO, in moving to a final decision, needs to weigh the competing evidence. Some evidence will corroborate or support a proposal. Some, from multiple sources, will be convergent and support the same conclusion. Some will be contradictory, and some may be conflicting. The CEO needs to keep in mind the issue that this meeting is trying to address, the desired outcome of the solution proposed. He needs to look at the outcome of the different proposals in computing terms, in terms of cost and profit, in terms of its impact on staffing numbers and morale, in terms of the reputation of the company, and many other aspects. Each proposed solution can then be evaluated against these and any other relevant criteria. A positives and negatives table could be drawn up to do this. Usually, different criteria are weighted differently. At the end, a final solution can be settled on, and a rational decision can be made.

The next stage is the impact analysis and communication with people affected. If the impact involves people losing their jobs, then plans need to be put in place to offer retraining for newly-created jobs in the organization or for filling other vacancies. Otherwise, staff must be helped to deal with redundancy and get work elsewhere.

If only customers are going to be affected, then advertising and social media can be used to explain how much better things will be. If employees will be impacted, it’s important to ensure that carefully-crafted messages are sent out explaining exactly what changes are taking place, and how that will benefit the people who will benefit, and how those impacted by the change will be helped into new roles.

This discussion uses ideas taken from critical thinking. This is a technique that can be used to find the best solution to a problem and then implement it successfully. It’s designed to identify alternative ideas and test them out. It should help overcome cognitive biases. And it should help to analyse data. The last stage would be self-reflection, where a person can review how well each stage was handled, what personal thoughts and experiences occurred, and what personal lessons were learned.

Using these ideas can help any mainframer prepare for those important meetings that may be coming up.