Being in control and illusory losses

Computers are sneaky things. They make us think we can be truly organized, that we can keep stuff — any stuff — in context and at our fingertips. They seduce us into thinking we can monitor and control the world.

Add to that the network management systems that drown us in status data and we’re ready to monitor and manage every minute detail of our IT systems.

This idea that we can control everything has led us into a fantasy world where we believe we can measure and value the tiny bits of time that hang off the computing tasks and behaviors within our enterprises.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Computers are sneaky things. They make us think we can be truly organized, that we can keep stuff — any stuff — in context and at our fingertips. They seduce us into thinking we can monitor and control the world.

Add to that the network management systems that drown us in status data and we’re ready to monitor and manage every minute detail of our IT systems.

This idea that we can control everything has led us into a fantasy world where we believe we can measure and value the tiny bits of time that hang off the computing tasks and behaviors within our enterprises.

For example, an IT services firm, Dimension Data, recently conducted a survey of 267 IT decision makers and concluded the following: The average network user loses 35 minutes per month on network log-in delays, 25 minutes per month on e-mail delays, and 23 minutes per month on file transfer delays.

So, the average network user loses almost one and a half hours per month to network performance issues. Fair enough. Let’s say the fully burdened cost of one of these average employees is $75,000 per annum or roughly $43 per hour. That means that if you have, say, 500 employees these network problems are costing you $32,250 per month or $387,000 per annum.

And that’s not all of these incremental losses that plague us. There’s the problem of how much time network users spend on handling spam, how long they spend on non-business related sites and on eBay, and the time wasted on instant messaging and updating Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. That’s got to amount to at least another lost hour or two per month, so your 500 person operation could easily be wasting $500,000 to $600,000 per year. Wow.

Something must be done, right? Actually, no, there’s really nothing that needs to be done.

The problem with these kinds of analyses is they aren’t identifying real costs because you can’t equate a solid hour of an employee’s time with an hour of his time that’s broken up into chunks of minutes or even seconds over a long period. 

If you are calculating the value of an employee it has to be on the basis of actual productive work done and revenue derived from that work.

For example, the fact that a sales person wastes 35 minutes per month waiting to log in to the network and a 25 minutes more for delayed e-mail and 23 minutes on file transfers is irrelevant if what we’re expecting from him are orders totaling some value and he reaches his target 

Now, what if the salesman isn’t making his target? We certainly need to look at what could be making his job harder, but I doubt whether the loss of 83 minutes per month — less than 0.8% of his time — is going to be the cause.

Yet if your organization uses this kind of time aggregation argument and adds up all these ultra-thin slices of time into one great big bucket of cost you’ve got an argument, albeit a bogus one, for doing something.

Of course, in that fantasy world of complete control it might seem that addressing all the tiny service issues in your network is justified, but that’s not looking at the bigger picture — whether you’re wasting money trying to fix a non-problem.