Cisco - TABPI

NEWS&ANALYSIS
Peter Coffee: Port Scans
The case for rest
As i looped around the east edge of phoenix,
heading home from the GigaWorld IT Forum,
I heard NPR’s salute to National Night Shift
Workers Day conclude with a poem by Karen
Jane Glenn. “Let us now praise the night shift,”
she began. “Those on the 8-to-4, the 10-to-6 ... the sleepdeprived
... the wired.” I could relate. It seems as if every
week brings me more e-mail messages that are timestamped
during the interval that Navy men call the midwatch,
from midnight to four in the morning. And I
have to admit that I’m also sending more of those
midwatch messages myself.
As it happened, the theme of the conference I’d
just attended was “Deliver more with less.” I don’t remember seeing “less sleep”
as a formal part of the agenda—but as I listened to Glenn’s poem, it seemed as if
that topic should have been addressed. After all, National Science Foundation
statistics estimate U.S. adults averaging
less than 7 hours’ sleep at night;
other studies point to sleep-deprivation
effects that include difficulty following
discussions; poor judgment in complex
situations; difficulty in devising a
new approach to a stubborn problem;
and failure to notice changes in situations.
In practical terms, this means that
people aren’t functioning as well as
they should in everyday situations
such as planning a project, responding
to a cyber-attack, debugging an application
or monitoring network operations.
Spread thin by staff reductions, and
losing formerly productive time to diversions
such as extra security delays in airports,
people are putting in 10-hour and
even 20-hour days for what used to be
considered 8 hours’ pay. That may not
be as good a deal for the employer as
it first seems, if the extra hours represent
neutral or even negative contributions.
Yes, it’s great that people can work
at any time, from anywhere, but sleepdeprived
zombies aren’t the shock troops
40 eWEEK n MAY 26, 2003
of enterprise success—whether they’re
“the wired” of Glenn’s poem or not.
International operations can approach
the 24-hour day as a relay race, rather
than a marathon. IBM, for example,
has adopted a two-shift approach to some
of its software development efforts, with
teams in Seattle setting daily work
specifications for offshore teams in India,
China, Latvia and Belarus. Overnight offshore
development returns product to
Seattle the next day for review, and the
cycle continues.
The company says this process
reduces development cycles by 35 percent,
yielding time-to-market benefits
that are worth even more than the reduc-
tions in development cost. Note well that
this is not about stretching a given number
of people across a greater number of
hours: It’s about taking advantage of
the 24-hour day in operations that circle
the globe.
The problem with success stories like
this is that smaller companies may feel
that they must do likewise. I’m reminded
of former Avis CEO Robert Townsend’s
warning that some corporate behaviors
don’t scale well from large to small organizations.
The smaller company that
decides to open an office in Bangalore,
or outsource some of its operations to
a contractor in Tel Aviv, may find that
it has blunted its competitive edge of
being able to get close to its customers
and thoroughly understand their needs.
Being just like IBM, only a hundred
times smaller, is like being a miniature
elephant in an ecological niche that’s better
suited to a fox.
In organizations of every size, managers
need to avoid letting IT push their
people across the line that separates anytime/anywhere
flexibility from all-thetime/everywhere
expectation. When
intermediate deadlines start being
regarded as purely pro forma, and everyone
knows that the real schedule
squeezes three days on the timetable
into a 24-hour all-nighter at the end of
every product cycle, that’s a cultural
problem that has to be solved by cultural
forces. When managers treat
crash-and-burn schedules as a sign of
commitment and not as a problem to
be fixed, that’s a cultural force that
PETER_ COFFEE@ZIFFDAVIS.COM
Sleep-deprived zombies aren’t the shock
troops of enterprise success—whether
they’re wired or not.
pushes in the wrong direction.
C. Northcote Parkinson was right:
Work does expand to fill the time
available. IT can make that available
time appear to be “all the time.” I’m not
saying that our e-mail systems need a
curfew. I am saying that the human side
of management includes making it clear
that you want good hours, not just more
of them. ´