adaptiman.com

Author: adaptiman

  • The Non-Technical Economy

    The Non-Technical Economy

    It seems that everything these days is about AI and how the world as we know it will end. Some are prophesying that entire swaths of our economy will be replaced by AI. Writers are lining up on both sides of the argument. As IT professionals, much has been written (or assumed) about the use of AI in IT.

    In 2019, Brian Merchant wrote, “A robot is not ‘coming for’, or ‘stealing’ or ‘killing’ or ‘threatening’ to take away your job. Management is.” Is that true?

    While most people are focusing on those things that AI can do to replace human work, there are a significant number of things that AI can’t do better than humans. Interestingly, I asked AI (i.e., MS CoPilot) for a list of things that humans do better. Here’s the list:

    1. Emotional Intelligence: Humans are naturally equipped with the ability to understand, interpret, and respond to emotions in a way that AI cannot. This includes empathy, compassion, and the ability to read subtle social cues, which are essential for meaningful human interactions.
    2. Creativity and Innovation: While AI can generate new content based on existing data, humans have the innate ability to think outside the box, imagine completely new concepts, and create innovative solutions to problems.
    3. Ethical and Moral Judgment: Humans can navigate complex ethical dilemmas and make decisions based on a nuanced understanding of morality, societal norms, and personal values. AI lacks the consciousness to make such judgments.
    4. Adaptability and Flexibility: Humans can easily adapt to new situations, learn from diverse experiences, and apply knowledge in various contexts. AI systems, on the other hand, can struggle with tasks that deviate from their training data or require adaptation to new environments.
    5. Complex Problem-Solving: Humans are capable of solving poorly defined or novel problems that require intuition, judgment, and the ability to find connections between seemingly unrelated information. AI systems are typically limited to solving algorithmic problems and can struggle with tasks that cannot be systematically defined.
    6. Physical Dexterity and Mobility: Humans have fine motor skills and the ability to navigate complex physical environments, which are challenging for AI and robotics to replicate with the same level of proficiency.
    7. Interpersonal Skills: The ability to build relationships, collaborate effectively, and navigate social networks is a distinctly human trait. AI can assist with communication but cannot fully replicate the depth of human interaction.
    8. Learning from Limited Data: Humans can learn new skills or understand new concepts from a few examples, whereas AI often requires large datasets to learn effectively.
    9. Understanding Context and Nuance: Humans excel at understanding context, sarcasm, irony, and nuanced language, which can be challenging for AI to interpret correctly.

    It’s important to recognize that AI is a tool designed to augment human abilities, not replace them. The collaboration between human intelligence and AI has the potential to enhance productivity and innovation across various fields.

    What’s interesting about this list is that most of these skills are closely related to those needed to provide excellent IT service management. As the emphasis in IT has grown over the last three decades from technical to customer-service competencies, the identification of these soft skills has been one of the ways the profession has defined and delineated itself. Take, for example, the list of skills necessary to provide excellent service desk support (ITIL4 Foundation Training, 2024):

    • Customer service
    • Empathy
    • Incident analysis and prioritization
    • Effective communication
    • Emotional Intelligence

    It would appear, at least at this moment in time, that AI will not be able to do some of the fundamental things we do in IT service management. Indeed, a survey of those industries most susceptible to “takeover” by AI include manufacturing, finance, healthcare, cybersecurity, and education. Note that these fields don’t rely heavily on stakeholder interactions to be effective.

    So why are “managers” still trying to replace us? I think the answer is that they are thinking in a binary way – either we use AI to do work or we use humans. The real answer is that AI will augment and complement humans in IT service management, not replace them. The collaboration between human intelligence and AI has the potential to enhance productivity and innovation across various fields. This is reflected in the newest ITIL4 Create, Deliver, Support curriculum which stresses the effective integration of AI, among other tools. Mature IT Managers will realize that AI is a tool that can automate steps of the value stream, but at the end of the day, customers will have better outcomes and realize more value if humans are left to do what humans do best.

  • The Appropriation Paradox

    The Appropriation Paradox

    My father joined the army fresh out of high school. After training as a “sigint” operator, his second tour took him to Munich, Germany. He married my mother shortly before moving to Germany and they settled in the small town of Bad Aibling, close to the army base and nestled under the gaze of the Wendelstein in the Bavarian Alps. I was born 11 months later in a Munich army hospital.

    Although I don’t remember much from that first year of life, I do remember family references to my birthplace and still have a pair of lederhosen they bought me there. I don’t have a drop of German blood in me, but have always loved German things. In high school, I took German for four years and was a proud member of our high school German club. I learned all about German culture including German folk dancing which carried over to college. That’s where I met my wife. My wedding present from her was a Lladro statuette of polka dancers.

    What’s my point? The reason I’ve embraced German culture is because I love it, respect it, study it, share it, and advocate for it. So yesterday’s story in the UK Daily Mail about a University of Houston Latina sorority who “culturally appropriated” black step dancing doesn’t make any sense. No one adopts a cultural practice that they don’t like. On the contrary, adopting cultural practices is a way to show your love and respect for it by making it your own. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

    The main argument against cultural appropriation is that if you are not a [fill in the blank: race/gender/culture/religion] person, then you can’t do something that that a [fill in the blank: race/gender/culture/religion] person does. Let me get this straight: if I’m black, I can step. If I’m white, stepping is cultural appropriation. So the difference in these two scenarios is my color. Hmm.

  • ITIL 4 and Aggregation Theory

    ITIL 4 and Aggregation Theory

    Back in the days of ITILv3, focusing on process was the right thing to do at the time. Building out robust, documented, repeatable processes went a long way toward consistent service delivery, and for many years, this approach to service management was enough. Then in the late two-thousands, significant changes in availability of IT service suppliers and the flattening of service delivery created a situation in which our customers, who had historically been a “captive” audience, now had choices. They quickly learned that we weren’t the only game in town. They had choices from outside the organization. Enter shadow IT. Were we still relevant to our customers? If our role wasn’t service provision, what was it?

    When ITIL 4 came around, the framework transitioned from an internal process-heavy focus to an external, customer-centered focus. At the time, the shift toward customer value “felt” right, but I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why. For a number of years, I had noticed that our customers were reasonably happy with the services we provided. But when we started engaging them strategically with BRM (Business Relationship Management) by fostering a relationship in order to understand their business and what they really valued, their happiness increased significantly. This practice worked in a big way, but why?

    Today, I made a connection between the outsized results we reaped with BRM and Aggregation Theory. The basic idea of aggregation theory is that value chains have three different groups: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users1. Before the Internet disrupted everything, distribution was expensive. Take the example of newspapers. Newspapers had to be physically distributed. Competitive advantage was gained by the distributors (e.g. New York Times, The Washing Post, etc.) integrating the suppliers (i.e., journalists). The reason this worked was because customers outnumbered suppliers. A distributor that integrated supplier relationships had a significant advantage over distributors that didn’t. This was integration up the value stream.

    Post-Internet 2.0, the cost of the customer transaction decreased to practically zero as distribution became aggregated. Using our example, newspapers moved to digital editions and the cost of distribution decreased. But along with lowering customer transaction costs came de-personalization of the relationship. I missed the sight of my paperboy meandering down the street on his bike only to toss my paper in the bushes. In the new era, customers became weary of thousands of scattershot email solicitations, the rampant buying and selling of their information, and the always annoying automated feedback requests.

    “You’ve been chosen as one of our special customers to give us feedback today. For your time and effort, you’ll be eligible to receive a totally worthless coupon that you can’t redeem unless you stand on your head, pat your belly, and cough three times.”

    Customers actually missed drop-in visits from support team members, calls from their sales reps, and conversations with the engineering teams. The ubiquity of low-value customer connections had increased the value of the personal relationship. And it wasn’t just the relationship, it was the nature of what we did for them. While we continued to provide IT services (if not all), our role had to shift to that of a strategic partner. We had to grieve that we would no longer have the exclusive affections of our customers and accept that they had become poly-amorous, so to speak.

    This is why the focus on value and relationship has taken center stage today. Successful organizations will be those that provide the best user experience. This means an increased focus on customer relationships and a careful curation of customer experiences – integrating customers down the value stream. It means continuously understanding what the customer really values. It means getting out and talking to our customers, and I don’t mean our robots talking to their robots. I mean WE have to talk with THEM.

    1Incidentally, ITIL 4 simplifies this model by describing two top-level roles: providers and consumers, and then extending the concept to the three-part model by stating that organizations are both consumers and providers. ITIL 4 focuses on the relationships between organizations in the service relationship model.

  • Home for the Holidays

    Home for the Holidays

    Don’t you love spending quality time with family and friends eating and drinking lots of things you don’t need? You gotta love those conversations around the dinner table and if you’re anything like me, you’re thankful that Christmas comes but once a year. I had a number of interesting conversations this holiday, but I’m only going to share one of them.

    This conversation happened at the dinner table and was initiated by one of my “in-laws.” I won’t say which one to protect the guilty. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t much of a conversation – more like a diatribe. “Higher education is a complete waste of time and money. All they do is indoctrinate your kids and teach them a bunch of radical ideology. Nobody should go to college. Anything you need to know, you can teach yourself for free. You just have to love learning, that’s the key.” It was an interesting topic to broach when you’re sitting next to two college professors.

    Except for that last part, you can guess that I disagreed with just about all of it. But it was unsettling on a number of levels. For one, this type of argument against higher education used to be the exclusive purview of liberal-minded folks, but I’m hearing it more and more frequently from conservative types such as those at the Daily Wire. Matt Walsh is especially venomous in his attacks of “liberal college professors.”

    While there is some truth in the “irrelevance” argument against higher education, I believe that we have a lot to offer students, if we can remember what higher education is really about. But poor leadership, a decline in the classic liberal arts education, and a rash of institutions in the news lately for behaving badly have fueled the fire. Higher ed is not making a good value proposition anymore. Steeply rising costs mainly as a result of falling state and federal support over the last 35 years coupled with the explosion of the administrative university have hindered our ability to provide value. We’ve allowed others to define the goal of higher education solely as skill development. This is why for-profit, online, nimble educational corporations are beating us, at least for the moment.

    So what is education really about? I believe that colleges should re-focus on teaching the classic liberal arts education which, by definition, develops a student’s intellectual and moral character, rather than simply teaching them a set of skills. This type of education is designed to provide students with a broad understanding of the world and its history, as well as to teach them how to think critically and communicate effectively. It includes subjects such as literature, philosophy, history, and the fine arts.

    And this is important: we need to educate students in these things in addition to teaching them skills that are useful to employers. After all, skills help us succeed in the workplace, but virtue helps us succeed in life.

    What makes me sad is that our colleges seem to have lost this vision. Colleges of liberal arts are under attack and being cut at every turn. While part of this result is self-inflicted, it seems that not many college professors are interested in mentoring our students to pursue truth and virtue.

    Higher education needs to rediscover what made it great in the first place.

  • To Insure Promptness…

    To Insure Promptness…

    On Tuesday nights, I teach until about 7:30pm and so I go out to eat after class. One of my favorite restaurants is a little “hole-in-the-wall” Chinese place in College Station off of Rock Prairie, T Jin Diner. Watching them work is amazing. To begin with, the food is fantastic. I’ve never had a bad dish there. They have a significant take-out business weeknights in addition to onsite customers and they process orders with exceptional speed and care. It’s like a ballet as they move bagged orders from the kitchen to the front door, seat incoming customers and serve dishes as they come off the line. Last night, I ordered a cup of hot-and-sour soup and Mongolian beef. The soup arrived in less than a minute. I hadn’t taken 5 spoonfuls of the soup before the main dish arrived, piping hot.

    The point is that this is a small independent business that pays attention to details, is fast and courteous, and produces exceptional quality. So when the bill comes, which is a credit-card receipt, I don’t think twice about giving them a healthy tip. I’m glad to give it to them and appreciative of their care.

    Contrast this with recent story in the New York Times on DoorDash tipping practices. “If you don’t add a tip for your delivery person, you might have to wait longer for your food.” Interesting, in light of the fact that the word “tip” comes from an 18th century British custom To Insure Promptness. DoorDash is not-so-subtly saying, “If you don’t tip us, we’ll provide poorer service.” Tipping seems to be an issue for this company especially since DoorDash settled a lawsuit in 2020 over “deceptive tipping” inferring that drivers were getting tips when in fact they were pocketing the money.

    Tipping is really getting out of hand with companies thinking they are entitled to tips. I for one believe that is tip should be given after exceptional service is rendered – exceptional service – not expected, average or mediocre service. Here are my personal rules of tipping:

    • Anytime I serve myself, I don’t tip. This includes fast-food or any walk-up or cafeteria-style restaurant
    • If asked for tip prior to service, I don’t tip. I despise the little turnaround kiosks that force you to select an amount while those behind you look on
    • If proactively asked for a tip after service, I don’t tip. I don’t think its right to ask for a tip because that infers an expectation.
    • If passively asked for a tip after service (e.g., on a credit card receipt);
      • If the service was poor, I don’t tip.
      • If the service was average, I may leave a small tip <15%.
      • If the service was better than average, I’ll tip 15-20%
      • If the service was exceptional, I’ll tip over 20%
    • If the requirements of exceptional service are met and I’m not asked to tip, I’ll try to find a way to tip anyway. At a minimum, I will remark to the staff how I felt about their service and thank them.
  • Van Halen Breaks AI

    Van Halen Breaks AI

    I’m a huge Spotify fan. As a GenX’er, I love ’80s arena rock – Queen, Van Halen, AC/DC, Journey, Yes – you get the picture. Spotify feeds my hard rock nostalgia hunger. Spotify released a new feature earlier this year called DJ that is essentially an AI bot that examines your musical tastes and curates sets based upon them, including new selections it thinks you may like. According to Spotify, “The DJ knows you and your music taste so well that it will scan the latest releases we know you’ll like, or take you back to that nostalgic playlist you had on repeat last year.”

    After using DJ for some time, I can attest that it’s pretty good at creating sets of my favorites but pretty bad at selecting new music. For example, I can’t stand Rap, but it keeps setting me up with Rap/Hip-Hop sets which I quickly fast-forward through. DJ doesn’t seem to think fast-forwarding is disapprobation, so after a few songs, I finally get fed up and hit the “DJ” button to explicitly show my displeasure. It makes me wonder if they are selling plays of those artists which would explain why they keep pushing genres that the AI should know I don’t like.

    Several weeks ago, DJ selected a Van Halen song from their album 1984. The song was the instrumental first track on the album. Now, I had that record on vinyl when I was a kid. I know every lyric, every note, every riff. So when I heard the instrumental track 1984, I was expecting to also hear the second track on the album, Jump. I’ve always considered 1984 as an instrumental prelude to Jump. This is a “by design” artifact of “album rock” that creates associations and meaning out of the order tracks are set on the album. If you doubt me, take a look at Pink Floyd The Wall. Other examples of instrumental preludes include Yes’ Cinema (followed by Leave It) on their 90125 album and Queen’s We Will Rock You (We Are the Champions) from their album News of the World. Regarding this last example, I always get irritated when radio stations play We Will Rock You by itself. In the 80s and 90s, they would ALWAYS play them together. Somewhere along the road, radio media forgot this tacit knowledge and wisdom.

    And here’s the point. When I heard 1984, I let it run expecting Jump to play next, but it never came. Because I let it run, in subsequent weeks, DJ kept serving that song solo, aggravating me all the more. Why didn’t DJ know that those two songs were supposed to be together? Because AI doesn’t understand tacit knowledge. Van Halen had “broken” AI.

    AI will never be able to recreate the beautiful complexity of learning through living in the world with all of the experiences – personal, communal, cultural, and national – that come with it. This is why I don’t think AI is as far along as some would have us believe. Some folks agree with me. While AI may be helpful in many contexts, I don’t think it will ever replace the complexity of human reason completely.

  • Career Readiness Skills Higher Ed is NOT Teaching

    Career Readiness Skills Higher Ed is NOT Teaching

    The list of marketable skills (aka: market ready skills or career readiness skills) has been around for at least a decade. The list is not surprising:

    1. critical thinking/problem solving
    2. oral/written communication
    3. teamwork/collaboration
    4. information technology application
    5. leadership, professionalism/work ethic
    6. career management.

    It’s also no surprise that higher ed is doing a pretty poor job of teaching these skills to our graduates. NACE has been in the forefront of this research. For example, in 2018, only 43% of seniors felt prepared for their future careers. 46% of employers reported that they had to provide remedial training to recent graduates, which accounted for 20% of their entire training budget.

    And it’s not a mystery that employers are looking for these skills. In a recent survey, 72% of C-level executives cited critical thinking/problem solving as most important in their workplace. 63% cited collaboration/teamwork. Technical skills followed these in the number three spot. Interestingly, these same executives indicated that career readiness skills were more important to entry-level employees because job-specific technical skills can be more easily trained.

    It’s clear that employers want these skills and graduates lack them. WHY?

    I believe the reason is because we’re simply not teaching them intentionally. We talk about how our current traditional curricula “inherently” teach these skills, but we’re not addressing them openly and explicitly. We’re not building them into our curricula. Being more intentional then becomes a goal of our future curricula.

    Here are six things we can do as instructors to enhance our students’ career readiness skills:

    1. Talk about career readiness skills – Simply listing and discussing career readiness skills in our courses, their importance, and how much employers value them is the first and most basic step.
    2. Create more project-based learning experiences – We use PBL for our capstone which creates a wonderful opportunity for students to operationalize most of the career readiness skills. But why do we wait for capstone?
    3. Add a “careers/resumes/interviewing” module to your class – ‘Nuff said.
    4. Create opportunities for peer evaluations – Opportunities for peer evaluations are invaluable. It’s one thing for me to tell a student they have poor team skills. It’s quite another for one of their peers to do it.
    5. Invite industry recruiters to your class – Guest lecturers help students learn what to expect in the interview process. If the recruiter can (be prompted to) talk about career readiness skills, all the better.
    6. Encourage internships – nothing prepares students to work like working.

    In summary, preparing students to be career-ready will go a long way in helping them acquire gainful employment before or soon after they graduate.

  • It’s for fun…

    It’s for fun…

    On June 30, 2023, I retired from the Texas A&M University System after 29 years of service. Recent events on the main TAMU campus have led to me return almost immediately as a “working retiree.” What would bring me back, you ask?

    Over the last three years, the Technology Management program has completely reshaped and updated their degree to reflect a foundation in IT Service Management (ITSM). The new degree is a Bachelor of Arts in IT Service Management and receives its first cohort of students in in the fall, 2024. This degree reflects what I and many of our faculty believe is a new focus for IT professionals – one based on a foundation of IT Service Management with a strong portfolio of technical skills and plenty of room for our students to build out concentrations of study for the myriad IT-related jobs in and around the perimeter of the industry.

    But the changes in the degree are just the tip of the iceberg. We are working with educational psychologists (I’m one) to focus the program heavily on career development during the student’s academic tenure. This is a holistic approach based upon career assessment starting on day one and extending to graduation and beyond. With ITSM as the foundation, our program can be shaped and molded to accommodate virtually any IT career our students can think of.

    For example, this semester, I have a student that wants to be an IT-focused auditor. She has identified a minor in finance that, when coupled with her IT technical skills and ITSM foundation, will position her for a strong IT career most likely in the banking sector when she graduates.

    Why did I come back? It’s for fun.