Bali Hi

I've had a somewhat strange travel week. A customer wanted to meet in Bali for several days, so on Tuesday I boarded the one Japan Airlines nonstop flight. When I arrived I learned that the customer decided to postpone the meeting, so I spent some of Wednesday on the beach. At about noon one of my colleagues asked, "Could you come to Kuala Lumpur then visit Singapore?" So I did.

Unfortunately Bali is not crowded right now. There's a persistent U.S. State Department travel warning, so lots of Americans avoid the place. (There were several vacationing Germans, however.) My flight appeared to be mostly full when I booked it, but the recent news about another Indonesian tsunami that killed hundreds in Java, not Bali, nonetheless largely emptied the 747 I boarded Tuesday. The hotel was likewise sparsely populated, and right now is supposedly high season.

I think lots of people consider the State Department warnings to have veto authority over their travel plans, but I have a somewhat different outlook. I do read them and take them seriously, and I do not like to take unnecessary risks. However, we all take risks. Crossing the street is risky, for example. As another example, last year I received a call asking if I would be willing to travel to Manila to teach an IBM internal class. One of my colleagues declined because there is a State Department travel warning for the Philippines. I did a little bit of research and determined the number of people in greater Manila who suffered violent death (murders, terrorist or otherwise) over the past few years. I compared that number to the same number for Dade County (Miami), my colleague's home area. I gave greater weight to more recent violence, and I also looked for differences in targeting Americans specifically. (There did not seem to be any particular targeting by nationality in either city.) Then I told him it would probably be a good idea to pack all his belongings and bring his whole family immediately and permanently to Manila because the rate of total death-inducing violent crime was about three times higher in Miami.

He went to Manila to teach the class.

As a side comment, I understand that the 9/11 deaths do not appear in official U.S. crime statistics or airline fatality statistics. Why? They should. Dead is dead.

There's a lesson here for computing. Sometimes staying put — inertia — is the riskiest move of all. That's especially true when your business changes and your information technology doesn't. For instance, in 1981 American Airlines introduced the AAdvantage frequent flyer program. Had Delta, Northwest, and other airlines not responded quickly with their own programs (and significant associated IT changes) they would have suffered grievous financial difficulties. "Our systems are stable, so we don't want to take the risk of changing them in any way" would have led to liquidation in that highly competitive industry. I try to explain this idea to my Japanese colleagues with partial success — many Japanese companies do not yet fully feel the effects of competition in what is still a highly cartelized domestic market. That's not to say that IT organizations should change systems and infrastructure just because there's a new whiz bang technology — that happened a lot in the 1990s — but IT should be highly responsive (or better yet anticipatory) to business needs. Perhaps this argument is obvious, but it is amazing how many IT organizations fail to serve business goals. In many such cases the CEO becomes incredibly frustrated, so he/she outsources the whole IT operation to, among others, IBM.