THE WELCH COMPANY
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111-2496
415 781 5700

Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 09:54:10 -0700

04 00069 61 99072101

Mr. Morris E. Jones
Director of Architecture
Intel Corporation
350 East Plumeria; Mail Stop CHP02-1
San Jose, CA 95124
morris.jones@intel.com

Subject:

Intelligence explains Com Metrics

Dear Morris,

I asked Tom Keesling to check around for potential commercial support within USACE for the NSF proposal, similar to your effort. His response is constructive (see attached).

Over 4 years I never took him to lunch or provided any inducement to endorse Com Metrics. I performed work. The experience of seeing the work led him to approve and distribute a report that described it as an intelligence effort supported by technology. But, he was against this in the beginning, like everyone else. He had to be ordered to use Com Metrics. Only then did he discover, through experience, that fears and doubts based on prior experience without Com Metrics, i.e., ignorance, was not justified.

That is our problem. We cannot enable people to overcome ignorance, i.e., lack of experience, without giving them some experience.

Tom is now leaving the government, at least in part, because his command would not go forward with Com Metrics. They won't do it because, like you and me, he cannot convince them to experience a benefit that is counterintuitive, beyond their experience, and so conflicts with their common sense.

Maybe it would help for you call Tom. Tomorrow is his last day. His number is 415 977 8473 and he leaves at 0300p because he comes in at 0630a. Why does he think the government should use this communication support, as set out in his letter today. Why did he approve a report describing it as intelligence?

These are important questions that impact people's feelings, which only direct experience seems capable of penetrating. To do that, we have to find a way to give people faith to gain initial experience, which you describe as "trust me." I say "trust the record of performance." You say the record shows no one is buying SDS.

This places us in a loop.

You are familiar with loops. The computer freezes up. We are stopped, until we change the code.

I suggest a change to the empathic design criteria suggested by Christensen: look at the underlying work process, and whether that is being improved, not to the acceptance of the product, to evaluate the potential for product acceptance.

You suggest changing the explanation from intelligence to "memory" and "remembering."

"Memory" is fine, if it works for you and Tom and Keith at Intel.

Memory alone does not get work done, and it is not communication, which Tom, at USACE, feels should be used in the government.

Management work entails a process set out in the NSF proposal called Plan, Perform, Report. If you click on Plan, Perform, Report in the proposal, you would get some detail that explains this emulates the intelligence? process of the human mind. But, we need not quibble about terms, we can call it "jelly beans" or "vkduey" or anything that makes people feel good. We are still stuck with the same challenge: how to enable people to gain experience with a new work process supported by technology, so they can discover this saves time and money, and so they will try very hard, as Tom did, to get it adopted.

There is a movie about the attack on Pearl Harbor that led to a declaration of war against Japan. One scene in the movie has a colonel, an "intelligence" officer, saying that analysis of Japanese deployment at sea, and intercepted communications showed there would be an attack on Hawaii in two days, on Dec 7, 1941. Another colonel says...