Snookered: Harmonization, a Test of Diplomacy
Notes from the road…
I’m on a train somewhere in Switzerland, nearing the Italian border. The Alps are screaming past with intricate matrices of dormant vineyards covering the foothills. I’m daydreaming of how many people on this train are listening to something from the group War (City Country City) on an iPod. None likely. Statistically, probably no one else in Switzerland or Italy is listening to Lee Oskar on harmonica backed by the legendary crossover band of the 70s. Ah well, my iPod is loaded with a wide spectrum of music from Les McCann and Eddie Harris (eerily, we just passed Montreaux, Switzerland, where it was recorded in the late 60s) to the imaginative Patty Griffin, to Morphine Head with Wings, to vintage Santana. But also loaded is John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra Birds of Fire, which reminds me to this day of the most stunning display of guitar work I have ever seen.
I’ve been privileged to have attended literally hundreds of concerts, and have stood backstage with the likes of Carlos Santana and Steve Tyler throwing back beers and chatting about nothing relating to music. It was McLaughlin and his collection of jazz superstars in the late 70s I remember above all others. The slow building of percussion through a bridge of smoldering electrified violin, climaxed by a progressive inferno of positively shocking guitar virtuosity, left everyone in the audience slack jawed and spent.
But we all have different tastes, eh? Otherwise, why would there have been a marathon snooker tournament on television over the last several days? Oddly, I was mesmerized by the players and British announcers.
“Oh, bad luck, he’s really left himself in a desperate situation with the pink ball, and this will take a courageous effort to overcome and to win this frame.”
I was really rooting for the poor sap, though his thick shot and reckless carom was his own fault, I cursed when his cue ball silently nestled in shameful isolation against the cushion. But his indifferent cue work had been a blight on the match from the beginning, and now my sympathy was turning to contempt. I now openly began to cheer for his opponent. Ok, so I’m lying. I really didn’t care, but it beat CNBC, so I cracked open the mini bar in search of a beer to pass time as they racked the next frame.
But cultural differences are much different than personal tastes, though the latter may be shaped by the former. The world of informatics is growing smaller, and assuaging shareholders is a driving force to show fiscal responsibility and a progressive approach. Frequently, this involves a harmonization of data, methods and instrumental analyses to raze the silos of geographic incongruity and pave the road of corporate homogeneity. But the “not invented here”; barriers, rooted in cultural differentiation, are not made of balsa, but are intransigent force fields of passive resistance.
It takes a hell of a lot more than a corporate credo “We Shall Speak with One Voice”; or similar drivel to make it so. I wonder how those folks in the Dublin pubs felt when they banned smoking? Hooo Boy! Ne comprend pas. Hitting the pubs after work for a few pints and a smoke or 10 while rabidly cheering the local soccer team is a religion, and one day the edict came down that, as of Monday, you can drink your pints, but you need to hit the cobblestones to smoke my friend. But in those little pubs outside of town where the presence of any unfamiliar constables is not likely, they still fire them up. Come on, these pubs have people who have sat there every night for 50 years. Are you going to tell them to take their Dunhills outside? Not bloody likely.
Passive resistance is interesting. It is the guerilla movement without guns and blindfolds. It is the weapon of the disenfranchised who can shake your hand while harboring a Bowie knife. Cultural change involves collective suction, not overwhelming force.
Here’s an example. Remember Lady Bird Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson’s wife? She was responsible for a campaign that, over time, put a massive dent in the national scourge of littering. Johnson’s government could have legislated jail time for first offense littering, but that would have filled the hoosegows with gum spitters. Instead, Lady Bird pulled the majority to the brilliance of a beautiful landscape. It worked, and campaign turned to convention, and convention to culture. Nowadays, few people remember when it was not reprehensible to open a car window and chuck garbage spaceward.
Corporate informatics harmonization is a measure of technical and diplomatic fortitude. The decision to consolidate applications and processes is often triggered because companies are realizing that support and training is simplified, resources can be relocated and instantly ramped up in the event of site expansion or closure, and it makes good sense to be able to collectively spread work over a large geography as a virtually gigantic laboratory. But the devil is in the details. When many disparate systems are collapsed into one, data identifiers such as test codes, test groups and location codes must be cleansed, duplicates eliminated, and the entire nomenclature of sample identification is negotiated and locked.
As if that wasn’t a Herculean task, what about the hardware issues? On one side of the battlefield, you have information technology and compliance. For IT, one single database, under strict control, is nirvana. Compliance, on this topic, also agrees. It is easier to control a system under lock and key in one site than it is to have duplicate databases and synchronization issues.
Okay, where might that server actually reside? Most modern labs want to interface instruments, and feel the heebie-jeebies if you tell them that the system their instruments are to be interfaced to is going to be 3000 miles away from their instruments. Sure, instrument servers can buffer data until the yahoos in IT get the network up and running but, for some, that’s little consolation to not having the application sitting on a box in the back room. I get the same story all the time:
“No one trusts IT to be able to keep the communication lines open to the server. They never even return our support calls. I personally don’t want our fate to rest in their hands.”
And even with upgraded networks and round-the-clock support, who is to question some queasiness in this matter? After all, IT supports not only your informatics system, but Logistics, Human Resources, Finance… you get the picture.
“Hey pal, the payroll system is down. If I don’t fix that, I don’t get paid. To be honest, if you can’t test a urine sample, it’s not going to snap me awake at night.”
What to do?
The buzzword these days is harmonization. It rolls off the tongue like a finely crafted Claret, but talking the talk isn’t walking the walk. It’s often a Dilbert cartoon in the making, and the platitudes of corporate PowerPoint presentations eventually have to give way to the brutality of doing the work.
When Henry Flagler first thought of building a railroad all the way out to Key West, someone drew a little hash mark of railroad tracks across the islands and said, “There you have it. I think I’ll grab some lunch.”
Of course, the actual work of building embankments in the open ocean, stabilizing tracks in Florida muck, all while getting hounded by vicious snakes and mosquitoes the size of bats was a detail the engineer working for Flagler had felt beneath him to address.
The actual heavy lifting of harmonization is not a matter to be swept aside like an annoying waiter, it is a sophisticated exercise in balanced diplomacy and raw intellect. The hand waving done during those excruciating PowerPoint presentations is often an acronym for sprinkling platitudes into a discussion where the next step is the Twilight Zone, but no one in the room wants to admit it.
But, with proper phraseology, even daunting chasms can be bridged. I can attest to it. I now look forward to catching up on the Snooker Championships tonight, despite the inevitable raise in blood pressure when some dolt misreads a bank and ends up frozen in a klatch of red balls with no hope for escape, and must resort to the humiliation of playing safe.
Randy Hice is the president of the Laboratory Expertise Center. He can be reached at [email protected].
