Michael S. Parks

The history of texaco's corporate information technology function: a general systems theoretical interpretation

We attempt to use general systems theory (GST) to understand why the resources of Texacos corporate information technology function consistently did not match its task during its 40-year lifetime. Our interpretation uses mechanistic, organic, and colonial systems metaphors, each with three components. The first is an analysis of a management action system made up of organizational indicators such as Texacos revenues, profits, employee numbers, IT budgets, and IT personnel numbers. The second is a narrative of performance versus resource needs, which shows a gap between the resources and expanding responsibilities of Texacos IT function. The third is a management perception system, which offers reasons why top management continually misinterpreted ITs performance as inferior. Our results show that the mechanistic, organic, and colonial interpretations converge. In addition, our GST-based interpretations show how top management might have remedied the situation.

The evolution of the corporate IT function and the role of the CIO at Texaco: how do perceptions of IT's performance get formed?

While senior managements confidence in the IT function and the CIO appears to be at an all time low, the fields understanding of why this condition exists is still confused. This paper suggests that the problem lies in how perceptions about IT are formed. To this end, the paper briefly looks at the growth and evolution of the corporate IT department at the oil giant Texaco, Inc. The analysis paints a somewhat disturbing picture of a top performing IT organization, intimately responsible for the success of the corporation, yet being perceived by much of senior management as an overhead that was costly and ineffective. The paper suggests some reasons as to why such perceptions might have come about, and what lessons the field can learn from what happened at Texaco. It is our belief that through such historical analyses, like the one performed at Texaco, a richer and broader understanding of the nature of organizational IT units is possible. These analyses shed light on the root causes for why IT is often perceived negatively. We suggest that IT organizations might change these perceptions by partnering with business units to share the credit for successful implementations and managing the perceptions about ITs contribution.

Sustainable virtual communities: suggestions from the colonial model

While virtual community research has contributed to the understanding of the virtual community sustainability, a need for a systematic model exists. In this paper, we propose a model of sustainable virtual communities based on the sustainability properties of animal colonies in nature. The premise of our model is that if we manage to replicate the sustainability properties of colonial systems in virtual communities, they can become longer lasting. We also present the results of an exploratory case study. The study shows that colonial properties form a construct that predicts member perceptions of their community being sustainable. While our primary objective is the conceptual introduction of the colonial principles of sustainability, the case study provides some early indications that these principles may help design systems that can bind virtual communities more permanently.

Forty years of the corporate information technology function at Texaco Inc. - A history

This paper is a history of Texacos Corporate IT Function (IT) from its inception until Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001. The four decades of Texaco IT are best characterized by a contrast between the functions performance and its resources. According to third party measures, Texaco IT was a top performer amongst oil-industry IT functions and third party service providers. Yet starting soon after its inception, the department endured a resource squeeze. As the workload increased, ITs relative resources shrank. Throughout its history, user dissatisfaction with the unit was prevalent. We believe that the Texaco IT story is a typical account of the experiences of many large corporate IT organizations. The unit was a success by the measures of the profession, but failed in the eyes of top management and business units.

A comparison of machine learning with human judgment

This paper compares human judgment with machine learning in a check processing context. An experiment was conducted comparing teams of subjects with three commercially available machine learning algorithms: recursive partitioning, ID3, and a back-propagation neural network. Also, the statistical technique discriminant analysis was compared. The subjects were allowed to induce rules from historical data under ideal human conditions, such as adequate time and opportunity to sort the data as desired. The results on multiple holdout samples indicate that human judgment, recursive partitioning, and the ID3 algorithm were equally accurate and more accurate than a back-propagation neural network. Subjects who chose mixed strategies of judgment were more accurate than those using noncompensatory strategies, while no subjects chose compensatory strategies. Large decision trees were not more accurate than smaller ones. There appeared to be a time threshold for humans to form accurate decision rules. Holdout sample accuracy tended to increase with primary sample accuracy. ID3 built larger trees than did either humans or recursive partitioning. The conclusion of this research is that the knowledge engineer faced with available historical data concerning a classification problem should not waste his time discerning rules, since he will only take longer and be no more accurate than a good learning tool. Knowledge of these tools will be the requisite skill for the knowledge engineer of the 1990s. Implications for IS design and further research are discussed.