The Importance of Research and a Lesson for IT Research

Executive Summary

• Research is one of the most powerful ways of determining what is true among competing ideas.
• Historically, research has been the exception rather than the rule, something that persists in IT research today.

Introduction

We will use historical examples from the excellent video series called Absolute History to illustrate the historical reticence to perform research and the financially biased individuals that fought back against performing research to get to the truth — even when the consequences of not going the research were deadly.

Example #1: The Issue of Untested and Un-researched Chimney Design in England

When chimneys were first used in England, their design did not go through any testing. The result was that the designs came about through guesswork, and the testing was performed on houses rather than in a testing environment, and these houses were frequently burned to the ground, lighting up houses next to them with their embers.

All of this could have been avoided if research had been funded to determine a safe chimney design. One of the important observations from “trial and error” is that the fireplace’s aperture needed to be no more than 10x the chimney top’s aperture. A larger aperture ratio than this, depending upon the amount of wood used, would lead to the accumulation of smoke at the midpoint of the chimney. This could have been determined through testing without any houses burning down.

Example #2: The Use of Arsenic Wallpaper in Victorian Era Europe

In Victorian England, wallpaper became all the rage. The problem was that the dyes used in the paper used arsenic. It took years of people dying from arsenic poisoning before these wallpapers were banned in several countries. The video points out that while banned in Germany, arsenic wallpapers were not banned in England.

One of the repeated features demonstrated in this video is that the people who make their income from the dangerous item oppose testing. This was repeated hundreds of years later, as the cigarette companies denied the large body of research that showed that cigarette smoking caused cancer.

Example #3: Cigarettes

The cigarette industry was pleased to ruin anyone’s life who provided accurate information about cigarettes’ lethality. For decades they stated that the research was “not conclusive” that cigarettes caused cancer. Under oath, top executives from the cigarette companies stated that they thought nicotine was not addictive. This is tantamount to saying that the moon is made of cheese.

In this video, it is explained that when the whistleblower Thomas Wygant brought up the interest in researching a safer cigarette, he was told by Thomas Sandefur, the President of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, the following.

I don’t want to hear anything more about a safer cigarette. We pursue a safer cigarette and it would put us at extreme exposure versus other products.

It is not only nicotine and smoke inhalation; Brown & Williamson used multiple known carcinogens in the manufacture of their cigarettes, one being coumarin in its cigarettes.

After these issues had been entirely exposed, the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company described him when Thomas Sandefur dies.

In announcing his death, the company praised Mr. Sandefur for playing a major role in developing Brown & Williamson’s full-price brands and in forging a strong position for the company in the discount-brand segment of the American cigarette market.

Nick Brookes, the chairman and chief executive of the company, said Mr. Sandefur “was a strong leader who not only saw opportunities before most, as in the growth of value-for-money brands, but was quick to take advantage of those opportunities. – New York Times

This is how Brown & Williamson describes this ex-president.

Example #4: Edwardian Cosmetics

How About References: The Problem with IT Research

IT research/analysts and consulting firms have a curious absence of references in their documentation. All of the IT analyst firms are paid off by vendors and don’t perform research as much as produce material that can be used by vendors and consulting firms to market their products and services. That is what is called research is actually marketing collateral. A good example of this we cover in the article Forrester’s Fake TCO Study on S/4HANA. This study, which estimated S/4HANA implementations at less than $1 million, was widely defended by corrupt SAP consultants. SAP consultants and senior managers and partners do not want accurate research into SAP published. This is because it would be negative for their income.

Conclusion

Research constantly has to fight against commercial interests. There is little difference between present-day IT research and IT consulting and medicine from the 1500s. In IT, there is close to no interest in testing comparative methods of systems implementation and maintenance.

The entities that benefit from large amounts of IT waste are both the income providers for content development and are considered legitimate sources of information on these topics.

References

*https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/16/us/thomas-sandefur-tobacco-leader-dies-at-56.html