The Theory of Games: Diplomacy

Like many IT people, in college I was a gamer. And like many gamers, I spent time playing Diplomacy. Most board games are strategy games, but in Diplomacy you make deals with other players, and there are no rules that require you to keep them. Everyone writes down their orders and then they're all opened simultaneously, so you have to depend

This is an intoxicating freedom for people who've played bad chess for years: all of a sudden, they can win by making a deal and then betraying them. It's as though you could take back moving a piece in chess!

They soon learn that while the chess board has no memory, their fellow Diplomacy player does. Betray someone on Friday night and next week they'll return the favor. I once saw a guy wiped out on turn one of a game (this is nearly impossible) because he was so untrustworthy that, when opening round orders were opened, we found out that every one of his fellow players decided to launch an all out attack on him as their opening move.

What does this have to do with IT at a University? Just this. On a college campus, our customer base doesn't change. The people we work with this year are the people we'll be working with in ten years. Thinking short term doesn't work, because we live with the long term consequences of our actions. We need to find "win win" solutions

When several of us took a short course at the Business School, some of our fellow students were surprised to find out that we actually recommend that customers not buy some of our solutions, because there were other choices that were both cheaper and better, and our bosses knew this and were okay with that. My boss at the time knew that (for those solutions) we couldn't be the cheapest or the best, because we didn't have the volume that some commercial operations did. So we offered the service for when it "absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight" and steered everyone else to more reasonable solutions.

It's one of the things that went wrong in the mortgage market. People made subprime loans passed them on to others, and so there was no incentive to be ethical. The saying on Wall Street was "You'll be gone, I'll be gone, so let's do the deal". University IT can't live that way. They'll still be here and we'll still be here, so we need to do the right deal.