The Disconnect Between Management and the Value of IT 333
DavidHumus writes "According to a Wall St. Journal article top executives at most companies fail to recognize the value of IT, having a tendency to think of information technology as a basic utility, like plumbing or telephone service. The article lists five primary reasons for 'the wall' between IT and business: 'mind-set differences between management staff and IT staff, language differences, social influences, flaws in IT governance (defined as the specification and control of IT decision rights), and the difficulty of managing rapidly changing technology.' Does this fully explain the extreme lack of understanding of IT at high executive levels? The article is even-handed in apportioning blame but touches on a few good points. In particular, how '[m]ost top executives ... think of IT as an expensive headache that they'd rather not deal with.'"
If only we were treated as well as utilities (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess I'm Lucky (Score:5, Interesting)
My own (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in the early 90s when I was a real newbie, I asked an ISP if I needed a special phone line for a SLIP connection. Instead of just saying "No" and being done with it, the guy just kept asking "Why". I was not very technical back then and the internet was extremely new (to the general public) so I wasn't coming up with very good reasons. But still, he kept asking "Why" like some retarded parrot.
Moral of the story is I developed a patient, not condescending, attitude to non-tech people when explaining things.
Re:If only we were treated as well as utilities (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:If only we were treated as well as utilities (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Cost Of IT (Score:3, Interesting)
IT deptarments only cost money with constant upgrades, in hardware and software. Lighting fixtures have a one time cost, and then a minimal replacement cost.
every 3 years all hardware and software is now useless and needs to be replaced. The real reason no one is moving to Vista. XP is finally starting to pay for itself for businesses who work on decade time frames.
As soon as IT departments stop asking for money for new software every three months or to sign contracts for software assurance that last for years but provide no benefit IT departments will earn some more respect.
That is not IT department's fault. (Score:5, Interesting)
IT only allows what other people them is allowed. And normally the people saying the last word are auditors of some kind or another.
But is it really a fault?
You see it as obstructionist, but do you have the legal know how to know if the application you want installed is legitimate? Are you going to vouch for its security? (I have seen badly programmed applications, including FOSS ones, bring down complete networks due toe unintended denial of service attacks. Will you take responsibility it the tool you need does such thing?). WIll you put your hands in fire for your application in regards to viruses, trojans and any other nasties?
The obstructionist attitude has a purpose which is to protect the assets and reputation of your company. If that pisses you off, though.
Re:No surpise. (Score:-1, Interesting)
Bear in mind, those who purchase IT services (Sr. Management) tend to rely on those most like themselves to advise said purchases - consultants and 'suit' salepeople. I am a consultant, my firm sells Big Software (ERP implementations, etc.) and let me tell you - there is a night and day difference between those who sell work and those who do work. I know a Managing Director who makes bank selling work, but does not know anything about tools - I had to explain to him what ACL was, and it is a standard tool at our firm. Likewise, our Oracle team (for example) are really great, knowledgeable people who *when given the chance to talk to client IT staff* do a very good job getting quality work done. The problem is, they don't get involved until after the deal is done, the schedule set and the stopwatch started. Management needs to learn 'what they don't know' and be willing to either understand some of the technical experts domain, or at least trust them (preferably both).
Re:Maintaining the pretence of superiority (Score:5, Interesting)
Me: "I have fleshed out our draft spec for the new Web site through a series of phone calls and emails over the last few weeks and the developers say they will be able to meet perhaps 80-90% of what you want by the tight deadline you have set and then they will roll out the remaining features over the next couple of weeks."
Director: "I am really concerned that the developers are so far away in another country"
Me: "Distance is not really a problem these days - and in any case, I have sounded out several of their customers and UK contacts and they have all recommended this team. Overall, they can do the job for a very good fee + offer the after-sales support."
Director: "I will think about it"
Email from Director 3 days later at 8pm one night:
"I have spoken to a friend and he has recommended a local company he knows so I have given them the contract."
So, for 3x the cost and over 8 months late we got a half-assed, closed-sourse site with bits still missing.
Boy do I feel valued round here. Thinking of moving? Funny you should say that...
Re:Phones make people productive? O RLY? (Score:4, Interesting)
Layne
Re:It's not just management (Score:5, Interesting)
Because IT can not only allow- but make the customers eager to- enter their own orders- saving you customer service costs and allow you to do the same work with a lot less people.
Because IT can take a 4 week manual process which sometimes completely failed and turn it into a 2-3 day process which is fully accountable.
Because unlike electricity or water, IT changes constantly-- every single day-- and if your company doesn't keep up, the next thing you know you are a year behind your competitors and their costs are 10% lower than yours and you are hemorrhaging customers.
IT is a lump of clay that can be sculpted into anything.
---
We recently found out that one of the other non-IT departments basically wrote a "system by spreadsheet" which requires over a dozen people to maintain. Their director is protecting them from being automated by IT because he would lose most of those people. So don't come talking to me about "IT COSTS". I think it is really a battle for headcount among the departments.
Re:The value of IT to most businesses... (Score:3, Interesting)
Dept A wants to be hooked into the city sewage system,
Dept B wants a septic tank because they heard it is cheaper
Dept C wants to connect to the county's sewage system because it is new and therefore has to be the best.
Dept D does not want plumbing at all because it is too costly and they can go use the other Depts systems.
There you go mister plumber. Make this work.
Re:IT attitudes (Score:2, Interesting)
Dealing with customers is easy - they know that you're on a clock, and every minute wasted is THEIR money wasted. As such, most customers don't call unless it's important, and when they call they tend to keep it as short as possible. On site visits happen of course, for larger work or if the customers wants to (We have several customers that prefer to pay for on-site service rather than online service - nothing wrong with that).
Dealing with customers is easy. Now, another part of my job is to take care of internal IT. With a large amount of technical people, we don't have any draconian IT policies - if you want to have local admin rights, you can have them. I will try to fix the problem, but if i can't all i can offer you is a redeploy of the base image. If you don't want to have local admin rights, everything will be maintained by us, and if something breaks it's our fault.
This policy has worked really well for us in the past few years. But the problems mostly come with the non-technical personnel that sometimes have insane ideas, wishes, or no idea on how we are organized.
"I need a new mouse" - "Ask your department head, i can't buy stuff, only your dept head can approve that"
15 min later
"x told me that you don't want them to get a new mouse"
*argh*
And of course stupid questions like
"Yahoo Messenger Video Chat doesn't work"
"Well, i don't care. You're allowed to install the software and use it according to our executives, but i'm not going to waste time on getting it working for you"
"x told me that you don't fix their computer"
*argh*
Such occurences really piss me off, because I think i do understand that IT only has value if it improves the productivity of employees. I'm also willing to try and solve all the Business problems that we have, but i can only solve one at a time. And no, i don't care about Yahoo Messenger or some other such bullshit you found somewhere on the web.
Management does NOT get it - I'm living proof (Score:1, Interesting)
I was hired by a Fortune 100 company to do desktop support, from my stint there as a temp. When I got there, the IT department was generally viewed by the user base as a joke, and a waste of time; if you DID manage to get through to the India-based help desk (affectionately known as the Helpless Desk), you would still wait up to a MONTH to get someone to visit your cube, or remote in to your system; oh, and forget trying to call someone onsite - no one ever answered their phones, anyway - all calls were screened, and generally ignored.
I was placed into a support role, and saw an opportunity to make a name for myself, which I quickly did. I changed the wait time on trouble tickets from 3+ weeks to well under 48 hours, answered every e-mail the same day, and, most importantly, answered every call.
This helped the department shed the previous negative image, and I quickly garnered a reputation as THE public face of IT here in the building. I had dozens of calls, e-mails, cards, and other notes of thanks and gratitude from the user base, from all areas of the company, and was totally happy with where I was. I truly loved my job, because of who I was serving. The people here are absolutely fantastic.
Then the worst happened - our headquarters was to be restructured. There would be about an 80% cut in personnel in the building, but I knew that most of them would still need support, so I thought my position was safe. That is, until this Friday, when I learned that my team of 7 would be slashed by 2, and I was one of them. So far, the only way I can see this decision being made in the way it was would be with voodoo and chicken entrails, or perhaps faulty divining rods. What's even more interesting is that I actually loved where I worked, and I'm gone, but at least 2 of the ones that survived the cut are wanting to get the hell out.
Incidentally, no management positions were eliminated in the IT infrastructure, in this series of terminations. Gee, what a shock.
All I have to say to the brainiacs that cut me is this; you will NEVER find anyone as committed and dedicated to their job, as I was to you - perfect attendance, zero tardiness, and my list of satisfied clients is the entire damn building; and this is the thanks I get... WOW. Just wow.
Personal observation evolution of IT over 30 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Then Microsoft became popular as a desktop environment. The low quality of their entire product range combined with very poor documentation caused in most companies one or two people (usually developers who had played with windows in their spare time) to emerge as the unofficial domain experts on solving microsoft-specific issues.
Microsoft very quickly realised this and enocuraged this model as it mitigated the need for them to provide support for their own products. That combined with the fact that Microsoft jumped on the 'professional certification' bandwagon led to them creating hundreds of new IT job titles and certifications for them that until then no-one had ever even heard of before, let alone actually needed. Fast forqward a few years and now most IT-driven companies are working under the illusion that there needs to be masses of IT staff usally with different Microsoft certifications to support a simple computer network, which has become a self-fulfilling prophecy beacuse the office network in most places has been made unnecessarily complex by the same Microsoft-trained IT staff, apparently partly as job-preservation and partly to get around the technical shortcomings of Microsoft operating systems and products. now many IT departments have transitioned to an incorrect yet frequently-encounterd mentality that they now believe that their role is to be gatekeepers rather than just to provide a service to the people in comapnies that actually make the companies product or service.
My point is, that given the above, I think that if anything, management generally massively overvalue IT departments.
I've seen in most companies that the IT dept get larger budgets than entire production departments, IT employees usually get top-end PC's with widescreen monitors etc. to answer their emails on while developers and engineers, the guys actually making the product, are struggling to compile code bases on hand-me-down hardware.
Re:Maintaining the pretence of superiority (Score:3, Interesting)
I know, I know... (Score:2, Interesting)
'Value' is determined by the market. If companies that 'valued' IT were making buckets more money than companies that don't; then you'd see a trend where all companies want IT.
The simple fact of the matter is, as much as it might hurt us geeks (I am, after all, IT myself); unless you are at a Software Company whose job it is to product software or something along those lines; IT is just a secondary consideration.
I used to work at Allstate.
Allstate sells insurance.
To sell insurance well, Allstate may very well need things like Electricity, plumbing, and IT. But IT has nothing to do with it's core business. Long before computers were commonplace, Allstate's business model existed, and Allstate made money.
IT doesn't 'bring in money'. At best, you could say that IT let's customers more easily pay or enroll for a service; but, all of the competators do it too; so it's just a big wash. Allstate's IT is no different than it's cleaning staff - it is a cost of doing business.
And to every Exec (with the possible exception of a CTO), one IT guy is as good as any other IT guy. As long as the servers are running nobody cares.
The real problem is that IT is hard (Score:2, Interesting)
Top-level management are usually people people; that's why they did MBAs rather than get real qualifications. Top-level management already have a head full of business domain knowledge (if you're lucky) and techniques for climbing the greasy pole (usually), and have to spend time on inter-company and inter-manager warfare.
I have consistently had problems getting clients to think about how their business works. They have got along for years without having to worry about it because they delegate responsibility to lower-level managers, who in turn delegate to the workers; between them, the various levels of management and employees use their brains and get the job done.
IT isn't like that - you tell a computer to do X and it'll do X, even if it should 'do X unless [really complex exception case], in which case do Y'. So there is an upfront cost to IT of defining what and how the business really does, and then checking it and checking it again. Worse still, form the POV of top management, this requires that the value of the knowledge of the lowest-level staff is acknowledged, while at the same time showing how little the top managers understand the details of their business - WHICH IS TO BE EXPECTED: the top-level guys are paid for direction not operational detail. But people being people, any deficiencies are implicitly taken to be criticism and can be used in inter-manager warfare.
I'd like to note that mitigating these factors is a large part of what led to Agile. But Agile admits that it can fall into the 'hard to predict' trap, whereas waterfall and 'glittering phalanx' claim not to.
Re:Personal observation evolution of IT over 30 ye (Score:3, Interesting)
Unix became enormously popular at a time when networked computer hardware was reliable and readily available, but still quite expensive. Software licenses for these systems were comparably expensive. Those economics allowed organizations to justify hiring highly competent staff in order to maximize return on investment. The culture was inherited to some degree from the mainframe culture, driven from the top down, and partly from a research culture, driven by design and engineering principles, to support a reliable multiuser environment with good access controls and other security measures.
Microsoft entered into this environment from the extreme bottom end of the scale. It was all about cheapness. No multiuser model, therefore no access controls, and well, conspicuous neglect of security. One of the tricks, I would say, for creating a perception of affordability was that users were expected to maintain their own systems, a situation which persists at many sites to this day. The real cost of managing these systems, dealing with misconfiguration and security issues and so on, can therefore be hidden, though doing so leads to all sorts of trouble and unrealistic expectations.
As these systems become more complex, the need for more expert system administration becomes greater and more difficult to hide. But these same systems are also becoming cheaper, so the relative cost of system administration goes up and also becomes more difficult to hide.
Compound this with the further complexity and brittleness of retrofitting multiuser security, and there will be plenty of dissatisfaction to share around. I don't envy the users who have to endure these systems and the quality of support that goes with them, nor the staff who have to support them. It's a real shame. Which is why I ended up as an open source guy.
To come back your point about management overvaluing the IT department, I end up thinking that it's a bit like the dilemma we face with valuing a police force that is not as effective as we'd like it to be. This question troubles me greatly. Some police departments, like some IT departments, are frankly dysfunctional. How can we possibly fix them? By tying funding to performance? I think so, but too much funding creates complacency and too little creates despair. From where I stand, IT departments are all too often in the despair zone, and that does nobody good. I wish that I could be as clear about policing. Perhaps someone else can make that point.