Global Business Leaders Say They Don't Know Enough About Technology To Succeed 110
Lemeowski writes: New Harvard Business Review research finds that only 45% of business leaders surveyed say they personally have the technology knowledge they need to succeed in their jobs. What's more, the survey of 436 global business leaders finds that only 23% are confident their organizations have the knowledge and skills to succeed in the digital aspects of their business. The report says that given the low levels of digital knowledge and skills outside of IT "it's troubling that close to half of all respondents (49%) said their department occasionally or frequently initiates IT projects with little or no direct involvement of IT."
I have a solution - H1B (Score:5, Interesting)
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Shouldn't that be H1E?
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I say we have them compete in the Octagon. Cage match. Two executives enter, one executive leaves.
Re:I have a solution - H1B (Score:4, Informative)
There already is such a path. In the US, it's the L-1A to EB-1C track.
The L-1A visa is for executive transfers, which means an executive would need to first be hired as an exec in their home country, then transfer a year later.
The L-1A has a perk different from other L-1 classes in that it's eligibility is matched to the EB-1C green card (meaning their requirements are almost exactly the same), such that L-1A employees will go down the EB-1C path nearly automatically (you need only apply). The EB-1C will get you a full green card in about a year with no lottery and no labor certification (e.g. the part where the H1-B employer needs to go through the process of searching for a local candidate first for the same job).
The L-1B (which would be like H-1B, transfer for "specialized knowledge" workers) has no such feature and those who move to the US under L-1B need to go through the H-1B process to gain the ability to switch jobs, and then from their begin a long multi-year green card process.
The reality is that for those at the top, their market is already global.
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By "succeed", they mean they are pretty sure they could lay off or switch to cheaper labor a large part of their IT department, but they aren't sure...
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Have you ever seen a CEO (or other executive) do something themselves that isn't a braindead easy and canned procedure on a computer? Any time it requires a modicum of application knowledge and a smidge of creativity, they come running to their underlings to delegate the task.
This is also typical:
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This is also typical:
The organisation as a whole probably has enough knowledge present to adequately cope with digital demands, but this knowledge is never tapped, because most of it isn't formalised in a certificate or diploma, so it doesn't officially exist. Therefore the employees are digital peasants and the company is doomed.
What's tapping, paying someone outside the IT department market rates to administer the highly specialized, complex software different parts of the business need that the IT department typically doesn't want to give up headcount for because they have a broader mission?
The software regular IT people deal with is, as a rule, more complex than it needs to be, and specialized business software that can really make a difference to the bottom line requires knowledge of the respective business function and is LUDI
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Hahaha. The executive market is already global. How else do you think they avoid paying tax? The other benefits of being a member of the 'market' is that nobody actually cares whether you just ran your last business into the ground, parachuting out of it on a cloud of shareholder capital just before it imploded, and if you really get completely useless at keeping businesses from imploding they will just give you a cushy government advisor job. Oh and the best bit is that the members of the 'market' set the
IT tech support (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I got it! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, but it appears that Capitalism is really demanding that executives be more highly compensated.
http://www.eveningsun.com/opin... [eveningsun.com]
Pay for the top 200 executives has gone up 21%. The average in 2014 was $17.6 million.
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Simply bizarre. I reallize the a person is going to take what the market will pay them, but it is seriously difficult to imagine that they are worth that much.
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Then you really won't want to read about David M. Zaslav, from the Discovery Network and The Learning Channel (former home of the Duggar family and Honey Boo Boo) who's total compensation in 2014 was...$156 million!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/1026872... [cnbc.com]
It is good to be an oligarch.
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Yeah, but it appears that Capitalism is really demanding that executives be more highly compensated.
http://www.eveningsun.com/opin... [eveningsun.com]
Pay for the top 200 executives has gone up 21%. The average in 2014 was $17.6 million.
To hell with STEM, lets start pushing business, economics, and leadership training for everyone, there's clearly a supply problem here...
Perhaps they are starting to realise (Score:2)
Leaders (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Leaders (Score:5, Interesting)
It isn't that they don't know what they're doing. The majority recognize their own limitations and (presumably) seek help in areas where they need it. Nothing wrong with that. It also says a lot that 23% think their own IT organization is incompetent.
That said, keep in mind two things: this report was sponsored by a company that sells IT services, and no matter what "global business leaders" do, half of them will be below average.
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100% of them think that their IT department is incompetent, only 25% would report it because the other 75% think that IT is watching everything that they do
I would also guess that of the 45% who reported that they have the necessary IT skills, only a small fraction of them actually do and the rest of them are a huge pain in the ass because they cannot even use email without getting phished or plug their laptop into a projector without having an IT person run over the conference room and help them
They also p
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You really think a small fraction of executives have IT Skills?
If there is a small fraction then it is so small as to be non-existent. The last executive I met who claimed IT skills kept coming down to the IT department and asking us to answer lists of questions, sometimes it was "Can I get someone to write a C++ program to do XYZ?" where XYZ had nothing to do with the job. Come to find out, he was working on a degree in CS and was having the IT group do his homework.
25 years in the field and I have yet to
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If they don't know what they are doing, then why are they the leaders?
You've answered your own question.
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What possibly makes you think this means they don't know what they are doing? Change the question to "Patent Law, Industrial Relations, Marketing, Geophysics, etc" and the GOOD leader is the one who can turn around and say "I don't know, but I can ask someone who does".
In any large organisation where IT is critical then a good leader should have someone they can trust who does know IT to tell them what they need to know. To parse down the huge shit-tonne of noise and distil for them the key points. This
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Because they have access to the biggest club. They claim Earth's resources as their own, and can back that claim with (outsourced) violence, so everyone else either obeys or starves. Actual competence in using those resources is irrelevant.
Besides, it's not like they're actually in charge - market logic or the "Invisible Hand" is. They have some leeway in interpreting its will, and particularly competent ones can sometimes even suggest a
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In my experiences, leadership is simply being the type of person that people want to follow. Now whether they have any idea where to lead the people once they are following is a different question. Certainly the best leaders also have a solid sense of direction, but it is entirely possible, and rather common, for people to exude the other elements of leadership while lacking this key requirement.
Where else do you think the entire management consultant business has come from? It is basically the way that cor
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If they don't know what they are doing, then why are they the leaders?
I disagree with others here. If they say they don't know if their organization has the talent to succeed, then indeed they don't know what they're doing.
Especially those who think their IT dept. is incompetent. What that means is (A) they are wrong, or (B) they are right... which in turn says they made bad hiring decisions and should clean house.
What else is new... (Score:5, Funny)
So what else is new? Most "Global Business Leaders" don't know much about anything else, yet some succeed due to blind luck and sheer force of money.
A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude." "You must be an engineer," said the balloonist."I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."
The woman below responded, "You must be in Management." "I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?" "Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."
Re:What else is new... (Score:4, Insightful)
So what else is new? Most "Global Business Leaders" don't know much about anything else,
So, you call it an ivory tower when it's intellectual, what do you call it when it's just a tower made of stacked-up money? The reason why "global business leaders" don't know about technology is that they are completely divorced from the daily life that normal humans live. They don't have to know shit, so they don't know shit. Then they want to tell us all about how to be successful. We're always having to endure quotes from Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, who both were born with silver spoons in their mouths, about how we can supposedly be successful — but they actually have no idea how to become successful, because they were born into positions of privilege. We should not give one tenth of one very small shit about what they think about becoming successful, because they never did.
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And Carly Fiorina, who Portfolio Magazine named as one of the 20 worst American CEOs in history, now wants to be President of the United States.
http://economictimes.indiatime... [indiatimes.com]
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And Carly Fiorina, who Portfolio Magazine named as one of the 20 worst American CEOs in history, now wants to be President of the United States. ...
She's just upping her game, trying to become the worst American president in history. But she'll find that there's a lot of fierce competition for that title. Can she make it? Stay tuned ...
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So, you call it an ivory tower when it's intellectual, what do you call it when it's just a tower made of stacked-up money?
A money bin [insidethemagic.net].
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She was standing in a boat.
Welcome to outsourcing (Score:3)
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The report says that given the low levels of digital knowledge and skills outside of IT [..]
When I first started working, IT was more closely interwoven with the business functions. Gradually, IT was separated into its own department, parts of it were outsourced, and the work was more compartimentalized (moving from individual generalists to fully interchangable specialists). To be sure this has had positive effects: in my own experience the level of professionalism has gone way up and there are far fewer ninja projects and hobby departments. But the downsi
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But the downside has been that IT has lost touch with the business almost completely, and the amount of red tape is staggering.
But were the downsides really accidental or a well understood consequence of a deliberate decision by the "Board of directors"? The red tape might be there on purpose to keep "junior management" from getting sucked in by the constant hype being pushed by "the press" for gadgets and bespoke IT solutions.
Most of the potential IT productivity gains for "traditional industries" might have been realised as far back as the mid 90ies, when all inventory, order processing and accounting were digitized, so a deli
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Nepotism (Score:2)
We are suffering for generational nepotism of the worst sort. That period where the psychopaths of wall street were marrying the narcissists of Hollywood and producing a generation of, 'holy crap what a fiscal disaster'. The Paris Hilton (sorry to pick on some one in particular but hey, you want to make yourself famous for being it, then that is what you are going to be known for) generations.
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Welcome to the new Versailles.
Of course, the good news is that we know how that ended.
A consultant's experience (Score:4, Insightful)
In my experience as a consultant, this is the case because Business Managers don't trust IT because:
1) The IT department inserts (perceived) too many non functional requirements on a project increasing cost or schedule.
1.a) (Perceived) The IT department doesn't care about the needs of the Business Manager's daily business.
2) Internally the IT department did not deliver on it's own projects within cost or schedule.
3) There's no way that an employee could be as smart as a consultant.
Having been a former IT employee and now a consultant, points 1, 1.a, & 2 are valid, point 3 is just bunk. Now being an consultant, I prefer to work with Business Managers because:
1) Business Managers have a vested interested in seeing a vendor project complete, where as IT typically does not, it's not their money or idea.
2) Business Managers will make time to meet with a vendor, where as IT typically think of vendors as hired hands, about as valuable as the lady who vaccuumes the floors every night.
Your two viewpoints (Score:3, Interesting)
both are showing the same thing: A disconnect of interests.
Now, whose job again was it to connect them, "align the noses" and get the great wheels turning?
Whose job again was it to pick what requirements at what levels? Whenever the project goes under in requirements hell it is because the wrong people made the wrong decisions on the wrong levels, or even failed to make any real choices at all.
Whose job again was it to hire people to do all that on various levels, and organise them in the various department
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Funny that, your point 2 is in direct contradiction to point 1a. You are effectively stating that your needs as the vendor are more important than the needs of the customer organisation.
Apparently you're a good example of "there's money to be made prolonging the problem" [shopify.com].
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The solution is to give them more money...
Except that's rapidly becoming non-viable, since over the past few decades, they've succeeding in capturing most of the money that exists and sequestering it so it's out of reach of the other 99% of us. Soon they'll have to find another approach if they want to continue capturing the money supply as they have been doing.
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Government contracts. After all, when you can print your own money spending a hundred mill or two over what you actually have isn't really noticeable...
Typical (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I've seen happen over and over again is when the boss decides it's much simpler to bypass the technology department, create something as a rapidly developed prototype, and then leave the tech department to cleanup the aftermath. Maybe the IT department got a reputation for making things overly complicated, or they find communication with their own experts too difficult because they lean on the side of realism rather than optimism. In either case, the companies that act this way clearly do not have leaders who have confidence in their own people, and will repeatedly go through new staff for their "technology department" which would be better labeled "cost center" as far as any of said leaders are concerned.
An aid or a barrier? (Score:5, Insightful)
"it's troubling that close to half of all respondents (49%) said their department occasionally or frequently initiates IT projects with little or no direct involvement of IT."
That's typically because many IT departments rarely add value to what other departments are trying to accomplish. A good IT department's role is to facilitate and support the activities of other departments. Their job should be to ask "how can I help you accomplish your tasks?" The problem is that too many IT departments think their primary task is to control the network and IT resources without much regard paid to what other departments are trying to accomplish with those resources. IT too often thinks of itself as an end rather than a means. So it should surprise no one that many departments in many companies regard IT as a barrier to be worked around rather than a partner ready and willing to help.
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it is more like, "how can I help you accomplish your tasks, within all the internal business requirements your department and others insist we follow, external legal requirements we are uniquely held to task for, etc., and all the other level 1 requests the other departments besides yours that are competing for our attention"?
well, IT *is* an end as well as a means. You see no problem requesting 10TB more storage for the SAN. Bet the CFO will want a say in that significant purchase. etc. But no one sees the
Re: An aid or a barrier? (Score:1)
I work there, in IT. We aren't trying to lord over just the computers. We are only staffed at an adaquate level to only keep the computer and network running. We would love to help you innovate, but realize if we don't at least keep the lights on of what you have now we will have real issues. Please let us staff at a better level so we can do both. Running around us and dumping your next 1/2 baked rogue project on us just exasperates the issues.
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ninja
One group where I work has started calling them "SEAL Teams" :-/
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At our company we outsource all of our IT. All projects are run by the actual users. This works perfectly. 'IT' handles the things that we know they're good at: keeping the email up and running, maintaining servers, troubleshooting workstations etc. The users do what they're good at: solving industry specific problems.
I wouldn't bother contacting our IT before starting a project because the only requests I'll have for IT are possibly provisioning a new ______ server that we need for the project or havi
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Oh, you're not IT, you say. View it as an epithet, do you? Well then hope against hope that your collocation service fixes the glaring security holes you leave in the dev servers you shift into prod. They won't, but hope feels better than constant dread.
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Oh, you're not IT, you say. View it as an epithet, do you? Well then hope against hope that your collocation service fixes the glaring security holes you leave in the dev servers you shift into prod.
I don't view IT as an epithet I view it as a specific skillset that we don't need full time in house. IT is about being an expert at OS, Network and Database management. If we want to deploy openstack, we call our contract IT company. If our fileserver goes down, we call IT. If we are seeing a performance bottleneck in our network we call IT.
Everybody else though is focused on a completely different task, making great visual effects. To do that we write tools to assist artists, streamline workflow a
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I don't view IT as an epithet I view it as a specific skillset that we don't need full time in house. IT is about being an expert at OS, Network and Database management. If we want to deploy openstack, we call our contract IT company. If our fileserver goes down, we call IT. If we are seeing a performance bottleneck in our network we call IT.
Everybody else though is focused on a completely different task, making great visual effects. To do that we write tools to assist artists, streamline workflow and automate time consuming tasks.
Are you even aware that there are businesses outside of hi-tech industries, or business functions that are not obviously hi-tech?
No, you're not classic IT, but you're not far from it either.
Who deals with ediscovery software, your legal or generic OS/networking IT?
Payroll software, is that your HR or OS/networking IT?
ERP, accounting, marketing, sales, business intelligence, customer support, etc.
Are all those teams equally equipped with tech-ninjas or has every facet of the company that doesn't deal with ma
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And why would the accounting department or HR consult with IT before purchasing accounting or sales or HR software? My fiancee is a school registrar. She understands the software she uses very well and is an expert within the limited domain of school registration and billing software. Why would she call their school's IT contracted company to consult before picking out a hypothetical new replacement piece of software to do her job.
Fucking developers, I swear. The fact you even know what Linux is makes you such an outlier and you don't even know it. Technology benefits more than just companies that "make great visual effects" ... I should have just said that and saved a lot of typing.
Fucking IT, I swear. The fact that you know how to manage a server, fix
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From what i've seen, security takes too much effort, make it easy... later on, they hacked us, you didn't stop them, goodbye
The problem with IT departments? (Score:1)
No, the problem is that because the business 'leaders' fear being found out
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The problem is that too many IT departments think their primary task is to control the network and IT resources without much regard paid to what other departments are trying to accomplish with those resources.
That's what the fuckups always say. I worked for a web design/hosting startup as the network manager. The boss' buddy set up an FTP server and it immediately got owned and we became a warez site. We don't want control of this stuff because we're control freaks. We want control of this stuff so that someone else doesn't get it horribly wrong.
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And hey, at least you can enjoy a warez site, right?
Oh no, the absolute best part was that because the guy was the boss' friend, I didn't even get to do the post-mortem on the machine that got owned, which means I didn't even get access to the warez. Well, no. The absolute best part was that I got blamed for the server existing, because stuff like that was my job. Lesson learned: firewall outgoing traffic, even in a small org where surely that would be more hassle than it would provide actual technical reward? (I could literally walk to all the desks and had
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If a business guy tells you: "I need an FTP server", your answer shouldn't be "no way in hell", but "what is it you really need?". Understand what their business need is, the
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GP makes a good point though, and actually both IT and the business often perceive the IT department as "plumbing".
Yeah, that's not the problem. The IT department is plumbing. The problem is that shitting is considered essential, so nobody grumbles about paying for plumbing because they know they need to shit, but nobody seems to realize that IT is also essential. It's not a value-add, it's a value-enabler. Without it, you don't have a business.
If a business guy tells you: "I need an FTP server", your answer shouldn't be "no way in hell", but "what is it you really need?".
They didn't even ask, they just set it up, and then it got owned because they didn't know half as much as they thought they did. And that's why we IT workers don't want people th
Trust in the IT department (Score:2)
Yeah, that's not the problem. The IT department is plumbing. The problem is that shitting is considered essential, so nobody grumbles about paying for plumbing because they know they need to shit, but nobody seems to realize that IT is also essential. It's not a value-add, it's a value-enabler. Without it, you don't have a business.
Every job is (or should be) vital to the company. Accounting isn't value added activity but it certainly is vital. Inventory management isn't value added but it certainly is vital. Of course IT is a sort of plumbing in a figurative sense. But the maintenance department which does real plumbing doesn't belittle company employees for not knowing how to hook up a toilet. They aren't perceived as a barrier to be worked around and there is a reason for that. IT departments far too often get in the way and
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The problem is that he didn't trust his IT department so he went around them. THAT is the root of the problem.
Yeah, his trust issues caused me a problem.
The fact that he got owned later on is merely the symptom of the problem.
No, the fact it got owned later on is how we know he's not as smart as he thinks he is.
Why no trust in the IT department? (Score:2)
That's what the fuckups always say.
This is EXACTLY the arrogant attitude that makes people not want to deal with their IT department.
I worked for a web design/hosting startup as the network manager. The boss' buddy set up an FTP server and it immediately got owned and we became a warez site
The question you should be asking is why didn't he go to his IT department first? Why didn't he trust them to listen to what he wanted and make it happen? There has to be a reason he thought his buddy would be more helpful. This is exactly what I would expect to see when people regard the IT department as an obstacle.
We don't want control of this stuff because we're control freaks. We want control of this stuff so that someone else doesn't get it horribly wrong.
First off I've dealt with WAY too many IT departments who actually ARE control freaks. Anec
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The question you should be asking is why didn't he go to his IT department first?
Yeah, I asked that question, I didn't get an answer. As it turned out it had entirely to do with him being a) arrogant and b) buddy-buddy with the boss, so he got away with it. He was just a special snowflake who thought he knew better than me, but he was obviously wrong. But he went to school with the boss.
There has to be a reason he thought his buddy would be more helpful.
You misread that. He undertook to raise the server on his own, he got away with creating a warez site by doing something I was supposed to do because he was friends with the boss.
Yes IT can help get it right but that is not the problem. The problem is that they are seen as a barrier rather than an aid. They say "no" rather than "why don't we try this instead".
Bullshit. They say no to
No stupid requests. Sometimes inquisitive idiots. (Score:2)
They say no to specific requests which are stupid.
I truly wish that were always true. Problem is that it isn't far too often. I've experienced first hand IT departments (usually in larger companies though not always) deny very practical reasonable requests made nicely because it "wasn't policy" and in some cases because they simply didn't want to. I've seen them verbally demean fellow employees which is never acceptable even when they are being stupid.
Stop coming to the IT department like you know what you're doing, tell them what you need to do, and you'll get the results you're looking for.
If I actually do know what I'm doing then it is perfectly reasonable for me to not pretend to be stupid
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Rarely, if ever, does an IT department have what might be called an Engineering or a Projects department.
There are normally more than enough break-fix type tickets from EVERY department to cover all the permanent staff. Plus there is stuff like compliance, routine maintenance, etc that outsiders never see but eat away so much time. And then various managers (1) cut the IT budgets so tools and resources are taken away while (2) complaining that IT isn't agile and responsive enough.
Speak to the IT manager. Pa
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In my experience, IT gets zero priority elsewhere in the business. It's rare you'd ever get a really clear business case for work, and so it's rare you ever get any traction from elsewhere when you need it.
As an example, say you've got $pileofshit software that's umpteen years old, not used by very much and all the people who ever knew anything about it have left. Probably the "best thing" (for different views of "best") would be to schedule some dev work over the next few months/quarters to get rid of the
Leadership (Score:2)
Business leaders are not there to 'know enough' about technology. Their function is to hire the right experts to do that.
Of course, listening to those experts and making an effort to understand their recommendations *is* part of the leader's role.
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So the CEO hires a CIO to handle al the information systems stuff. And if he wants to kno what's going on, he pops into the CIO's office and asks.
Unless you are working in an information systems company, the IT department is not a stepping stone to the CEO job. That would be someone from engineering, sales, maybe finance or legal. And the CIO knows this. He and his staff are just cogs in the wheel. Where he can make an impression (but not at his company) is to deliver his companies IT needs into the hands
Business leaders... (Score:2)
Bro. Guy Consoglmo, one of the Vatican astronomers, who's been interviewed on NPR, among other places, and has been mentioned on /. before, also teaches at Catholic colleges around the US. One of the courses he teaches is "science for non-science majors". Some years back, he talked about the food chain of the majors that take that class. Next to the bottom were business majors, who didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them.
So, are they worried yet?
Btw, the bottom of the food chain are the communication
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I do wish people would stop using that phrase incorrectly.
You do know that a flea is higher up it than you are, right?