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Is Today's IT an Undervalued Asset?
mwillems asks: "I work in the technology industry, as a CTO. What I have increasingly seen in the last year, both in North America and Europe, is that IT has ceased to be a valid way to spend corporate money. IT spending used to be looked at as a way to gain competitive advantages. Since the .com bust, the arguments I hear everywhere is 'IT has now been proven to be a waste of money'. At many companies it is now easier to get a corporate account at a strip club than a new PC. Or a budget to develop a much-needed corporate app. If any spending is done it is on hardware - at least that is 'real'. Do Slashdot readers recognise that? Are there going to be many techies left ten years from now? What can we do to keep the spirit of innovation alive while this 'IT is bad' era lasts, and how can we make it end? And, how do you prove the value of IT? This is not as simple as it seems. Try it with a spreadsheet: as your typical CTO has to do so, every day."
How do you feel about the cost benefits of IT? Is it worth what your company spends on it, especially if the advantages can't be reduced to a simple dollars-and-cents figure?
Most people in the tech industry are going to fade out. Thus, leaving the majority of workers those who have been around before the .com boom. Bigger salaries and more work, instead of the bloated staff in a lot of IT departments that you saw during the .com boom. Personally, I'm glad to see it. I know plenty of people who shouldn't be in the IT field. Luckily, those are the ones finding other professions or reverting to their previous professions.
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Most firms now realize that they can survive another year without upgrading their router or servers, which were either so expenseive originally that they simply must sit in the rack room longer, or are "good enough" even if they aren't the latest model.
Software is a whole other story. Most companies realize now that upgrades are a scam.
On top of all of this, many buyers realize that the latest tech will simply make them part of a large beta testing mob, where their old tech is now largely debugged and productive. Certainly MS users understand this.
This is easy - innovate. Don't just buy new hardware and upgrade software, do something that IMPROVES life at the office. There's more to IT than scalable switches and making sure that you can ping the server. Come up with new applications of the technology and make yourselves valuable.
Create your own value, the rest of us have to do it.
This may not be a popular opinion but I really don't think the majority of corporate users NEED a new pc very ofter. I'm a full time software developer and I'm perfectly happy with my "ancient" PII 400... Granted there are always exceptions to the rule, but for the most part I think new PC purchases should be scrutinized.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
The late 90's: All Tech Spending is Good
:)
The early 00's: All Tech Spending is Bad
It's oversimplistic reactions to the problems that came from tech spending in the 90's. Many people were creating products that were full of pizazz that didn't work for crap and people bought them because they thought technology was their salvation. Well guess what, technology isn't a magic pill, and anybody who claims ANYTHING is a magic pill should be taken out back and shot.
So now today, everybody is gun shy and overcautious. A company gets burned in the 90's converting their billing system to some flaky electronic system that has cost more money to keep together than your old system. Today they get the choice of buying yet another new system, taking the same risks again, or sticking with the known quantity. At this point, with money tight, few are willing to take that risk to get it right the second time because they can't afford to get burned this time.
Over the next few years as a recovery slowly works its way into the system, some people will feel that they can take some risks again. Those flaky systems will have long since been purged from the software gene pool and there will be good products that people will be able to trust. We'll actually begin to see those efficiency gains that were supposed to happen during the 90's hype and the world of IT will be back in business.
Until then, batton down the hatches and hang on tight
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IT is a value added resource in most companies but, sadly, in most companies it really doesn't directly contribute to the bottom line of profits vs. losses. IT's value is in making the employees lives easier without intruding on the day to day operations of the company. This tends to a be a cyclical trend based on two factors. The first is arrogance and the second is repentance.
The arrogance factor is what drove IT spending a couple of years ago. In essence, it is drawn from the idea that for the vast majority of corporate America IT organizations have tended to view themselves as being "The Reason for all Existance." CIOs, and the organizations they represent, develop an over exagerated opinion of their place in the world. The inevitable happens when the CEO realizes that spending a third of the total corporate budget on new computers still means he has to use Microsoft Office.
The repentance factor happens when after the arrogance factor has disappated and IT spending has flushed itself down the toilet. Computers start breaking and the two guys who program in COLBOL either retired or died. The peasants rise up in arms and the CEO takes notice, realizing that just maybe he needs to up the dollar count before he drives his company out of business.
These two cycles make up the Hebrew Cycle of Corporate Management, or HCCM for short. This is named after the relationship that God's chosen people have developed with God.
In a couple of years, when processes start breaking and computers get older causing more downtime than otherwise necessary the trend will turn around.
Beware the wood elf!!!
What about all of the power to power your precious machines? You ever thought about that? I'd guess that 80% of all companies today could *get by* without a computer system, just as they did years and years ago. I'd guess that 0% could get by without power. Yet, you don't hear the electrical engineers saying "I bet they'd appreciate me if I shut down this transformer". Please. Grow up.
This one is pretty obvious - you have an IT network, you have to keep it running. You have existing software that is providing some sort of value, you must keep it running. Maintenance means replacing broken/failing equipment, it does not mean constantly upgrading to the latest gadgets. This type of IT spending is currently way to high. NT4.0 is good enough. Office 97 is good enough. There is no compelling need to upgrade to newer versions. When we upgraded from office 95 to office 2000 the only reason to upgrade was because of the compatibility issues. And this only affected about 1% of the office! This is not money well spent.
This is a bit more complicated. Actually it's a lot more complicated. Most businesses have been doing things one way since the beginning of time. When asked why they do something the answer is usually "that's how we've always done it."
Spend a few days looking around your corporation. Maybe you can apprentice with some of the Secretaries/Assistances for a few days. Learn their processes. Find out why they do things... question everything and look for redundancies. It probably won't take you long to find cases where people are re-keying information that has already been in the PC once. This type of work adds no value - if there is a significant amount of time spent doing this you can easily build a case to correct this. Start a project to extract the data from its original home, put it in a format that your clients will be able to use. These are the easy projects to get approval for - low political risk, high pay out.
Another way to find potential IT projects is to spend some time trying to trace processes from the original entry into the company, to the final delivery to the customer. Create a complete processes map. Find out what the original input is, and what the eventual output is supposed to be. As an outsider you should be able to look at the process and see major areas that could be improved. Anything that doesn't add value to the final product (in the eyes of the customer) probably does not need to be done.
Focus on areas where a customer request passes between many different people before it is filled. There are usually ways to improve or eliminate hand off time. Possibly there are many 'specialists' involved in a process when really they need one generalist and an expert system. These types of projects are difficult because many business units will need to cooperate to accomplish an improvement - but at the same time this is where the highest return can be.
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IT has a reputation in corporate America as the most unresponsive and least human-centered department in any organization. Here are the stereotypes I've encountered:
1) IT people are more interested in their machines than in helping me do my job.
2) IT people have no understanding of what I do on a daily basis.
3) IT people are penny-wise and pound foolish. They won't pay $200 so I can have a Zip drive that will allow me to take my work home, but they'll spend $1.5M on a VPN that will take a year and a half to implement and won't work properly when finished.
I've been on both sides of the fence, serving as IT support and being one of those people griping at poor IT support. It seems to me that if more IT departments thought of themselves as enablers rather than as an end to themselves, they'd receive much more respect.
Want to see a good example of how it works in a good support organization (and IT is always support)? Go to your nearest Air Force base and talk to the pilots and crew chiefs. Sure, the pilots get all the glory, because missions are oriented around flying the aircraft and hitting the target. But the crew chiefs are given tremendous respect, because they are responsible for making sure the aircraft fly properly. They understand and take pride in their role.
Many IT folks seem to have the opinion that they're smarter than the people they serve. They may be smarter, but that doesn't change the fact that people above them in the organization have to make the truly difficult decisions about hiring and firing, where to spend money, how to stay competitive, and so on. It's not that IT decisions aren't difficult, but in any organization, the more important the decisions you make, the bigger your salary.
If more IT departments realized that they actually are part of a larger team supporting the same goal, and took off their wizard's hats, they might find a lot more acceptance on a human level.
That's where IT folks commonly fall flat on their faces. They don't realize that business people make decisions based almost exclusively on human factors, only secondarily on money, and a distant third on technical factors.
IT departments that grasp the human factors, take care of the other people in the company, and bend over backwards to help people go about their daily tasks are far more likely to get the money they need to conduct glamorous "innovative" projects.
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