Slashdot Mirror
Shedding Light On the Black Art of IT Management
Cathy writes "An article by Harvard's Andrew McAfee tells nontechnical managers how not to get overwhelmed by the 'drumbeat' of IT projects. McAfee breaks down IT into three categories — functional, network, and enterprise — and says that this framework 'can also indicate which IT initiatives are going to be relatively easy to implement and on which projects executives should focus. In that light, IT management starts to look less like a black art and more like the work of the executive.'"
The "black" part of the art: the inability of managers to adequately know everything they need to know about the projects for which they are responsible.
I dont think this article says much to the Slashdot audience. It is really targeted at poeple who find IT confusing and needs to get an idea of what it is. It categorises and simplifies - maybe in a useful way for people who need an introduction. But again: not for the slashdot audience. Move on.
Most of the techniques for managing IT Operations have been known for decades. It's just that each generation seems to insist on learning everything the hard way. Believe it or not, the mainframe folks in the 1970s really did know a lot about IT Operations.
Other than thst, the biggest problem I see today is middle managers on up not bothering to talk to their technical people and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on poorly configured equipment.
Lucky we have commentary Academe to put us people that actually work in IT onto the proper path. Possibly he would be equally open to our suggestions on how universities should operate.
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
Just stop using the black light and use normal lights. Where IT workers work, it doesn't need to be a dark hole in the wall. That's for cables and switches.
...everything I need to know about management from Dilbert.
A friend recommended it (The Mythical Man Month) to me 10 years ago when I was a Sr. C++ developer at a small start-up. I read it, then later re-read it. Years later, after going over to the "dark side" and becoming a manager I often still quote from that same book after going through things like RUP, Agile, MSF, etc. Everyone puts a new spin on the reality that if you have a project with a manager that is not technical they have to have a VERY strong development lead or they are in deep doo doo.
In the past some at some companies people could not fathom a good project manager being a good architect. Where I currently work that is not the case. My strong management skills are important, but my technical knowledge is also valued. I have seen change in the industry in this direction. I hope it continues. At the end of the day what was valid over 40 years ago is still valid today.
--Cally
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
Don't say "McAfee" and "Framework" in the same sentence ever again.
Unfortunately, though I'm sure he's smart and all, it's a little hard for me to take IT Management advice from a guy named McAfee... Ah well, at least it wasn't from Harvard's Peter Norton...
Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen. -Hawking
is broken into a few areas:
Firefighting - finding those lovely bad caps
Suspect Web Development - adding spaghetti PHP code
Trolley pushing - bring out ya dead PCs
But that's not how it works in all too many companies. For an enterprise with 10,000 people producing, you have 1,000 IT people to sit around and think of new ways to justify their continued employment through bureaucratic process and unnecessary BS. IT managers, just like all good managers enter the resource war with their colleagues for more money, more staff, more power, etc. What is forgotten is that meeting requirements has essentially a fixed price.
I have worked in industry a long time with a bunch of carbon-blobs that do anything they can to impede the real work. IT is not a mission, it's a f@#$king support role worthy of no higher esteem than janitors, accountants or lawyers. Now get off your pedestal and fix my god-damned computer you FU%$&ing OBSTRUCTIONIST!!!
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Anyone who says "Shedding light" immediately loses all credibility with me, since they obviously copy from others instead of saying anything original.
A lot of non-IT people have a distorted view that all IT staff fix computers. I know how, but I don't. It's not my job. I *can* get you the data you need to make a sales decision. I can tell you why the query development wrote is broken, and how to fix it so that not only will it make the website work but *faster*. So please don't confuse a DBA with a desktop administrator ;)
P.S. All of the desktop administrators I have known have been extremely helpful, skilled in multiple areas and far from lazy. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Wow! You have some bitterness going on there! I am an IT/IS manager and in many ways I agree with you (minus the venom). IT does exist to support the business and many times IT/IS does get a distorted view. That is a function of Bad IT management. The main thing that separates IT from Electricians and Janitors is that IT can be, and needs to be, used strategically. This is the biggest failing with the article. It needs to be stressed that businesses run on information, and the more efficiently you can handle that information, the more you can create real competitive advantages that either save the business money on the back end, or help drive revune on the front end. Two quick examples that jump to mind are Just in time delivery, and targetted sales based on data mining.
Yes, there are carbon blobs (they also exist in Finance, HR, marketing, sales and any other functional part of the business). What a CEO, COO needs to understand is how IT can be used for strategic advantages. This is the responsibility of the IT manager/CIO. They need to understand the business well enough to put forward ideas that the other executives can understand, in other words, how can this project give us a strategic advantage. The article does a nice job of breaking IT down into different categories, but completely fails to bring IT into a strategic light. For a non IT example, the CEO doesn't need to understand six sigma in order to understand the importance of quality control. The CEO DOES need to know how, if and where, six sigma can give an advantage.
I am sorry to hear that you have had that kind of experience with IT, but I am also glad as it means my job prospects are great!
Cheers,
CB
Dear Sweet $DIETY, I sincerely hope your head doesn't pop-up over a cubicle wall in my building. I recently met a gentleman in a Starbucks, who started a conversation with me regarding IT after seeing my purchases from the adjoining bookstore.
His philosophy was quite similar; "IT is by no means important, it's just a necessary evil. A means to an end." He then went on about how no one is even truly dependent on IT, computers, or information.
I mentioned my point of views differ, as I have made a career of IT, and I don't see myself as a "glorified secretary". Then I steered the conversation towards his laptop, a rather beat-up looking Dell, with an 802.11 PCMCIA card sitting next to it. Turns out my new friend is a writer, been in my hometown for almost two weeks, and hasn't been able to upload his work off of the laptop the whole time (PCMCIA card not working, Dial-in line for his company was always busy, etc).
Long story short; there was an "incident" involving my recently topped-off 20oz coffee thermos, and his laptop, which was aptly on his lap at the time. Not only did the poor Dell unleash the magic smoke the instant my thermos slipped, but it's display didn't survive the fall off of his lap as he started hopping up and down like, well, someone who's "valuables" were drenched with hot coffee.
Something tells me that he spent the better part of the evening begging a physician to be gentle with him, and begging a "glorified secretary" to recover two weeks of his work off of his Almond-Morning-Expresso soaked hard drive.
P.S: Yes, I am aware of the fact that I am a bastard. Thank you.
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
How long did it take until engineering mgmt was not a black art?
WTF happened to ITIL?
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Folks have commented about the mainframes in the 70s being well-run (and I agree) and how people don't learn from history.
I think it's still a symptom of the Boomer-Knows-Best mentality. The Silents ran the mainframes--and we can still learn from them--but Boomers prefer to toss that knowledge out.
Enter the issue of Boomers managing Gen Xers. This process is working so well that the Boomers have turned their attentions to the Millennials.
In Soviet Russia, IT breaks you down.
the IT staff would make the decisions and then tell management/sales/paper pushers what they are to do. Judging by the comments on Slashdot over the years, I am not the only ubergeek that thinks the IT people should be the high paid personnel and the management asshats should be the underpaid paper pushers that we all know they are. If I had a company all the managers would have to have undergrad degrees in CS or something before they were allowed to get their MBAs.
For most IT projects you could better categorize them as: "decreases costs and adds efficiency to the business", "increases costs and makes things more difficult", and "is huge Enterprise overhead purchased by someone at the CxO level who's clueless."
Oh wait, that third one falls into the second category, but the magic of "I'm in charge, do what I say" comes into play and suddenly the need to determine whether or not the project is worth the money being spent flys out the window.
If you work on projects that fall into that third category, you know who you are. The larger the organization, the more money you're being paid over your peers to shut-up and keep working on it, no matter how many years behind it is, no matter how few goals it actually will reach when you're done, and no matter ANY form of logic.
As Rick Moranis stated so succinctly in the movie SpaceBalls, "Keep firing, Assholes!"
+++OK ATH
Spent ages scrolling back to copy McAfee The biggest pain in the a$$ software. The IT field is filled with two types of people, those that know what there doing and those that have been there since 1992 and think they know what they are doing. "He has been here since 1992, John is 67, but will not take retirement, he keeps us all in check and we cannot do anything, he just upgraded us to windows 2000" I have heard that, thats a real sentenance at an interview. The people that hire you are idiots 90% of the time. They interview you becuase the person that runs the show is too busy. lol Whats with the firefighting, every interview or visit to an IT department is like visiting Iraq, people running around, terminal 2 is down, what do we do, i got a call from sales on 3rd floor, there email is down, who do tell, Janet Chadderdon wants how to do an out of office reply right now, she needs you now. Thats all i see. Dam people, you all run nothing, my job is 90% foresight, 9% hands on and 1% firefighting. If you cannot just sit in front of your computer for a whole day (8 hours) and not get one phone call, you are either dumb or in the wrong job. btw, in case you wanna bitch about networks, i run a 1000 node network. So, the point is, kick all these old DOS, Win 95 people out and we may have a chance at getting people that are living in today, into companies. Thats you i am talking about. Dvid