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The Disconnect Between Management and the Value of IT
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.'"
I think this comment shows a failure to recognize the value of basic utilities.
-Dave
They missed something off the list. One of the biggest, if not the biggest barriers I see is the desperate attempts of managers to pretend they know more than their staff. This is never more apparent than in computers and the painful experiences I have had with managers who have to try and justify a higher salary whilst doing something which, at the end of the day, is less critical to the production of a product or service than the people who are actually developing it, have left me with nothing but pity for those managers. It's a terrible burden to have to try and instruct someone who knows a lot more about how to accomplish something than you do, and it tends to result in interference or denigration. Only a few non-technical managers I have had have had the confidence or humility to just ask me what the best thing they should decide is. And they were the best managers.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
The top execs are the true victims of the IT bubble and nonsense IT sales pitches they bought into that ended up just costing them and their company valuable time and resources. Add to that the possibility that they lost boatloads of personal capital on IT stocks, it should be enough to justify their phobia for the sector altogether.
To us IT folk, the nonsense might seem clear, but to those who are targeted and easily confused, treading waters softly is really a matter of safety, not ignorance.
Perhaps the reason some businesses "don't want the headache" is do to the attitude of some IT departments. In my dealings, some of them (READ SOME) have the attitude that they are doing you a favor, just talking to you.
No one (management or not) ever recognizes the value of IT until they don't have it.
The way I usually put it, at least to my company, is that a good IT department can MAKE the company money, rather than cost it money. A good IT department can increase productivity of said company's employees, provide support services to customers (through the web), provide exposure to potential customers (again through the web), and fix the boss's home computer when his daughter breaks it. (Har-Har)
...is the same as the value of a toilet.
- it is necessary to the functioning of the business
- unless you are a toilet manufacturer or a landlord, it is NOT part of your central business
- ideally it "just works", allowing you to focus on more important things
- when it doesn't "just work", things start to stink.
The difference is that it is unthinkable that most companies should have a "Chief Plumbing Officer", but the IT world seems to think that they need to be involved at the highest reaches of every company's management.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Typical call to IT here?
"Hi, I need to use X piece of software (which is mainstream and well-known). I can't install it myself because I don't have admin rights, can you install it please?"
"Why do you need it?"
"Well [insert many technical reasons here]"
"Sorry, we can't install software that hasn't been approved."
"How do I get it approved?"
"Well it will have to go before the board, which meets every 6 months or so. And you also have to [insert about 100 roadblocks and obstructionist measures here]."
"Great. Screw it, I'll just work from home again."
If you want to know why your IT department is hated, ask yourself how you treat your customers. Do you treat them as your bosses, or as your enemies?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Price != value.
Basic utilities are immensely valuable. Imagine how much less productive your office would be if it didn't have phones, electricity, or indoor plumbing.
The fact that these items cost only a fraction of their contribution doesn't mean the same is true for IT.
The key difference is that most basic utilities are or have historically been regulated and their price set at the cost of production plus a reasonable profit. Where they are not regulated they are theoretically kept reasonable by market pressures or political pressures.
Employment of knowledge-workers on the other hand is different:
Each job is unique. Each worker is unique. Leaving one employer for another you hope will be better takes time and effort, as does "getting rid of" a less productive worker and replacing him with someone you hope will be more productive. For these reasons, if someone's pay, benefits, and working conditions are "close enough" to what both the employer and employee think are fair, the employee probably won't quit and he probably won't be "gotten rid of."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Perhaps you should start encouraging equal recognition by lobbying management for pay parity with your facilities department.
I used to respect management folks. Then I started actually getting to know them and how they operate. Their decisions have next to nothing to do with what makes sense. Their decisions are about squeezing ever last drop out of the bottom line, all other priorities are rescinded. Need a new app to do task X? Get the cheapest one. It doesn't matter if it sucks, it's cheap and that makes Manager X happy because their year-end bonus, that's about the size of your entire yearly salary, will be bigger.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
IT people often forget hey are a support, not line function.
On the third hand, IT departments are often not staffed adequately, either in butts in chair or in the quality of the heads over those butts. It seems absurd to think about using IT to achieve breakthroughs in productivity or competitiveness when they seem to spend more time restricting the work that goes through the department than actually getting things done.
The bottom line is that skill is distributed on a normal curve, and the vast majority of people are mediocre. That includes top management; most companies have mediocre leadership. When the leadership of a company is weak, there's not much IT can do to make things better. They really are just a facilities type function.
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I knew one like that. He got fired for not knowing some tech buzz word that I can't even remember myself. Many of those guys are defensive for a reason: maybe because of their own irrational insecurities or maybe they've learned the hard way not to look "stupid".
Let's face it, if you don't know something, many, if not most, IT folks will be quick to criticize and pounce on the "stupid" person and give the poor bastard a bad rep that is almost to get rid of. I once worked somewhere on someone's code that I thought was designed quite well: it was tight, commented impeccably, excellent memory management (in 'C'), and it work as designed. I was told that the original coder has a horrible reputation as being "stupid". I just shook my head and said that I wish I were that "stupid". He was no longer with the company. He quit and got a better job - good for him!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
That's a bad attitude, but it develops as a defense to crappy user attitudes. "You NEED to fix this!" is the cry of the user who did something stupid/inappropriate and broke his computer.
Employees also tend to blame IT when they got caught browsing porn or running their home business at work.
User: "My computer is broken."
IT: "What's wrong?"
User: "I can't access Myspace"
IT: "That's because we block it."
User: "You suck!"
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
IT is not the only department that is misunderstood. For example, Ray Kassar of Atari thought that software programmers were a cost center too, and no different than assembly plant workers. He didn't realize that programmers were vital to how Atari makes money, and thus the best programmers all left Atari and went to start Activision with a business plant o make 3rd party software for Atari.
When it comes to IT their are THREE parties involved. Those who build it (IT), those who govern it (Management) and those who use it (Employees).
These three groups often have no idea what the other is actually doing.
Have you ever seen one of those programs where the boss of a big company is put to work on the factory floor? They used to be pretty common, was there ever a SINGLE boss, who wasn't shown to be totally clueless about how the actual work was being done?
You think IT is any better? How many people with the best training in IT skills ever bother to go down to the factory floor and SEE the REAL workflow before they implement a system?
You got management trying to make decisions on how to improve a workprocess they don't understand, you got IT trying to implement something that has no basis in reality and employees forced to choose between actually getting the work done and following procedure.
It doesn't suprise me at all that this article doesn't mention the workforce. Management article talking about proper management but ignoring the people who got to do the actuall work, yeah, never seen that before.
Get your hands dirty before you even bother trying to think of implementing IT, FIND out what is REALLY needed. IT can do wonderfull things to be sure, but it needs to fit with what is really going on in your company, not what some manager thinks should be going on.
Make sure your management decisions can be executed, first observe what REALLY goes on, plan your changes, then TRY THEM YOURSELVE, with FULL pressure. If you can't do it, your employees can't do it and what counts isbeing able to do it on the busiest day of the year.
The most perfect example, testing an application with just 3 records in the database for performance. My job was to convert the old data, if I pushed more then ten records in, performance crumbled. Took me MONTHS to confince them that the problem was in the application, not my conversion (for every insert MILLIONS of reads were being done thanks to the most idiotic database design in history (no keys), compounded by some really really bad code). But they TESTED IT and it worked fine. Yah, 3 records and those not even fully fleshed out.
I could rant on for hours about bone-headed mistakes of all kinds, but basically FORCE management to get a clue and the only way to do that is BACK TO THE WORKFLOOR!
99% of IT projects that end up unused or not meeting requirements can simply be explained because they were designed without knowing what the real situation is.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The problem isn't management not seeing the benefit of IT, it is the lack of management skills within IT leadership and the typical geek mentality which is counter productive to traditional business.
I'm not saying that either one is better or doesn't have a place but workers in IT & particularly IT leadership need to start thinking that those business management classes in college are a good idea to at least take & listen in on. You're not going to convince the ones with deep pockets (upper management) to keep you around if you don't show your value up front to them. Sure, their practices may be antiquated but they are time-tested and in their eyes, work.
Geeks are also going to need to realize that not all things are academic, business leaders expect results, not some elegant solution that looks cool in an IDE. There's that classic line from Ghostbusters I remember, "I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there."
Maybe it's not that extreme but that is the truth, like it or not.
I've seen shitty and arrogant IT departments, I've seen friendly ones.
The people who say IT is mostly support, they have it exactly right. IT is a support function unless the business's main product is IT. Stupid management always devalues the workers, the people who keep the place running. In this regard, IT is not special. Sometimes IT is staffed by arrogant asses who deserve to be mocked, just like you can have rude janitors or marketing weenies. Again, nothing new here.
In a healthy organization, IT's attitude is "How do we make things better?" I'm always the Excel go-to guy since most people don't have the time to learn all the tricks. I'm fine with that. I've got a thousand tricks and most people only need to know a few of them. I set their sheet up the way they need it, they'll learn just the tricks they need and will be happy.
IT is always lacking for resources? Most departments are. My dad worked as a mechanic for the phone company motor pool and he was constantly complaining about how they had to make bricks without straw. Management saw them as nothing more than a cost center, never appreciating the value they provided. They increased the average age of the fleet from 10 to 20 years. Oh, that's great. Yes, you're cutting down on procurement costs but did you notice how maintenance is skyrocketing? No, that chart wasn't in the meeting. That's great.
Good IT makes itself available to the business, makes things run more efficiently and is invaluable. Ask the workers or management what would happen if the IT staff all got hit by a bus. If the response is "Oh my God, we'd be so fucked," that's a good IT department. If they just get this wistful little smile on their faces, that's a bad IT department.
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Upper management should be disallowed from having vendors talk to them unsupervised. The real value in IT is solving business problems. Many times what happens is upper management has been sold a solution by a vendor that doesn't really solve any particular problem, and then we are forced to implement it. In pretty much every case, when this happened to me, I could have led projects to do it cheaper, faster, AND better. I swear, the manager at my last company had stock in Cisco, and the Director (of course) in Microsoft.
If management had instead gone to IT and said "This is what we need to do" then the real value of IT comes to light as we can work on a solution to that problem, or maybe even give some insight into "Well, with technology, that problem is actually this..let's solve that".
I don't constantly second-guess my plumber; I treat him and his solutions with respect because he knows more than I ever will about plumbing. I pay my plumber a lot of money for his expertise.