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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.
Where I work, our Facilities department gets whatever it wants. They take care of the generators, the lights, the A/C, etc. All things this place needs to keep running. We IT people get shafted at every opportunity because we "cost money," yet we take care of the servers and applications that keep this place running. Turn our stuff off, and it's as detrimental to the business as turning off all the lights. I can only dream of what being treated like a utility would be like. It must be nice.
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
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)
The CEO was once an IT grunt back in the old days. So, yes the tech has changed but he still sees the world through the IT "filter" as it where. Many decisions he has to defend to the board and rest of management because they make sense from the business side for IT (such as hot swap backup equipment). The other managers see it as expense, luckily the CEO sees it our way (yes, it's a cost now, but downtime mean more cost later)
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
...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
And how does IT view Management? Do they view them as nothing more than an employer? Somebody who writes payroll checks and should stay out of the way of IT? Does IT understand the value of business investments, legal contracts, general ledgers, due diligence, SEC problems, etc? I think in order for Management to care about IT, it is going to have to be a two-way street. IT and Management need to learn to work *together*, and that is going to require some understanding from IT as well.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
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.
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.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
The problem? IT people don't typically understand good business practices, how to make money, and The Big Picture. Management doesn't typically understand the overall usefulness of IT and how it isn't the plumbing and lights - they just know it isn't management or sales. When management and IT REALLY don't get along, there's a serious productivity disconnect that affects everyone.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That is auditors or security departments fault.
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.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
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.
There's no magic in IT. You identify what you need and then implement it. If it doesnt give a significant gain in productivity its not worth dealing with.
Most CIO's and techies tends to look at a new system and then start figuring out where it fits the organization. Thats completely screwed up and is the biggest reason why so many projects fail. The way it should work is that the people needing a function identify it and then the techies find a way to solve it as good/cheap as possible.
IT is just a utility like everything else, there is no gain in overspending whatsoever. You dont buy 10 ferraris when you need one truck do you?
HTTP/1.1 400
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.
So, we're talking about guys who
-jumped on the latest bandwagon without thinking about the actual usefulness of IT for their business
-or maybe were just afraid to look obsolete
-and wasted some of their own money buying the latest crap stock because it had ".com" in its name
Yeah right. Exactly the kind of guy who should NOT lead a company. Or at least only a company held privately, with himself as the only investor
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
sensitive/urgent/otherwise critical
I'd suggest that there are often times that those can be applied to the needs associated with the toilet.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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've been a software developer for over 30 years. Back in the day, the usual IT department even in a large comapny was one or two guys who knew about setting up unix networks.
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.
This is slashdot and all; but this is basically just an IT circle jerk where we talk about how unvalued we are and how nothing could happen without us.
/Truth
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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