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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
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.
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.
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
If upper management treated the plumbing like IT, then you'd have a bucket to piss in and slop out every day, and the bucket would have a leak in it, but there wouldn't be any money to patch it up to keep the contents secure. The bucket would also be in the company basement, in a poorly ventilated corner next to a dead dog.
...
Plumbing - you do it once, it lasts 25 years if not 50. The only upgrades might be for more efficiently flushing toilets and taps that don't drip. That's the equivalent of putting a 750GB hard drive on an original IBM PC.
IT is an essential part of a modern business, and if it's done wrong the business can go down the drains. Wrong can be getting IT in the way of people's jobs, instead of helping them. Sadly this can't be avoided (e.g., third party clients demanding that you use IT for something that only benefits them whilst being a massive inconvenience for the supplier).
I bet many IT guys would love to get paid at the rates plumbers get paid at though. I don't think they'd like the apprenticeship period though
Most businesses don't cease to function when they suffer a toilet outage, however.
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"
The toilet analogy is a pretty good one, but it fails in one respect that is very important - few companies choose to design their own toilet. They assume that existing, simple, common toilets will work just fine for them and they assume that even if they chose to design their own toilet it would give them no competitive advantage. Now, examine software for a moment. How many companies would be willing to change all of their procedures and operations in order to adopt a standard off-the-shelf solution purchased as a commodity on the open market? How many would abandon their carefully crafted strategies and competitive practices in order to avoid special purpose software? To put it another way, how many would be willing to run their businesses exactly (and I mean EXACTLY) like the competitor across the street so that the two of them could use the same software "plumbing"? In my experience, the answer is NONE. And that's why we have CIOs and Technology Officers and the like slowly forcing their ways into the boardroom. Without them, the custom-made "plumbing" isn't worth the millions spent on it, and the company can't compete.
Not sure how you got "Insightful" on this comment. If any thing, to me, this shows the opposite. Management didn't choose the plumbing. In fact if you wanted to really compare it to how some companies manage thier IT would look more like this:
Dept A wants to be hooked into the city sewage system,
Dept B wants a septic tank because they heard it is cheaper
Dept C wants to connect to the county's sewage system because it is new and therefore has to be the best.
Dept D does not want plumbing at all because it is too costly and they can go use the other Depts systems.
There you go mister plumber. Make this work.
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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