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Tech Vs. Business?
An anonymous reader writes "I've recently found a spot in a large company, and I'm noticing that here a lot of people on the technology side are very anti-business. Tech makes up about 40% of the total line of business staff, but the whole LOB is only a tiny percentage of the larger company in the financial industry. I personally haven't seen this before in prior jobs, but I'm told that this animosity is commonplace. So I come to Slashdot to find out if others have experienced this adversarial relationship between business and tech, and if so, what was the effect on the overall success of the business?"
i've found this to be true in almost every company that i've worked for. tech workers are looked down upon, because people only ever come to us when things go badly and most of us literally "sit on our asses", which they dont see as working. so we're seen as lazy and bad at what we do, because if we were any good at it, they wouldn't be having whatever problem they're having. the best way i've found to combat this is to be honest with your departmental managers and hope that they can spread some love
What I think he means is this:
IT is anti-business because they prevent people from using IM to keep in touch with their baby sitter, mistress, or downloading a virus.
IT is anti-business because they block youtube and online stock trading and the flavor of the week streaming radio station.
IT is anti-business because they run the company firewall.
Business is not anti-tech at all. In fact Business loves technology so much they don't care how it works, if it works, or if there is some better product. All they care about is that it's cool, they saw it on TV, or they downloaded it. It is, of course, IT's fault that it does not work, blew up their computer, or caused the entire accounting database be sent via e-mail to someone in the Ukraine.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Back when mainframes were King, the 'operators' wore white lab coats and worked in their own cleaner-than-average, air conditioned rooms - if you needed a 'job' run, you had to meet with the programmers and negotiate your place in the queue.
I called these types 'Programmer Priests'. Their style seemed reminiscent of history lessons that described Incan temple rites where the head priest would routinely trundle up the local pyramid, telling the villagers and King to wait while he consulted the Gods concerning whatever tragedy needed divine intervention that month.
Outside of a good view and a supply of virgins, nice clothes and fresh fruit from the village, of course the Incan priests had nothing to do at the top... beyond theater.
The early white coated programmers felt this same power. Everyone was at their whim - even their superiors. 'Be nice' or you'd wait for an eternity before the computer gods sent your answer back with the priests.
That particular IT style persists today.
I make it a habit to kick dirt on those types every chance I get...
This is a situation where there is complexity that the user does not understand or want to understand, but the complexity cannot be removed in the simple way they hope. They might shout, "Just make it right!" and leave the room. One is faced with a difficult choice of implementing an ugly fudge which makes you look bad, or forcing the user to understand and still making you look bad by being perceived as a "pest".
For example, one client wanted a list of integer percentages that added up to 100 percent. In practice, the numbers were decimal, but if you rounded them then they would not always add up to 100 percent.
Before rounding:
40.4
52.4
7.2
-----
100.0
After rounding:
40
52
7
---
99
(Sorry, I can't get slashdot to line up the columns properly)
The client did not seem to "get" this issue and just wanted the integers to add up to 100. The programmer eventually built an elaborate scheme to fudge the results by "bumping" up or down one of the numbers closest to 0.5. For example, they may make the first integer into "41" instead of "40". This later could generate a phone-call by an astute accountant working with the client. Sometimes you can't please everybody and just have to take lumps. Put extensive footnotes to cover your butt if possible.
(based on a story I submitted to C2.com wiki)
Table-ized A.I.
I know this first hand. I was an IT admin who was taking care of things with very few problems. I had a poor review from the business manager due to what he said was low productivity. In other words, since I was not running around all day fixing things it meant I was not doing anything. He never saw the preventative maintenance and testing that I performed that kept it running well.
Wouldn't it be simpler and better to contract that out? Here are the benefits:
Cost. There's no need to hire and maintain unnecessary staff. If there's an emergency, the contractor can bring in more people to handle it, but most of the time they won't need to dedicate even one full-time staffer to your office.
Versatility. The contractor will work with many clients and many environments. That means that they will have a diversity of experience that will allow them to deal with problems quickly. They will also have the experience to point out better solutions.
Employee satisfaction. The contractors personnel will need to be respectful and courteous to your staffers, or else you will find a different contractor. They will work to find solutions (and charge you more money) rather than making excuses about why your problem can't be solved so they can stay in their budget.
Come to think of it, maybe I should start a business doing this for people.
OTOH well, if you find (say) a good auto mechanic, see what the difference in your bill looks like depending on (a) how expensive a car you drive in with is, and (b) how close to peonage said mechanic is treated by said customer.
I think independence may be the key -- if you work within the firm as a permanent (or long-term contractor) then the perception of your technical skills are diminished as time passes, as familiarity dilutes your apparent value. From outside the company, well, they may treat you like the auto mechanic in the above example or they may treat you like a saviour, the person who recovered their email / payroll / customer database.
If they're rude, you have the option of legal retaliation when you give them the next quote -- if you don't want to deal with them, raise your contract rate to an absurdly high level. Either they'll ignore you or you'll be paid commensurate with the aggro involved (they can sneer at you all they want if you're driving the Porsche while they're driving the clapped-out 1972 Pinto, no?)
That said, with the skills crisis here in Australia, engineers and skilled trades of any type are pretty well regarded due to the tight market, and that's probably why I don't see a lot of Tech-Business animosity.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Nah, you guys work way too hard. Highly regulated industries are where it's at. I am a very small cog in a very large wheel, and I like it like that.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
In my experience, it is best to just nod and say as little as possible, even if you are at a nice place having dinner with an exec. Simply pass pertinent info along to a manager (Well the reason they can't copy that 7GB database to a win98 box is because fat32 does not support files that large.) and leave it at that. Do not pipe up in conferences or meetings because you are not the type that the company buys lunch for, and if you happen to be there at the meeting take that into consideration. Don't speak your mind because that's not what you are there for or they would have told you so. It sucks but that's the way life is. And most of all don't laugh when you are on a conference call with IT and corporate and some more important person asks a stupid question. Their job is to make money, and to outsource your job if it will be cheaper. Yeah it might be lame, but tell someone who is sitting fat and making 80k for doing non-technical work and demanding that IT do it yesterday and $20,000 under budget to do it right and you will be looking for a new job. Your argument has no weight there unless you are very special. Nod, say please and thank you, and do your job to the best of your ability and things will be "ok". Just my two bits*.
*inflation
In my experience there can be a persistent problem where sales guys have no understanding of the product or service they're supposed to sell. Their managers know it, the engineering managers know it, executives know it, but the situation is tolerated and the sales guys are expected to keep on selling. Don't ask me why, but I've seen people tolerate that state of affairs for years as if there were no cure for it.
I think it really depends on the business. Personally I work for a company who runs online communities, so you'd think the most important departments would be IT and designers (as they literally create all product the users/consumers see). In a case like ours, the marketing department should only really be deciding what features are the most important to implement, plus advertising our services.
Unfortunately, the business has fallen into the trap of offering crap services that nobody in their right mind would pay for. However, our marketing department spends all their time and money spamming, scamming, and tricking users into purchasing subscriptions (ie: 80-90% of the communications you receive from "other users", whether on our sites or external sites' forums, are actually our bots). So of course marketing with all their blackhat-style tactics rise to the top of the chain of importance from the CEO's point of view.
Man, it sucks working for a company who's only objective is how much money they can make before the end of the current month. No long-term vision whatsoever. :'(
Amen. I think you've boiled it down to the basics - lack of respect from both sides.
The suits consider IT the corporate equivalent of burger-flipping - something dirty that needs to be done, but could be done "better", "cheaper", and "faster", and preferably by interchangable, known quantities (hence the reliance on things like certification over actual skills.)
The IT people who are any good basically see the suits as people who are full of shit who couldn't hack it in a real degree, so they went and got an MBA (and likely cheated in order to get it.) And then they get promoted despite having put in zero work compared to the engineers.
Moral of the story. If you're any good, don't work for suits. Consult for them when they're desperate and you dictate all the terms, and can walk all the way to the bank laughing when their house of cards collapses (make sure to get your consulting checks cut regularly - if they start coming late or at all, you can cut your losses.)
The "tech vs biz" feuds are an extension of the conflicts between management and labor. Tech divisions, though they have their own managers, are responsible for doing the production work of the company, while the biz offices are responsible for managing the company (and, ultimately, the tech division).
The management vs labor conflict is as old as the division of labor. Tech vs biz is probably at least as old as the first person to market the inventor of the wheel's widget.
--
make install -not war
It's amazing how many people just don't understand basic maths. A while ago I used to have to report on how many calls missed the grade of service in a call centre. Each line would have a % grade of service and there would be half a dozen lines. Almost every week at least 2 or 3 of the desk managers would ring me up to complain my figures were wrong because my report said line 1 had 80% GOS, line 2 had 30% but my overall GOS was 79% and not 60% like it should be. I actually had a make a tutorial spreadsheet to explain the concept of weighted percentages but 1 or 2 people even questioned the validity of that !
I don't generally have problems with the 'business' but I do often have problems with people in the business. Just this morning I have had maybe the 8th e-mail from some guy asking me to send out all our confidential customer information to some pharmacuetical company. Every time I tell him that a) we're not doing that and that b) if we did even send out the limited amount of non confidential data he still needs to tell me exactly what he wants. But he never does, each e-mail is just "Mr Gravy, How much longer will this report take, the client are nagging me now". Each time I reply telling him he needs to explain what he actually wants but so far he hasn't bothered to do that.
At my company, there is a strong belief that if it ain't broke, you don't fix it.
So you basically have to wait for the customer to file a trouble ticket for you to fix something, and push a change control for approval, in order for you to fix something you knew was going to go wrong.
What we end up doing is developing the fix and keeping it in dev, until that fateful day when the user happens upon the bug. The we look all mighty because we can fix it insta-magically.
Actually, we no longer do that. We let our managers take the blame now. We say, we knew about it, and we were ready to fix it, but it was low-priority for our boss, so we never did.
Come to think of it, that's exactly how management likes it.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Two rules:
1 - Real World spins because of money, not gravitational forces, and businessmen control that flow of money. IE, they have the power techies have not.
2 - A techie manipulate things while a businessman manipulates people.
Conclusion: when problems occur and a techie has to defend him/herself against the businessman, usually it's the businessman who wins. This explain the frustration among techies.
But...
A techie can screw the businessman in multiple ways just by manipulating his gadgets. Just be sure not to be caught because the same energy that moves our world also fuels the justice system.
Reconciling the distinct, sometimes conflicting needs of different groups is where good managers are priceless. If you've got that kind of antipathy between your tech people and your business people, someone has been doing something wrong. Tech is supposed to _enable_ people to do their work, not get in their way. And it can be fun in and of itself, which is why many of us do it.
But they don't often pay us to have fun of our own, they want things to work well and not cost too much. As soon as your tech staff starts calling people 'lusers', and the secretaries leave things broken because it's just too much trouble to come to us for help, then our company or department should start looking for a new leader. Not just a new IT person: a new leader to help create those relationships.
Your answer is in RFC 1925, point (2) 7a:
Good, fast, cheap - pick any two (you can't have all three)
As techies our instinct goes to "good and fast". Almost without thinking. Business people, on the other hand, really are the exact opposite: "cheap" is the fixed value for them, and then they pick either good or fast depending on the specific project.
The most common scenario is that the techie builds something, but isn't happy with it, rebuilds it, improves it, tests it, fixes bugs, continues on and on and on. You can see that very well in security. Techies hold entire conferences about which obscure, rarely encountered problems could under which very special circumstances provide a small chance that technology X could be circumvented.
For business people "does the job" is all they need. If there's a 0.1% chance that a hypothetical attack can go straight through, say, your firewall, a techie will consider it broken. A business person thinks "let's get an insurance, at that failure rate the premium will be very affordable".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
We once installed a configurable system, and did months of testing to ensure it worked on all configurations, boundary cases, etc.
This was an important financial system, and I know that if it had not worked as required there would have been hell to pay.
Six months later someone decided to check our test data against the live configuration and found a very odd rule, giving people with worse credit histories better interest rates. We queried it and they said it was wrong but "why was the system so hard to understand".
We brought up the original specifications, page diagrams etc. given by business and showed them that it worked in exactly the way they wanted it to. The "difficult to understand" argument was never done again. In fact the whole thing was put down to "just one of those things".
The ID manager suggested that we could query the database and find out how many people were given a rate inappropriate for the risk - and maybe flag the accounts for quick follow up if they had arrears. Almost unbelievably we were told that on "under no circumstances were we to query the database for this information, as the results could be seen as unfair to the business unit concerned". This came from a board level director so we really had to comply.
Again, had an IT problem lead to people being given the wrong rates we all know the first question would have been "How many people are affected and how much money is involved?". The second would have been "who was responsible?".
I believe that the business see the IT department as a car and them as the drivers. If they take a route that leaves them crawling in traffic at 20mph its "one of those things". If the car only crawls along at 20mph its "totally unacceptable".
I also have seen this in life; most notably in government agencies where I have worked. In addition, it seems that, since management is now recognised as being a skill in its own right, managers often seem to drop straight in at the bottom of the management structure without ever having produced anything. As a result, the management tends to consist of fast-tracked graduates, often tracked so fast that they didn't have time to train on the way.
I can't resist, sorry; how come you used the correct spelling of 'principle' twice and then the wrong one for the rest of the post?
From my point of view, there's only a small number of companies where the Techs have a good relationship to the Business People or even Managers.
The main reasons are, in my oppinion, management, and respect.
As many others pointed out, the Tech doing his job best is the one you'll never see working because there are no problems with the IT infrastructure at all.
The problem is: In most companies I know or worked for, the IT departement is managed by a business man -- not by a tech. This is a fundamental (management) mistake.
Just do make it clear to everyone: Would you as business man like to discuss your great business plan with a non-business Tech, who then decides which way to go? No, of course not -- he'll hardly understand what your point is at all.
So, why do they force the Techs to discuss new hardware, network expansions and other, highly tech-related stuff with a business man? He won't understand why, won't see the connections, the big picture in the background.
The business people often tell the Techs that's part of the Tech's job to explain it in a way so the manager understands. Would you like (or even able) to explain your business plan to somebody knowing nothing about marketing and management at all? Giving him a crash course in Management/Marketing? And every time from the roots up, because next time he doesn't remember what you did talk about last time.
No, you won't. So, don't force the Techs to do it the other way around. It's useless -- you'll perhaps get a little window where you can see a part of the big picture behind, but you won't be able to see it in total.
By managing IT departements in this way, with a business man doing the decissions who has not the Tech background, you'll make a lot of false decissions. And the Techs are the ones having to deal with. No wonder they get fretted.
If you want a smooth, productive IT departement, look for a Tech with some business/management skills and help him to tighten them. Ensure that the head of the IT departement is a Tech. Because he's accepted, he has the background, and he knows what he's talking about when he talks about your IT. And give him financial responsibility. He must be the one deciding which hardware to buy.
I know a company here in Germany where the CTO and member of the board of directors at first a Tech and then business man. In the early days, he was one of the upper sysadmins. It's a big internet provider/hoster over here.
I whish this would be the common situation in most companies.
The slighly overweight penguin.
While I agree with some here who have shed light on the fact that business team members usually have a poor opinion of technology team members but sometimes I've seen this is the fault of the tech person. In my experience tech people tend to leave business causes and methods at the door either because they aren't familiar with them or the are more involved in their own missions that may or may not align with the business as a whole. I've seen IT architects that are more concerned with pushing out their upgrades and/or their infrastructure "upgrades" (usually to prove to the organization their position in the company) that the neglect to take into account the real mission and goals of the organization. In my opinion IT exists solely for the business, not the other way around. And I'd like to see some IT managers come up with a vision for IT that involves seeing ways to improve or support the business FIRST and then coming up with the solution (instead of having a technology and then finding a way to fit it into the company).
falling into the trap of hating the business i work for. its inevitable because IT is very rarely in line with the same goals management is (profit, corporate citizenship, etc... i could care less about.) IT just wants it to run right, and keep them out of the office on a saturday.
my old boss once insisted IT was a part of the business, lock stock and barrel. however I once read on slashdot that IT was a service to, not a function of most businesses. keeping myself aligned with "service" has helped me to avoid alot of workplace animosity.
Its all in how you spin it i suppose, but without a customer, none of us would be here. its tough to have visibility.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Stop thinking about making it all work smoothly. Give up on the proactive vs reactive approach. The trick for me was to give the business people "presents." I put them on their own subnet with a (fairly useless) firewall, so they all felt cozy and comfortably isolated from the "lower workers." One day I gave them all cheap web cams and shortcuts to our remote offices, telling them to cut their phone bills (the head of finance almost kissed me for that one.) Pick someone who bad-mouths the techies and give them some report that they never knew they could get that fits their job well. Look for influential people and influence them. I gave a CEO a "speedometer" that showed running totals of accounts payable, accounts receivable, total $$$ on orders placed, and $$$ on orders shipped for the day, week, and month. He loved it, and I got a new PC. Business folks don't see how hard it is to maintain the status quo, so don't bother showing them. Give them bangles and neat toys and data for their job that makes them go "Cool" and they'll see you as a friend.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
In other words, since I was not running around all day fixing things it meant I was not doing anything. He never saw the preventative maintenance and testing that I performed that kept it running well.
That doesn't only apply to IT. I heard a similar story about the maintenance staff at a manufacturing company.
Back in the 80s the president of the company went on an unscheduled tour of the plant (a very rare occasion). While on the tour he comes upon two maintenance workers standing by their tool carts having cups of coffee and chatting.
Furious that the two workers weren't fixing something at that particular moment the president asks, "What are you doing?"
One of the maintenance workers replies, "Well, the line is running perfectly, and since it's running we have to wait until the operators go on break to do any preventative maintenance."
The president of the company then goes back to his office with a great idea to save some money. Since these two maintenance workers are standing around, he clearly has too many of them. So he proceeds to fire half of the maintenance staff.
Ten years later, the board of directors notices that the profits are decreasing substantially. So, they fire the president and hire a new one. After 6 months the new president has to make a report to the board. This is what he found:
We noticed that our sales went down so we performed as survey and that indicated that our sales were down due to a perceived decline in quality of our product.
We also noticed our manufacturing costs have grown exponentially in the past ten years.
After speaking with some of the foreman and the manufacturing engineering staff, it appears that the uptime of the line has declined. Ten years ago, the uptime was 92% and today it's 63%. Additionally, the majority of the tooling can no longer produce parts within the designed specifications, sending the scrap rate up to 42%. This means that our plant is only 37% efficient. They all cite a lack of preventative maintenance as the cause.
It appears ten years ago, the president of the company fired half of the maintenance staff. As a result, not all of the preventative maintenance was performed as required. This decision has saved us, $500,000 on average annually for the past ten years. However, due to the increase in the scrap rate, the quality control department has increased their inspection staff. This has cost the company $500,000 on average annually over the past ten years.
This decision to cut back on maintenance has cost the company 1 billion dollars in down time last year alone. This figure does not include the decline in sales, and increase in warranty claims, and scrap rate due to lower product quality. In total, this decision has cost the company 10 Billion dollars, last year alone.
In order to get this company back to where it was ten years ago, the entire production line will have to be retooled. This has been quoted out by several companies, and is expected to exceed $900 million.
Even with these changes, the damage that has been done to our company's reputation is irreparable, and we may never recover.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
That is a very elementary definition of a business. While in practice that is what most businesses are, essentially, the largest and most powerful business are actually Entities, consisting of Shareholders, a Board, Directors/Managers and employees. Because these huge powerful corporations are beholden to their investors, the board directs its management to employ bean counters and will lower the bottom line, *regardless*. And it is *regardless* because, in the cut throat nature of business, any possible slight advantage over a competitor must be pursued. This often results in squeezing the employees, squeezing the environment, and thus squeezing society as a whole.
Make no mistake, I am not against business, profits, or any such thing. I actually run my own business. However, when shareholders enter the picture, things change. Appeasing shareholders become the end-all of the company, instead of profits flowing back the employees that make it (essentially, a pyramid scheme). Add to that the massive size and power, these large corporations have the potential, in a heartbeat, to either uplift or drag down humanity. Due to their "bean-counting" nature, it's generally the latter.... at least without some form of regulation to prevent it. (Think 50 to 100 years ago... our cities would be worse than Beijing if pollution ordinances never went into effect. I live in North Country, and back in those days, the snow was black, not white.)
On the other hand, in my business, I know my actions directly effect my employees, my environment, and myself, and thus I make balanced choices that will benefit them all. I'm not tied to some nameless "shareholder" that demands I make profits increase by squeezing anywhere I can. Not as efficient? Maybe. Better quality product, service and employees? You betcha! And I sleep well at night knowing I am successful because I have helped others become successful.