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Why "Running IT As a Business" Is a Bad Idea
snydeq sends along a provocative piece from Infoworld, arguing that the conventional wisdom on how IT should be run is all wrong. "Bob Lewis dispels the familiar litany that 'IT should be run as a business,' instead offering insights into what he is calling a 'guerilla movement' to reject conventional 'IT wisdom' and industry punditry in favor of what experience tells you will work in real organizations. 'When IT is a business, selling to its "internal customers," its principal product is software that "meets requirements." This all but ensures a less-than-optimal solution, lack of business ownership, and poor acceptance of the results,' Lewis writes. 'The alternatives begin with a radically different model of the relationship between IT and the rest of the business — that IT must be integrated into the heart of the enterprise, and everyone in IT must collaborate as a peer with those in the business who need what they do.' To do otherwise is a sure sign of numbered days for IT, according to Lewis. After all, the standard 'run IT as a business' model had its origins in the IT outsourcing industry, 'which has a vested interest in encouraging internal IT to eliminate everything that makes it more attractive than outside service providers.'"
This concept will only work in an 'enlightened' company, ie one that IS IT. In a company that sells things or services, it's all based on how many beans you can count. If you have this completely integrated IT organization, how does the company keep the IT budget under control? Unless you segregate the work into it's own silo, and then yell it like those Burger King "Angry Whopper Onions", how will costs go down.
No one sees IT as a partner. We're not even a business unit in a company. We're a collection of desklamps and staplers. I've seen management boggled by the fact that a Windows SA doesn't know anything about tuning an Oracle database. "But you're IT!" I've seen very skilled people moved over into jobs they are not trained or qualified for, and then eventually let go because they didn't have the skills for the job.
I haven't seen many companies that don't down right object to the fact they have to pay for IT. They don't blink at ordering 1000 new business cards for all the sales people, but ask for a $50 piece of software and you might as well be Oliver asking for more pourage.
Outsourcing has just made it easier for them to do this. How are you going to have a strategic partner doing IT, when the IT person you are dealing with is loyal only to the contract you've signed with them and really could care less if the company is growing or not, as long as they get paid.
Yes, I'm bitter. I'd love to see the fantasy land where IT is cherished. Especially outside of an IT company. I haven't seen it.
On the other hand, how many users have I had where I go to their machine and they say they are having a "problem" connecting to the web, and they open up an IE window with 5 or more toolbars popping up?
How many users have I had that installed Weatherbug, or some other little widget, and then complained a couple weeks later when their machine was overrun by various spyware/scareware apps?
CutePDF, for instance, comes bundled with ASS ("Ask") TOOLBAR. Pain in the ass to remove. Nuisance in terms of security. If you don't know what you're doing when you install it, that crap gets dumped in along with it, then starts opening you up and phoning home as well.
"If it sounds too good to be true..."
Yeah. It's like that. Get yourself into a large enterprise and there are reasons to be cautious. Hell, there are reasons to be cautious at home on a 1-machine network.
Roger that! After working at few very large organizations, I finally called quit, waited for a good opportunity to come by (sat home, did one or two certification while waiting), and could not have been happier with a smaller company I work with now. Not only can I wear jeans and t-shirts, have flexible timing, I can also use Ubuntu or any other Linux distro as my desktop at work without worrying about standards, policies and all such fuck-ups.
And I get paid a little more.
Good for you. I recently left a large enterprise after 20+ years that had gone from being a fantastic creative place to a loathsome hole governed by policy nazis. Where I work now is still large but truly empowered and I no longer hate going into work each day. I grieve for my former co-workers who are managed by MBA's who think that aligning with the business will move them upstairs. It hasn't happened to anyone yet but they still hold on to their deluded dream.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
I am not saying that the skills learned in business school are useless. Only that claims that management is a completely transferrable skill independent of the specifics of the operations of any type of business are overblown.
I should also specify something more about the particular food plant that I am familiar with. The previous manager had worked his way up from the shop floor. He new the ins and outs of food manufacturing. He was familiar with how much maintenance was necessary on the machines, how much cleaning was necessary, how hard he could push the machinery and the workers. He was fair minded but firm. And when he ran the plant, operations ran smoothly and the company made lots of money. The plant gained a reputation for reliability and quality. But he didn't have an MBA, and so he was pushed out by upper management types with MBA's.
Fast forward to the new guy, an MBA manager who previously ran a train plant. He would sit up in his office staring at graphs. His method of management was basically to control money flows. He would cut money from sanitation, from quality control, from food safety testing. He would push the system to its limits, and several times the system broke, hurting the reputation of the company. To top it off, the company lost more money under his watch.
The business schools, to a certain extent, teach managers to cut themselves off from the details of operations, to abstract the operations of a company to a certain number of parameters. I am arguing that this is not a good methodology, and will not usually lead to an agile and innovative company.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)