8 Reasons You Should LOVE IT =)

Posted by Susan Cramm on June 5, 2008 4:58 PM

The last blog discussed why we all hate dealing with IT – not the people, of course, but the crazy system that results in the IT paradox of spending too much to create too little, too late. No doubt the current operating model is ripe for an overhaul. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future. We can’t undo all we’ve built overnight, and even if we could, we dont’ have a new system yet. To borrow from a great CSN&Y song, we have to “love the one we’re with.”

Most of what we hate about IT is based in the unpleasant reality that the system is designed to protect ourselves from ourselves. It delivers complex IT services to a relatively unsophisticated and demanding “customer” who expects IT to serve their individual needs without regard for the benefit and risks to the enterprise. They say “Make it work for me now!” and we have to build around that.

Building around that customer creates all kinds of negative effects. It depletes cash, perpetuates information silos, fragments processes. Sometimes it even causes laws to be broken. (See Sarbanes-Oxley and its causes).

I anticipate some of you don’t buy this and think I’m being over the top. For the doubters, check out this research about how the narrow pursuit of IT-business alignment negatively impacts business performance.

But too often we confuse hating the system with the people who work in it. We should love the people in IT who are doing their best to make the best of a bad situation. Let’s look at the 8 Things We Hate About IT from my last post from the perspective of IT. Here’s why they deserve love, along with a little insight into what they think about you:

We can hate the…	But we have to love that IT…
1. Limited Authority	Creates governance that allocates resources to reasonably balance value and risk. Ensures systems are designed and delivered in a way that promotes usability, integration, reliability, and compliance.
2. Missing Adult Supervision	Dedicates senior managers to strengthen relationships with lines of business and help make better IT decisions.
3. Financial Extortion	Bears the brunt of defending the ongoing costs of IT-enabled investments in spite of the fact that corporate management isn’t held accountable for deriving value to pay for these costs.
4. Projects Never End	Tackles difficult projects and figures out how to (ultimately) deliver (most of them) without adequate resources and involvement from the other parts of the business.
5. Helpless Help Desks	Provides OTJ training to an ungrateful user community even though much of this tedious work could be eliminated if they mastered the basics of the systems that support their business.
6. Outsourcers Who Run Amok	Fights hard against unnecessary outsourcing – many times to the point of putting their careers at risk.
7. Out of Date Geeks	Works long hours supporting old technologies that the company can’t afford to upgrade.
8. Absence of Good News	Increases shareholder value for those organizations who manage it well.

Many in IT understand that current practices will cause the current IT system to collapse under the weight of future complexities (poignantly articulated by the question posed in Tim Gray’s comment to the last blog post, “What if this is as good as it gets?”). They also know that the key to a better future is to dramatically increase corporate management’s IT IQ (thanks to Vaidya Nathan for sharing his story and posing these questions, “Don’t you think it is a bigger risk that something so important to you is opaque to you, both at knowledge level and management level?” and “Don’t you think you need to take concrete steps to reduce the opacity?”)

The challenge in front of us is to create a future where the capacity to innovate isn’t limited by the size or shape of the IT organization. Next time, we’ll address the question, “If we could build a new IT operating model from scratch, what would it look like?”

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/cramm/2008/06/8-reasons-you-should-love-it.html

Does Playing Golf Help your IT Career?

The survey says…………………………………NO!!  But it obviously cannot hurt.  So if you enjoy golf go for it!! But if you don’t really like it and you stink, don’t stress and network and build relationships other ways!! There is always blogging, social networking community sites and many, many other things….

According to our survey results, playing golf with business peers and corporate partners isn’t as critical a career-enhancing and networking activity that everyone once thought it was — especially for those in IT.

By Thomas Wailgum

June 20, 2008 — CIO — Conventional business wisdom has long held that to succeed in the corporate world, to win friends in the ranks of senior management and to show you can interact with co-workers and customers alike, you should take up the game of golf.

But that’s not the case in 2008. According to the “CIO Magazine Golf Networking Survey,” not everyone is convinced of the relationship-building, networkingand career-advancement power of the game of golf. The results are from an online survey of 394 IT industry professionals who identified themselves as golfers (48 percent), non-golfers (34 percent) or those considering taking up the sport (18 percent). (A wide range of industries and company sizes were represented by the respondents, who took the survey via CIO.com in May 2008.)

Overall, opinions from the respondents were split on whether playing golf had actually helped them professionally: 55 percent said that the game of golf had helped their careers; 45 percent said golf had not helped them.

For years, many in corporate America have claimed that the golf course is “where business gets done.” Donald Trump once said, “I have done many deals on the golf course.” (Occasionally, though, 18 holes can’t create M&A nirvana: Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang’s May 2008 round of golf could not seal the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.)

But according to our data, many IT industry professionals have no qualms about saying “no thanks” to the boss’s invitation to the country club or a day out on links on a vendor’s dime. To some of our respondents, there are plenty of networking opportunities on Internet-based social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook—and you don’t have to leave the office. Plus stringent post-Enron corporate practices that frown on schmoozing and gift-giving may have had an effect on vendor- and partner-sponsored golf junkets. (See “Mastering the Secret Etiquette of Golf” for a look at the written and unwritten rules of the game that all executives need to know.)

Your IT Budget: When Cutting Costs, Look to the Future

Another good article from CIO.com…

If your IT budget must be cut, make sure you preserve your organization’s muscle by retaining key positions and consulting with business users about project priorities.

By Laurie M. Orlov

June 10, 2008 — CIO — The economic slump has generated pain all around. If it hasn’t kicked in for your organization, at some point it will. As we swing into the second half of the year, CIOs are scanning for opportunities to prune expenses. For those who anticipate being asked to cut their IT budgets between now and the end of the year, it’s a good time to reflect on our past behavior.

The last time the economy soured, CIOs responded as if the sky were falling. In the ensuing panic, many CIOs cut too much of the wrong things. This time, you need to plan ahead to preserve your organization’s ability to grow again when needed.

Then: The Destruction of IT Competency

Think back to the dotcom boom. Remember the Y2K spending hangovers, bloated organizations and data centers everywhere crowded with redundant equipment? IT shops amassed unused software and stacks of yet-to-be-read service and maintenance contracts. Pioneering infrastructure outsourcing deals designed to “save money” were launched with nary a baseline cost analysis. Travel was unconstrained, and everyone’s stock was up.

When the bubble burst, IT organizations were sitting ducks. Spending was justifiably slashed—but without contingencies and little strategic thought about what would happen once growth began again. Vendors went out of business, venture capitalists stopped funding new ideas and IT R&D teams were disbanded—putting a damper on innovation. Meanwhile, service levels often plunged and enterprise know-how was pushed out the door without warning, as Just-Do-It outsourcing accelerated.

Finally, as a nasty side effect, IT lost its charm as a career for young people just as the average age in many organizations began to climb. In one large defense industry IT organization I am familiar with, the average of IT employees is older than 50. In a large manufacturing company, only the senior IT staffers are employees; instead, IT careers with the company must be launched and developed inside supplier organizations.

Now: Preserve the Future of IT

In this next wave of cutbacks, we can do better—now that we are armed with experience and hindsight. We know which cuts we made last time—like eliminating investment in R&D—weakened IT’s ability to respond when business picked up and CIOs were expected to contribute to innovation.

Let’s assume your organization is doing all the right stuff —consolidating servers, data centers, vendor licenses and maintenance agreements; deferring new purchases and outsourcing commodity services under contracts that really do save money.

Let’s also assume that you’ve offered early-retirement incentives for employees who are eligible, that you’ve terminated any contractor roles you can live without and that you’ve deferred filling vacant staff openings. You know that you’re doing all the right tactical things. So what shouldn’t you cut and where else should you look?

1. Protect hard-to-fill roles. Architects, database administrators, relationship managers, security specialists and business analysts: It took you a long time to find them—and even longer for them to understand your tech environment, business constituents and enterprise strategies. How much time has it taken them to identify those investments your company sorely needs but no business leader or steering committee has thought to request? These folks know what’s needed next year and beyond, though their value isn’t always obvious to the CFO.

Make the case for keeping them around by clarifying what will happen if you don’t retain their skills in-house. Without that architect, future M&A synergies may take forever to crystallize. Without a really senior person acting as a demand manager, helping business units prioritize projects, those business units may get from IT just what they asked for—but not what they need. If the IT budget is a top target for cuts, maybe, as a last resort, you can shift business analysts and demand managers (though probably not the architects) to more flexible business budgets.

2. Bring on the interns. Interns are inexpensive. And one way or the other, young people represent the future of your business, your IT organization and the IT industry. Even if they don’t join your company full-time, interns who work for you will end up referring new employees, customers, vendors and service providers.

To tap into the supply of interns, cultivate a relationship with business and technical faculty at your local college. Each semester, bring one of their top students on board to learn your business, soliciting their observations and ideas. You may find talent you can’t do without (if you don’t, you should help the faculty shape a program that does deliver what your business demands). Keep in touch with your interns, and when they graduate, help them find jobs in your firm or with a peer at another company.

Meanwhile, take advantage of this year’s crop of graduates. As the economy softens, they’re finding it tough to line up jobs. Persuade your boss to let you hire a few of the brightest before they give up and enroll in business school. It’s better for them to gain a few years of work experience from your organization as context for an MBA—and better for you to be able to cultivate a future with them so they return to you after they get that graduate degree.

3. Solicit ideas from your staff and peers. Your staff knows what’s really going on in the nether reaches of the firm: which organizations struggle under laborious processes, which business units are hugging their tiny data centers to their chests, or how teleconferences could replace costly (and often miserable) travel. Collect the ideas using an online tool, such as a wiki or discussion forum, so you can save, share and respond to their ideas.

Tap ideas from your business constituents, too. They know in their hearts what they truly need now and what can be put off until the next quarter or next year. Ask their advice on how you can help them sustain the company while saving money. Once these conversations begin, you and your staff can suggest ways to ways to save space, energy, time, maintenance, devices and even paper. While you’re with them, take the opportunity also to answer their questions about IT spending that they may not understand.

Why You’ll Succeed

You’re probably wondering whether this approach can work if IT is such a compelling cost-reduction target. I think it can because this time around, CIOs are better communicators. They’ve had to be to recover from the last round of cutbacks.

CIOs today know how to make a business case, and how to explain IT’s impact on profit and revenue. Today’s IT executive is also experienced at explaining the value of strategic IT positions as well as the need for low-cost, high-potential new hires. He or she is well-positioned and skilled enough to listen to staff and business peers. CIOs who lived through the last poorly managed slashing and burning of IT are wiser about shaping the future that their organization needs.

Any questions regarding cutting costs during procurement contract Hybrid Consulting Group.