If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: IT generally shouldn’t run itself as a business that sells to its internal customers. It should, instead, act as an active, integral part of the organization, collaborating with everyone else to create value for Real Paying Customers.
Something else I’ve often recommend: Don’t think of yourself as an employee. Think of yourself as the business named You. Your employer is your customer, to whom you’re selling your valuable services.
Isn’t there just a tiny bit of contradiction between these two positions?
Sure looks that way. But there isn’t, for two reasons.
Here’s the first: Your employer can get rid of you. Your employer can’t get rid of its IT department.
The decision-makers might think they can, through the miracle of outsourcing (of which “The Cloud” is one form among many). But that’s a mirage. Companies that outsource IT aren’t doing without it. They’ve merely replaced their relationship with a CIO with a relationship with an account manager, whose loyalty is to the outsourcer and whose marching orders are to grow the account.
There are valid reasons for outsourcing IT, although not the one you usually hear. “Keep the core and outsource the rest” might look great on the PowerPoints, but it doesn’t hold any actual water.
Outsource to share access to expensive expertise you don’t need often enough to hire an employee? Sure. To gain economies of scale? Absolutely. Outsource so IT becomes Someone Else’s Problem? Don’t be ridiculous. It’s still the company’s problem, only now there’s a legally binding contract in place. Think that enhances flexibility?
Me neither.
Companies can’t get rid of their IT function. They can, on the other hand, get rid of you. That makes a big difference in how you as an employee and the CIO as head of a business function should think about your separate relationships with your employer, even if you are the CIO.
That’s one reason you and IT departments need to follow different relationship strategies.
Here’s another: The CIO can influence how the rest of the company thinks about their relationship with the IT organization. You can’t influence the company’s employment philosophy.
When business executives figure they’re IT’s internal customers, there’s a good chance this is an attitude inflicted on the current CIO by a past CIO, who in turn had been told this was the most advanced thinking in business by … well, let’s not get into that. Blame is pointless exercise, no matter how enjoyable.
As I was saying, since a past CIO was the one who persuaded everyone outside IT that they should think of themselves as internal customers, there’s no reason the current CIO can’t persuade them to change their thinking to a more enlightened alternative.
You as an employee? Speaking of enlightened, there still are business leaders who consider employees to be integrated members of the corporate community. They recognize that fully engaged employees, who understand the company’s history, values, strategy, culture and folklore and are committed to its success are more likely to cause that success than any other source of labor.
These enlightened business leaders are still out there, but they aren’t in the forefront of modern business thinking, and probably aren’t in the majority. Modern sourcing strategies consider employees to be just another form of contract labor, albeit a form that’s more expensive than the alternatives, and harder to get rid of when they become inconvenient.
As an employee, you aren’t in a position to influence how executives and managers think about such things. Your choice is how best to respond.
And if, as is likely, they consider employees to be sacks o’ skills, providers of effort, interchangeable parts and nothing more than that (and the larger the company you work for, the more likely it is that this thinking dominates), then that’s the game you’re playing.
You have two choices. You can either learn the rules of the game and the strategies and tactics that help you win it.
Or you can operate based on how you think the world ought to be organized, whether or not that’s how things really are. You can do this. It won’t work very well; you’ll be disappointed quite often; and you’ll complain bitterly every time the world lets you down.
But you don’t have to play your employer’s game. You don’t have to accept the way gravity pulls either.
Nevertheless, when you trip, the direction you’ll fall will still be called “down.”
You are so … correct! When I worked at Arthur D. Little, Inc. it was popular to refer to hired personnel as “resources.” Their management consulting was based on the philosophy that all resources are “fungible.” This makes corporate re-structuring much easier. I was amazed that major companies actually bought into this crap. The result was ALWAYS that the top talent walked out the door – sometimes fired/laid-off, but mostly by resignation for a job at a better company. ADL was wrong, and their clients eventually found out when they found that there wasn’t anyone left who knew how to run the store. ADL also found out when they could no longer sell new business and they themselves failed. People at any level are NOT fungible – each person is an individual and left to their own devices, and with good management, can excel.
Bob,
Long time listener … First time caller, etc., etc. 🙂
Your column reminds me of 2 things from the Staff Officer portions of my Coast Guard Career:
1) An old and everlasting problem in military organizations: When support units forget that their job is to support operational units, and not vice versa, the operational units will always find a way around the support units.
2) On my 2nd tour as a Staff Officer in the 90s, I met up with my old, E-6 Yeoman who was now an Commissioned Warrant Officer. He asked me if I had noticed what had changed since we had served together a decade before. When I asked what he was talking about, he remarked that in our first tour together, a decade before, Officers were sitting at their desks thinking great thoughts and doodling on pieces of paper while junior enlisted and civilian personnel were converting those thoughts and doodles into correspondence with IBM Selectric typewriters and filing the correspondence in carefully cataloged file cabinets. Practically speaking, these masters of the IBM Selectric were major choke points in our organizational efficiency. In our 2nd tour together, a decade later, those same Officers where now busy banging away on key boards and putting their thoughts directly into correspondence via the newly embraced word processor and spreadsheets, and filing the correspondence in data bases. The administrative support positions of the junior enlisted and civilian personnel had disappeared under the mantra of improving organizational efficiency (the military equivalent of profit in the private sector).
V/R
Tony
Your article on what’s a business is thought provoking. I’m interested in hearing more about how to react to this new kind of employer. I’m of the old school which believes the harder the work the more you get. Does the “new” employer still believe that too?
I checked out your career management section on your web site but did not find out much about the rules of the game – hopefully this means you’re going to talk more about those over the next few months.
Excellent thoughts, Bob, thanks! We’re IT specialists/generalists but your thought: “Don’t think of yourself as an employee. Think of yourself as the business named You. Your employer is your customer, to whom you’re selling your valuable services.” cuts across jobs, disciplines, and even personal relationships. It’s a lesson I’m trying to teach my son, an expert welder, and daughter, a new graduate looking for a ‘job’. A corollary to that thought is when our personal investment is too high or our return on that investment is too low, we should think seriously about finding a new “employer”. Sure is easy to say, however.
Another way that “employer is customer of employee” model would be more accurate than “business is customer of IT” is in whether the customer can be replaced.
While reading tech supplier periodicals over the years (CRN, VAR Business, etc.), there are occasionally articles about when it’s a good idea to “fire” customers (one/some/many), usually when the cost of keeping a customer happy is more than the revenue from the customer.
Similarly, if my employer isn’t what I want, or if the costs outway the benefits, then it’s time to (try to) find another, better employer. I don’t think the same can be said for most IT organizations; an IT department usually can’t shop for a better company/organization to be part of.
Just my $.02. Please keep up the good work with your articles, I enjoyed this one.
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David Strom
(not the writer)