It appeared in Forbes, it was about how to run IT better, and it was fatuously patronizing.
For a change of pace, it didn’t come from superficially informed business pundits who assume their general-purpose insights qualify them to offer up brilliant ideas for us we’d otherwise never have thought of.
The article (called to my attention by Bruce Gutzmann — thanks!), was titled, “The Convergence Of IT And Business,” (Taylor Buley, 11/19/2009) and suggests, “There’s a new role for IT workers: business consultant.”
Who, you might ask, is so out of touch they think this is a new idea? It was a panel consisting of executives from Microsoft, VMWare, Hewlett-Packard, and other “major technology companies.”
Shortly after providing this important insight the panelists announced the invention of the abacus.
Here’s a sample quote, from Ramin Sayar, a vice president in the software and solutions division at HP. It describes a “new role” in IT: The business relationship manager, who, surprisingly enough, manages business relationships, both internal and external.
“This business relationship manager,” he explained, “usually has a non-technical background. They have a business background. They have a consulting background. They have a financial background. They’re looking at how much it costs to run a service or an application.”
Now let me get this straight: An executive from a major technology vendor suggests the right person to put in charge of technology vendor relationships is someone who doesn’t know how to evaluate solutions and applications in terms of their technical excellence.
Hmmm. Ulterior motive, anyone?
Not that I blame HP for suggesting this. As the proud owners of what used to be EDS, it’s in HP’s best interest to keep IT executives with strong technical chops as far away as possible from contract negotiations and ongoing management of the vendor relationship.
KJR’s readers know, of course, that IT solved this problem a long time ago … so long ago we were called “EDP” (electronic data processing) at the time. EDP departments had someone titled “Operations Manager.” This individual knew how to run the data center, read and negotiate contracts, perform a lease/buy analysis, maintain a healthy relationship with every EDP vendor, and spot marketing bushwah a mile away without even needing binoculars.
Our smaller clients still handle things this way, unless the CIO handles vendor relationships personally. Some of the larger ones establish an IT business office to handle vendor relationships, coordinate with HR and accounting, oversee IT budget planning, and otherwise take care of the administrivia necessary to support IT’s overall organizational effectiveness.
Here’s a dirty secret of the world of IT services: For decades, the top-producing sales reps all knew to bypass the technology chain of command, selling past the people who understood the subject to the business executives who, the sales reps assured them, understood what really mattered.
Unlike those tunnel-visioned technologists who don’t understand “the business.” It’s a tactic that proved quite effective in selling services such as IT outsourcing.
This isn’t, by the way, an ethical lapse on the part of the sales representatives. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do.
The judgment of the business executives who fall for this tripe is a different matter. Having consulted with a lot of IT departments, many of which have seriously needed to improve their performance, I’m confident in reporting that failing to understand the business or to know how to work with vendors are only rarely root causes of IT’s problems. Heck, they’re seldom even symptoms.
Quite the opposite: Because IT is the only place in the entire enterprise that knowledge of how every part of the business operates and wants to operate comes together … generally in the form of competing priorities someone has to reconcile … IT business analysts, managers, and executives generally know more about how the business really works than anyone else.
The missing piece is, sad to say, what the code words “know the business” really mean.
The most effective IT leaders have at least a few engineering base pairs in their DNA. Engineers tend to think in terms of mechanisms, and generally figure documentation means something.
That means they’re likely to ignore the most important factor in business decision-making. It isn’t the documented process, published evaluation criterion, or official methodology. It’s their personal relationships, and the trust they create. The kind of trust that leads a CEO, faced with an IT services sales rep who explains why technologists should be excluded from technology decision-making, to deliver the proper response:
“Get lost.”
Bob,
I think as a corrallary to this is the fact that nowadays a lot of IT organizations have cut out the vendor altogther and build solutions based on open source components.
Its really hard (although I’ve seen them try) for the business folks to dismiss solutions that can be had for free.
I disagree when you say that salespeople misrepresenting a situation to non-technical execs isn’t an ethical lapse. It may be a salesperson’s job to sell but it is unethical to lie. But sadly too many execs want to be told what they want to hear (which ultimately ends up costing them a lot more than they should be paying) and salespeople are happy to profit from that. Engineers just tell them inconvenient truths.
I didn’t say they misrepresented the solution. I said their advice on who to involve in the decision was tilted to their advantage.
It has occured to me more than once that the quickest (or surest) way to kill a strong company, is to put under the control of a “Bean counter”. Look at GM under R.Smith!
Most people who rise to the top have very limited knowledge/interest in the business components outside of their personal experience.
As a ‘techie’ who got into just about every aspect of GM one way or another, and several other businesses, I can only sadly shake my head at the myoptic decisions I’ve seen made by those in power with limited knowledge and understanding of the basics of their company.
IT / EDP / DP, for all its faults, forces one to understand the underlying processes in order to work with them. A ‘generalist’, who surrounds themselves with expert ‘specialists’, would blow these MBA Wizzards out of the water. Unfortunately, unless they are the founder, they rarely get the chance.
The other way way to quickly kill a strong company is to put sales guy at the top. Case in point: Microsoft. Steve Ballmer may understand sales, but he seems not to understand the technology they produce, nor the process by which new products are developed.
Pingback: Email List Management – 4 Rules Of Thumb
Interesting topic as HP just announce layoff of 9,000 skilled people
A masterpiece of understatement. Similar situation: keeping the VP Marketing and Sales out of the meetings to raise new capital investment.
As a career technologist (systems engineer) at a large company, who recently lost his job in an IT restructuring initiative (Outsourcing, mostly offshore, plus the creation of a large BRM group), I have to wonder who’s left in these arrangements to look at the big picture from a technology perspective? If the only thing that matters to the business is contract management and SLA’s, isn’t that akin to saying you don’t care what’s under the hood of the car you drive as long as it runs most of the time and you get a free loaner and a hug when it breaks? Oh well, time to pursue excellence elsewhere…
Bob really hit the nail on the head this time. It is a great summation of the problems that seem to be endemic to our current business culture. I’ve always thought that an IT person who had worked on a variety of projects for various areas of the company would be highly qualified to, if not run the company, at least sit at the right hand of the person who does. But the MBAs and glad handers would never let that happen. Something to do with emperors and their clothes, I believe.
This is one of the few times I felt Bob was a bit ‘off’ – there is as much risk in leaving things in the hands of the technical people, as there is in leaving it in the hands of business folks. BOTH need to be in the room, and talking to each other, not just the sales person. The techies need to understand what issues the business is trying to solve (and what level of risk they are willing to tolerate) and the business folks need to listen to the techies about their concerns. This means both parties need to communicate in ways the other understands, and not resort to hyperbole. [Given some of the emails coming out re: BP, it sounds like their ‘bean counters’ didn’t listen to the techies…]