Bad ideas that refuse to die!

Dear Bob …

Yesterday I saw a headline about how the IT Department would disappear, which I thought meant IT people would be inside other departments, but the content actually implied the IT Department would simply be renamed to something like Business Support. These ideas have been tossed around before. I’d like to know what your current perspective is about that.

Thanks,

Barbara

Dear Bob …

We are [Vendor’s Name] customers, and we’re pretty happy with them. But I just got a piece of their marketing fluff, offering webinars on their “top three resolutions for IT in 2015,” which are to (1) “Get out of the data center business” (they’re in the data center outsourcing business); (2) “Become a service provider to the business”; and (3) “Modernize your people, process, and technology.”

These three resolutions are all bothersome to me, but the become-a-service-provider-to-the-business one is just a rebirth of the old “treat the business as a customer” canard. I’m guessing the webinar will urge us to set SLAs, at which point I would just lose the ability to speak rationally, so I’ll be skipping these.

I thought this outbreak of sloppy thinking by a major IT player, revealing its profound misapprehension of what it and its own customers should be doing, might be of interest.

Personally, I’m disappointed that these resolutions were thought up by anyone with more than a couple of months in the industry. I feel like Ted Cassidy as Lurch, quietly growling in disapproval of something done by a stupid guest.

Thanks for listening,

John

Barbara, John, and everyone else who subscribes to KJR …

I trust you aren’t actually surprised at the near-infinite supply of shallow thinking available from those who should know better. As the National Lampoon said so long ago, “Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet.”

And so …

Re-naming IT as “Business Support” mistakes the part for the whole, as does the whole internal-customer refrain.

Yes, of course. Supporting the business is an important part of IT’s responsibilities. Also, this name change would let IT invade HR’s, Marketing’s, and Accounting’s turf. So for an empire-building CIO, once the CEO approved IT’s new name, every department that “supports the business” would be folded into IT.

Or, the CIO could simply ask for a promotion to the title of Chief Administrative Officer, to which these other departments would now report.

Either way, the CEO might reasonably respond that not only isn’t IT providing technology leadership to the business, it isn’t even collaborating as a peer to help business managers and executives figure out the best ways to use technology so as to make the business maximally effective.

All it’s providing is “business support,” which means waiting for the phone to ring to find out what information technology the caller wants, and then more often than not saying no.

Why should the CEO provide a more expansive domain for which the CIO can fail to provide leadership?

As for the vendor’s other proposed resolutions …

While this is probably too obvious to need pointing out, getting out of the data center business is sometimes a good choice. And sometimes it isn’t. Change the resolution to “Determine whether you should stay in the data center business,” and I’m on board.

See, once a business has invested in a well-engineered facility it’s set a trajectory. Unless it can reclaim at least some of its investment, and unless it has a use for all that freed-up space once it gets out of the data-center business, the business case often falls apart even for a business that would outsource its data center if it was starting out fresh.

As for modernizing IT’s people, processes, and technology, I’d think the first of the three would give the head of HR a heart attack. Even though it actually means investing in education (I hope!) it sure sounds like a suggestion to fire your codgers and hire young whippersnappers willing to work for a lot less.

Lots of companies do this, of course. But relatively few are stupid enough to make a neon sign out of it.