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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Mark Twain missed the big one.

As he pointed out, lies, damned lies and statistics can certainly give people the wrong impression. But if you really want to convince someone that up is down, they’re flimsy tools compared to the really big deceiver: Surveys.

I’m not talking about the well-understood practice of asking biased questions, like Burger King’s famous, “Would you prefer to eat a delicious hamburger, cooked from a quarter pound of fresh ground beef on an open flame, or a disgusting, greasy, fried, hockey-puck-like mess?” (I might have the exact phrasing wrong — I’m working from memory) that led to its not-very-effective “The Whopper beat the Big Mac” ad campaign some years back.

Sure, it’s a useful technique. It’s simply second-rate compared to one exemplified by a recent Gartner survey, reported in the January 14th issue of Processor magazine in an article titled, “The End of the IT Department as We Know It.”

The survey asked the popular question, “What’s your biggest frustration — something you’re supposed to accomplish but don’t, or something someone else is supposed to accomplish but doesn’t?”

The exact phrasing was a bit different. Gartner asked corporate executives to identify what gets in the way of strategic change in their companies, and IT failures beat out changing the culture. Since the culture changers are themselves and IT is someone else, the response is less than surprising.

Perception, of course, is reality, so you need to pay attention to this, especially since Gartner sells the perception to the executives with whom you work, also sells its solution, and, unlike you, has a paid sales force and PR machine. According to the article (and to be fair, it’s possible Gartner’s actual findings had fewer logical holes than the article that presented them) what’s going to happen is:

New technologies, that deliver pre-packaged workflows to businesses, and let businesspeople reconnect the process flows by manipulating visual tools and pushing a button (Ta-Da!!!) will fundamentally change the responsibilities of IT departments.

Since today most IT organizations spend the bulk of their budgets on operations and applications, something fundamental needs to change. Mix in outsourcing and the end of IT is at hand.

Oh, and the career solution for technical professionals? Get an MBA.

Let’s deconstruct this, shall we? First of all, suggesting that IT should spend most of its budget on something other than applications and operations is a bit like suggesting that Toyota should spend most of its budget on something other than designing and manufacturing cars. Applications are what people use to do their work. What, other than running the applications you have while enhancing them and delivering new ones, are you supposed to be doing? Raising chickens?

Second, workflow tools (just another class of application, by the way) don’t automate work. They automate the process of assigning work. Once the work arrives at employees’ desks, they still need business applications to help them do it.

Maybe the point is that businesses will start to view internal processes as commodities. Instead of figuring out how you want to run your business, you’ll just buy best-practice processes off-the-shelf, pre-automated and pre-integrated, with no work required from IT other than to install them and no work required from anyone else other than training the end-users.

Yeah, that’ll work. Your COO will buy Wal-Mart’s supply chain processes, Nordstrom’s customer relationship management, Amazon.com’s e-commerce, and Dell’s build-to-order. Voila! Like magic, out will come a lean, mean, fighting medical-devices, cosmetics, or maybe janitorial services machine.

There’s an old saying in the consulting business: It looks great on the PowerPoint.

So here’s some advice you might find a bit more practical regarding how to keep the joint running, from your old keep the joint runner:

Keep on spending most of your budget on operations and applications. Shift as much out of operations as you can every year — but only what you can shift through improved efficiency and not a penny more.

Spend as much as you can on applications — not just coding, of course, but all the associated disciplines that spell the difference between code that runs and successful business change.

And most important of all, pay attention to the “biggest frustration” that started this chunk of rant ‘n roll. Many IT organizations still haven’t mastered the fundamental discipline of managing projects to successful conclusion.

If you haven’t, perception really is reality, and while your IT department might not go away, you probably will. Soon.

And not under your own steam.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

It’s okay to lead.

I mean it. Go ahead. It’s okay.

I’ve run into a number of otherwise capable, knowledgeable, smart, visionary strategic thinkers in this business who would be fine IT executives save for one minor deficit: Somewhere along the line, they learned the opposite: That leading people isn’t okay.

Ignore all the fancy words you’ve read over the years about what it means to be a leader. In the end, there’s just one measure of leadership: Whether anyone is following. If they are, you’re leading. Otherwise, you’re doing something else.

These managers know what should happen, but aren’t willing to insist that it happen. They’re willing to be right, but aren’t willing to exhibit the behavior necessary to turn their rightness into a business change. Ask them why and you get a variety of answers, most of which boil down to one of just two major themes.

The first is a lack of courage. Some managers worry that if they take the actions necessary to make sure the changes they envision turn into reality, some people won’t like them; the ideas might prove to have unanticipated consequences; or the program is politically risky, and if it doesn’t work out well, the likely outcome is to be shown the door.

These aren’t small things, and I don’t want to pretend they are. While deciding on inaction because someone might not like you or your alternative has a certain cravenness to it, wise leaders do avoid alienating those they lead unnecessarily. And they take the risks of unanticipated consequences or personal unemployment into account in their decision-making. They don’t avoid a decision because of fear, but do make wise decisions that take all foreseeable consequences into account.

Which is to say, wise leaders are willing to be bold, and to make unpopular decisions. They aren’t however, willing to be Don Quixote, fighting unwinnable battles because the nobility of the effort alone makes them worthwhile.

Other managers aren’t so much afraid to lead as they are concerned that doing so is, at some fundamental level, immoral. By not allowing people to say no, you’re forcing them to do something they don’t want to under duress. And that’s a wrong thing to do.

Which is to say that somewhere along the line, the most basic attribute of leadership — the exercise of authority — got a bad name.

It’s hard to say exactly how this happened. One possibility is that it’s because too many leaders abused their authority for too many years, mistaking authoritarian decision-making for the proper use of authority. Some management theorists, missing the point, concluded the problem was the exercise of authority itself rather than overuse of the least useful way to make decisions.

Another possibility is that it’s the result of conflating public and private sector governance. Empowerment is, after all, an assumption in American society.

In the United States, we reject the whole notion of royalty, insisting that governments are only legitimate with the consent of the governed. That’s public governance. Citizens are naturally empowered; we delegate authority to our government to prevent collisions among those naturally empowered citizens. We aren’t supposed to consider elected officials to be better than we are. We’re supposed to consider them public servants, not aristocrats.

So maybe business managers worry that if they exert their authority they’re somehow being un-American, acting like they think they’re better than anyone else.

Or maybe we should blame Scott Adams for making too many managers worry if they’re turning into a pointy-haired boss.

The etiologies of public and corporate governance are opposites. Citizens delegate authority to their government; business owners delegate authority to their employees. The difference is just one reason among many that the whole notion of “running government like a business” is dangerous (and quite different from the entirely sensible notion of running government in a businesslike way).

The delegation of authority and responsibility is quite different from the abdication of authority and the disenfranchisement of leadership. Sadly, many managers bought into this strange notion that any use of authority makes them bad people, and worse, arrogant people who must think they’re part of the business aristocracy and therefore morally inferior to others with a more egalitarian mindset.

If you’re one of them, stop worrying. You’re allowed to make decisions. Heck, making sure important decisions get made is part of the job description, as is making sure they’re acted on.

Not everyone will like them; not everyone will automatically accept them unless you insist on it. Stop worrying about that.

It’s okay to lead.

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