All Posts in Office Politics

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

I’ve just made the transition from renting to owning. Someday I’ll understand why the Constitution of the United States, which describes our entire system of government, has so many fewer pages than the papers I signed at the closing.

Obtaining a mortgage was bad enough — while mortgage companies understand YUPPIES (Young Urban Professionals) and DINKS (Dual Income, No Kids), they don’t understand how a SITHY such as myself (Single Income, Two Households) could manage to pay a monthly mortgage lower than the rent I’d been paying all along.

Compared to everything involved in moving from one place to another, the mortgage was the easy part. Getting the new place to my liking, transferring my utilities, sending out change of address information to everyone who might care, and especially unpacking (unable to cope, I paid a moving company to do as much as possible) … there’s nothing about this experience I enjoyed, except the result after it was over.

Employees who experience business change react the same way, except that often, the result of the change is no fun either. Their natural inclination is to resist it.

Heck, nearly everyone’s inclination is to resist change. Since in IS we’re in the change business, we need to be good at overcoming that resistance. This is an important subject, so this isn’t the last you’ll read about it in this space.

Everyone resists change. Those who do real work resist change, because “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and besides, I spent years mastering this job and now you’re making my skills irrelevant. Not only that, but the whole point of the change is increased productivity, and I’m not stupid — you’re going to downsize when you’re done.”

Managers resist change, because “We must have been doing something right all these years. Besides, right now I still understand the work because I was promoted from the ranks, but after you change it all my teams will know more about it than I will. Not only that, but part of every change is reorganization, and modern reorganizations ‘de-layer’ the company. De-layering leaves fewer management positions, so even if I do grab one of the remaining chairs when the music stops, I’ll have fewer opportunities for promotion than I have now.”

Executives resist change, too, because “I spent years getting to the exorbitant level of compensation I receive now, I’ve entirely forgotten how to do useful work, and the distance I can fall if the change makes me irrelevant is a heckuva lot longer than the distance I can climb if I survive it.”

How about the CEO? Surely this paragon of leadership will embrace the painful changes needed for the company to navigate the dangerous shoals of the future. “Sure, except that I only have five years until I retire, this change is going to be tremendously disruptive to our short-term profitability, and my compensation depends on how well our stock performs, so why should I go through this pain when it’s my successor who will experience the benefit? Besides, this may be the wrong change to make because the whole point about the future is that you can’t predict it.”

And then there’s you. Whatever position you hold in IS, what you really end up holding is the bag, because information technology isn’t just built into every modern business change — it’s the most visible part of it, and usually it’s the critical path. Succeed and employees blame you for the pain they experience. Fail to deliver the technology and your name is on the failure. Even when you deliver the technology, if employees resist the change your design must be the problem.

That’s OK, of course, because there’s nothing more fun than a software development death-march, so the joy of creation will make it all worthwhile.

And that’s the silver lining part. It gets worse, because you know every silver lining is accompanied by a nasty dark cloud. In this case the dark cloud is this: Companies that fail to change end up looking a lot like Amtrak in an age of airplanes, only without the subsidies — mostly irrelevant.

That means that when it comes to change you have only two choices: Hurt now, or hurt later.

Pick one.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Let’s play telephone. You know the game – it’s the one where each person at a party whispers a message in the ear of the next person, until the message has gone full circle. By the time the message returns to the original speaker, it’s completely distorted.

Only we’re going to play it the IS way. We’re going to have only two people in the room – a CEO and a CIO. And instead of whispering, they’ll speak in loud voices. Let’s listen in:

CEO: “We always seem to be one year away from achieving high value. The high cost of undelivered promises is a continuing and increasing problem.”

CIO, trying to repeat the CEO’s message verbatim: “IS isn’t very well aligned with the business and we need to do a better job of getting involved in setting the company’s strategic direction.”

The CEO quotation comes from quotes in a recent InfoWorld article reporting on a census conducted by the London School of Economics. The CIO quotation paraphrases conversations I’ve had with CIOs and articles I’ve read by various pundits describing what they think the big problems are with IS.

I guess we weren’t paying attention during all those seminars where they taught good listening skills.

Why do we keep getting this wrong? The answer, I’m afraid, is simple: Strategy is fun and easy. Done the usual way, it requires neither deep thought nor intellectual rigor. Not only that, it’s prestigious, and provides a wonderful boost for our egos: We’re involved in setting the company strategy!

Delivery, in contrast, is hard work.

Pick up the clue phone, folks. If you want to be involved in the fun stuff you have to earn the right. Do you know why the directors of manufacturing, customer service, accounting, and sales and marketing all get to play? Because manufacturing gets product out the door, sales and marketing gets it sold, customer service keeps ’em coming back for more, and accounting makes sure the bills are paid and taxes are kept as low as possible.

Meanwhile, IS projects have a failure rate worse than the Cubs’ infamous shortstop, André “Double-play” Rogers (so-called because when he batted with a man on first, you could count on his hitting a grounder to the second baseman). With projects of any size, we bat about .100 – about 10 percent get done with some semblance of success.

In the data center, our servers go up and down like yo-yos. Sometimes it’s deliberate, too – I know of some data centers that still take down servers in the middle of the business day because that’s a more convenient time to do it … for the data center staff. Sometimes servers crash a lot because the data center manager expects servers to be unreliable. Trying to make an NT (or Novell, or whatever) server reliable, to these mainframe jockeys, has about as much point as Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills.

Never mind that lots of data centers run reliable NT environments (hint: reboot the server every Sunday night) – these fossils subconsciously want the servers to crash, because that will justify their dislike of the new technology.

Then there’s the Help Desk. Many CIOs staff it with the lowest-paid, most poorly trained people in IS, and use it largely as a dispatch center. Then they complain when end-users try to bypass it. Run an actual information center, staffed with experts in PC applications who actually enjoy helping end-users succeed?

Bring up that sorry subject and you’ll hear the same explanation you’ll hear when you ask for a raise: “It isn’t in the budget.” What a sorry excuse that is, too – if you want to be the CIO, you’d better learn how to justify important expenditures, even those whose benefits are hard to quantify.

The funny thing is, CEOs aren’t complaining about lack of quantifiable return on investment. That’s our hang-up.

The CEOs are complaining about broken promises and simple bad management.

Want to be involved in your company’s strategic planning?

If you want to get picked for the All Stars, first you have to succeed at the fundamentals.

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