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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Once upon a time there was a queen bee.

She enjoyed talking to her beekeeper, who, fortunately enough, enjoyed listening to her. She was fortunate, that is, because the beekeeper considered himself a poor conversationalist, and so was happy not to have to share the burden of finding interesting topics to talk about.

Queen Bee

And besides, there are lots of talking beekeepers around, but not so many talking bees, so he figured he’d take advantage of the opportunity while it lasted.

The beekeeper was in this way wise, but he wasn’t very bright. The evidence: The queen’s favorite topic was the land of milk and honey, and how she was going to lead the beekeeper there.

Finally the day came when the beekeeper couldn’t stand it anymore. “Let’s go!” he said to the queen, flushed with the enthusiasm that comes from a vision of a better tomorrow. “I don’t want to wait another day!”

So off they went to find the land of milk and honey.

Leaving behind a hive full of honey. And full of the worker bees who made the honey. Also all of the ingredients needed to make a new queen for the hive.

The moral of the story is, don’t be a queen bee CIO.

I ran across one of these characters not all that long ago. I had four one-hour conversations with him over the span of a couple of months. He was a visionary, talking in glowing terms about how the brilliant information technology he’d recently brought in and the new and even more brilliant information technology he was going to bring in soon that would transform the company.

Remarkably, in all of the time we spent together he never once mentioned anything about the department he “led,” what his plans for it were, where it needed to improve, or where it already excelled.

Unremarkably, nobody in the entire IT department could make a decision of any kind, with the possible exception of where to have lunch.

What causes an IT manager to become a queen bee? That’s for psychologists to diagnose, not workaday IT commentators. Or perhaps for budding ethologists. We could, I suppose, get them together to resurrect the pointless nature vs nurture debate, even though it was long ago resolved.

Bee it nature, nurture, or a combination of the two really doesn’t matter. A queen bee sits at the top of your IT hive, and you have to cope with her. Or him; unlike honey bee queens, both male and female CIOs can wear an apian crown.

So what you do if you report up to a queen bee CIO?

You could feed her/him royal jelly (pushing the metaphor to its limits, this of course means mastering the fine art of sucking up). This can work in the short term … queen bees do love hearing how brilliant they are … but it’s a bad habit to develop. Once this becomes your normal you’ll lose the habit of initiative and decisiveness that help you succeed in healthier environments.

And so you’ll find yourself seeking out queen bees to work for.

No thanks.

Then there’s the obvious solution: Leave. It’s the best general-purpose advice there is no matter which sort of bad manager you report to, because bad managers aren’t going to change — the attitudes and behavior that make them a bad manager are what, in their eyes, got them to where they are today.

So by all means, explore the world of opportunities that surrounds you.

But as you do, consider a different sort of departure.

As has been pointed out in this space from time to time, wise CIOs are starting to encourage what’s commonly called shadow IT — information technology that happens outside IT’s organizational boundaries.

Unwise CIOs still try to stomp it out, but fail.

Therein lies an opening you can exploit.

If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that your corporate beekeepers will soon tire of the queen bee CIO’s tales of milk and honey. They want their milk and honey right now.

And if IT can’t deliver it, well, maybe shadow IT can.

With your help.

You will, of course, need to tread cautiously. But there’s a good chance your company has a director or three who have the budget and don’t care about obeying the IT governance process that’s been stymying them as they try to turn their own visions into business reality.

You know IT. You know the business (you do, don’t you?).

With finesse, you can be the person who actually does make IT happen.

Not a bad place to be when the CEO kicks the queen bee CIO out of the hive.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

“Markets don’t fail. They always allocate goods and services perfectly,” a correspondent explained in response to last week’s column about market failure and how its sources might apply to IT shops that act as independent businesses selling to “internal customers.”

My correspondent’s position was, however, unassailable: Markets do always allocate goods and services perfectly, so long as your definition of “perfect” is “whatever allocations the marketplace delivers.”

With non-circular definitions, though, market failures are very real. Take my favorite example, covered in this space almost a decade ago:

The Dollar Auction

I auction off a dollar. There’s just one change to the usual high-bidder wins auction rules: The runner-up has to pay me his last bid too. So if the winning bid is a nickel and the runner up stopped at 4 cents, the winner would net 95 cents, I’d get 5+4=9 cents, and the runner up would be out 4 cents.

Except the runner up wouldn’t stop. He’d certainly bid 6 cents instead of losing the auction. And so on, and so on, until the high bid is a buck and the next highest is 99 cents. The second highest bidder now has to either bid $1.01 for my dollar — losing a penny on the deal — or stop, losing 99 cents. As losing a penny is better than losing 99 cents, there’s no end to the escalation.

Which, as I wrote in 2007, looks a lot like a politically high-stakes project that’s going off the rails. The sponsor can either throw good money after bad or cut her losses. But as each click of the throw-more-money-at-it ratchet looks to have a better ROI than losing everything invested thus far, and also avoids the political embarrassment of backing a loser, the train wreck continues into the indefinite future.

Customer Incongruence

The term “customer” involves three very different roles: Decision-maker (true customer), consumer, and wallet. When the same person fills all three roles, call it customer congruence, and market forces do what they’re supposed to do.

Customer incongruence (my term) happens when different people occupy the different customer roles, as when the family goes to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal. Be honest. It’s the kids who made the buying decision. Consumers? That’s the whole family. Mom or Dad are merely the wallet.

Healthcare provides another example of customer incongruence. The patient is the consumer, the insurance company is the wallet once co-pays and deductibles have been left behind. But who makes the buying decisions for your health care? For most of us it’s our doctor, who tells us what drugs to take and what surgeries to undergo.

That’s right: The seller of healthcare services holds the most important customer role: decision-maker. Which often leads to such inconveniences as buying a very expensive pharmaceutical solution when a relatively inexpensive alternative would be just as efficacious.

Which is not to suggest we should all prescribe our own treatments. Even with WebMD, few of us know enough. So while neither physicians nor IBM’s Watson are perfect diagnosticians, the alternative — self-diagnosing and self-prescribing patients — would result in a lot of unnecessarily dead people.

It’s a customer incongruity, which explains, at least in part, why the U.S. healthcare system is such a mess.

But IT organizations that act as a sellers to internal customers create customer incongruities that are just as challenging. The parallel with healthcare providers is, I hope, clear: Business executives and managers know where it hurts, but selecting or building IT solutions is complex enough to require professionals who know the field. They have the needed expertise.

As a result, to a very real extent, the IT organization acts as both seller and buyer of the company’s portfolio of information technologies.

The [partial] solution involves both formal governance and informal relationship management: Governance in the form of an IT Steering Committee or the equivalent — business managers who acquire enough expertise to oversee decisions about the company’s IT investments; relationship management in the form of the same trust-building you engage in with your doctor (and vice versa), and for the same reasons.

The better, admittedly partial solution is to not consider the rest of the business to be IT’s customer in the first place. It doesn’t do much for dollar-auction situations — what’s needed there is an executive culture that makes risk-taking safer by accepting that risk means some efforts must fail to pan out.

But customer incongruities go away when IT has no customers — when IT and everyone in the business collaborate to figure out and implement desired business changes.

I don’t know if it’s good economic theory. My experience, though, tells me it works quite well.

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