All Posts in Policies and Procedures

|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

“I have two questions for you,” a client told me, shortly after I launched IT Catalysts: “The first is, how can I instill a better customer-service attitude among the IT staff? The second is, how can we stop all of the shadow IT [he called it ‘rogue IT’] that’s going on in the company?”

My answer was, and continues to be, pick one. If they’re really your customers you have no business telling them they can’t do what they want to do. It’s the difference between being a restaurateur and a dietician.

And even that answer is less than the best, because neither one is a particularly good idea. So pick neither.

There are no internal customers, as regular KJR readers are tired of reading by now, and anyway, the word “customer” is superfluous. Instill a service attitude and have done with it. “We’re here to help everyone else take care of the people who pay the bills … the company’s customers,” does the job just fine.

Meanwhile, IT’s attempts to stop shadow IT are like squeezing a closed tube of toothpaste. The toothpaste just moves around inside the tube, just as shadow IT is moving from the PCs hard drive to the cloud.

We used to be able to pretend. We’d lock down the desktops, hoist up the landlubbers, and congratulate each other over having followed security best practices.

We can’t pretend anymore, though. Back when, we were able to prevent the sales force from installing Act! on their laptops, thereby reducing an already-minor security risk while helping make sure the company’s revenues were smaller than they could be.

That was then. This is now. We can still lock down their laptops, but we can’t lock down the cloud, which means that while we can stop the sales force from buying Act! licenses ($550 each one-time), the only way to stop them from “installing” Salesforce.com licenses ($780/year ongoing) is to use a website blocker, which means the cost of blocking Salesforce.com (blockers aren’t free, and someone needs to administer them too) probably exceeds the cost of buying Act! licenses.

Here’s what kills me: Salesforce.com has to have the most amazing PR machine in history, because the usual cant about Software as a Service is how much more economical it is than the usual IT-installed solutions.

And lots of CFOs believe it!

There are, at a rough level of analysis, two types of CFO. One understands only costs, and sees IT as the company spendthrift, always trying to increase them; the other understands both the concept of investment and the value of better tools.

The CFOs who believe the “the cloud saves money” stuff are mostly cost-CFOs, I think, probably because:

  • It fits the IT-as-spendthrift narrative they’ve already bought into. Few people scrutinize statements they agree with.
  • As Salesforce.com charges are paid monthly, and out of the Sales Department’s budget besides, they’re pretty much invisible, even though they’re a helluva lot higher.
  • IT has locked down the desktops to stop shadow IT, which means IT has to buy the Act! licenses (there’s that spendthrift thing again), handle the installations, and support the users (we’ll have to hire more staff).
  • Because we’re IT and think this way, we’ll first do a bunch of business analysis to determine whether Act! or an enterprise CRM suite would be a better choice.
  • Also because we’re IT and we think this way, we’ll do more business analysis to determine how to configure the solution we decide on to fit the company’s sales process, and to integrate it into whatever other systems it has to integrate into.

By the time we’re done, Salesforce.com costs a lot less … not because it has to, but because we’re so determined to stamp out shadow IT and do things “right.”

Imagine that instead of trying to stamp out shadow IT, we embraced it. The sales director would have told us that many of the sales reps wanted to install Act! Is there any problem with this?

No. No problemo, so long as they’re willing to be self-supporting (just as they are with Salesforce.com) and aren’t looking to integrate Act! into any of the company’s other systems.

And if Sales wants IT to provide integration and support? That also isn’t a problem, and costs the same whether IT is integrating and supporting Act! or Salesforce.com.

There are three bottom-line “goods” in any business: Revenue, cost, and risk. Stamp out shadow IT and you’ll reduce risk a bit. Embrace it and you help improve revenue and cost.

Tough choice.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

In business, no idea is real until it reappears, under an approved author’s byline, in the Wall Street Journal or Harvard Business Review.

Okay, I’m whining. But still. Nick Corcodilos and I have both written repeatedly about the fallacy of skill-to-task matching—the practice, common among internal recruiters, of carefully listing every skill a position might require, as if a perfect match between skills required and skills acquired does even a half-decent job of predicting a candidate’s performance once hired.

If you need convincing, two points should do the job, made over-and-over again in this space, in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World (under the headline “hire people, not resumes”), and by Nick on www.asktheheadhunter.com. The first: Employees who are stretching are frequently superior to employees who are happy to do what they’ve been doing. (But not always—”pinball players,” who do a great job so they get to play again, are nothing to sneeze at either, assuming you’re the sort of business leader who sneezes at employees.)

Skill-to-task matching favors applicants who are coasting over those who are stretching. That’s the first point. The second:

Especially in knowledge work, but really, in just about every kind of position in the company, the best predictors of success for any employee are:

  • Habit of success: Loving what success feels like, and knowing that’s needed to feel it again.
  • Love of achievement: An employee who takes pride in producing something important will (I trust “Q.E.D.” is all the proof you’ll need for this one) work hard to produce results they can take pride in.

Not always recognized—employees who work well in teams consider helping their team succeed to be a worthwhile achievement—it’s part of the love of achievement, not separate from it.

  • Intellectual integrity: Faced with reliable evidence, employees with intellectual integrity adjust their opinions, rather than insisting their “opinions” (the correct term is now “biases”) must still be right.

If you’re never convinced until you read it in HBR or the Wall Street Journal, check out David Wessel’s review of Peter Cappelli’s, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (“Software Raises Bar for Hiring,” WSJ, 5/30/2012 and well worth reading in spite of my regrettable need to say “I told you so”).

Cappelli blames the problem on the increased use of automated resume screening software, which he considers to be a response to the completely understandable desire to minimize cost while increasing the ability to wade through the very large piles of resumes that flood in for every open position in a time of underemployment.

Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running will respond, “No, it isn’t completely understandable! It’s assuming instead!” They’ll ask, that is, the most important question about any business function, which is how the six optimization parameters (fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence) rank.

According to Cappelli, the top two are incremental cost and throughput. He’s almost certainly right that this is the fact. Understandable? Not so much.

This is how companies attract and select the people who will do the company’s work. What are the proper priorities for this, the most important responsibility business leaders have?

Excellence comes first—recognizing who will truly succeed the best in each position, even if that choice is unconventional.

Next, I’d put quality—the absence of defects. While skill-to-task-matching is a losing proposition, goodness of fit to what a position actually requires is not. Beyond that, conforming to the relevant laws and regulations, especially with respect to all forms of discrimination, really does matter.

Throughput, also known as capacity, comes third. Companies are faced with a flood of resumes for many open positions, and do need ways of coping with it. Not ways that reduce excellence or quality, though. Quite the opposite—companies need ways to spot the needles of great applicants in the haystack of all the rest.

That leaves cycle time (filling positions quickly), fixed cost (the cost of turning on the lights every day), and incremental cost (the cost of processing each applicant) to float — to be whatever they need to be so that companies make great hires.

Think recruiting would look as it does if companies were explicit about how the six dimensions rank in importance?

Not me. Not Nick, either. And, fortunately, it appears the world of mainstream business thinking might finally be coming around as well.

* * *

If anyone from WSJ or HBR is reading this … call me. We should talk.

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