Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms

Hiring the Right / Wrong IT People to Achieve Alignment

Dr. George E. Strouse had a great article recently on CIO.com entitled "Are You Hiring the Wrong IT Staff to Achieve Your Alignment Goals?"  Strouse contends that the major cause of business and IT mis-alignment is that IT is not hiring the right kind of people.   He states "The right people need strong backgrounds in both business and technology. Most IT hiring managers place too much emphasis on strong technology backgrounds."  Although I cannot comment on whether or not this is the major reason for the misalignment I wholeheartedly agree with his comment on the needed background nonetheless.

The most popular post I've made (accounting for about 20+% of site visits) is one that contains what I thought was a good business analyst job description.  While this job description does contains some technical requirements as you might expect it also contains skills that are not often found in traditionally trained IT folks.  These are the types of skills that are needed for an business analyst to understand business.

Dr. Strouse contends that the reason business can not get the right people is that we are asking for people with a Computer Science degree rather than an Information Systems degree.  As a professor of information systems at York College in Pennsylvania he is eminently qualified to layout the distinction and makes a strong case.  Now before anyone with a Computer Science degree gets upset please read his article carefully.  As he points out there is a need for both types of degrees but each is better suited for different functions.

Agile Programming - A Poor Choice of Words?

Agile Programming is a popular programming methodology.  But it's not alone. There are other methodologies such as the Rational Unified Process, Spiral, and the traditional Waterfall methodology in common use.  Each has it advantages and disadvantages and each is named in a way that describes the process.  However with Agile its very name can tend to cause confusion.  "Agile" gets confused with "agile".  Wait a minute.  Other than the capitalization aren't they the same things?  Well not exactly.  Agile with capitals does mean something different than lower case agile and that's where the confusion comes in.

Agile (upper-case) programming in overly simple terms is a method of developing programs using closely knit teams to quickly produce releasable code in short time frames.  Based on the Agile manifesto principles it has some certain processes.  Wikipedia provides a good overview and a simple Google search will provide a mass of references. 

agile (lower-case "a") programming simply denotes being flexible in our design and adjusting as we go.

The term Agile was no doubt derived from its lower-case counterparts and that's where the difficulty comes in.  When we speak of Agile others often hear agile.  And after all who wouldn't want some flexibility in programming?  So very often you quickly get buy-in to employ this methodology when you use this term.  That is until the realization sinks in that what your user thinks they bought is not what you thought you were selling. 

Keeping Data Accurate

This weekend I got a new windshield on my car.  A few weeks ago a rock chipped the windshield and propagated and 18 inch crack within a few minutes so I arranged for a windshield repair company to come to my house to replace it.  Things were going along pretty smoothly at first.  They removed the old windshield, took off the various registration and safety inspection stickers and prepped the car for the new windshield.  Everything was going well until it came time to put in the new windshield.  That's when they found out that the windshield they brought wasn't the right one for my car.

The repairmen called their office and verified that all of the ordering information was correct.  The problem turned out to be that the database of auto glass parts that they subscribed to had the wrong information.  They finally were able to figure out the right part number, brought it out to the house and installed it.  All turned out well except that it cost them an extra 2 hours of delay.  As they were about to leave one of them commented that they recalled that they ran into this same problem the last time they worked on my model of car.  It turns out they had to work with an inaccurate database that didn't have a good means for them to update or correct when errors were found.  In this case an inaccurate database became a customer service issue.

It's a fact of life that errors will find their way into our databases.  There are things we can do to minimize this but it difficult to entirely eliminate errors.  So this begs the question - "What do we do about the errors?"

The Digital Divide: Promise versus Delivery

The "digital divide", the gap between those with access to information technology and those without, gets a lot of play in the press and with politicians.  It is always expressed as a problem that must be addressed.  You typically hear of it in socio-economic terms: 

• by the country's development level
• by age
• by economic status
• by race
• by gender
• by all of the above.

It really is an important issue worthy of thoughtful discussion - but I'm not going to discuss this in this post.  At least not this form of "digital divide" anyway.

We in corporate IT may be a little smug about the digital divide because for the most part we don't have to deal with it.  Generally, the groups we serve are all on the same level of access to technology so we don't have to worry about the divide.  There is however a digital divide that we do need to worry about.  In geo-political terms it is not nearly as important as the issues above but it is a local issue for all of us.  It is the digital divide between what technology promises (the potential of technology) and what it delivers (or how we use it).  This divide between promise and delivery expresses itself in two ways.

Zappos: Integrating Systems and Business Processes

When you run across a company the truly integrates their systems with their business processes it can be an amazing experience.  Dealing with these companies borders on fun because they take the effort to make it easy and have anticipated your needs.  Zappos, an online retailer of shoes and other accessories, is one such company.  Or more appropriately as they describe themselves: "We are a service company that happens to sell ________.

• shoes
• and handbags
• and clothing
• and eyewear
• and watches
• and accessories
• (and eventually anything and everything)"

Since I'm a customer of Zappos I'm surprised that I hadn't written about this before.  Fortunately, Seth Godin's recent post, "Zappos wants you to return those shoes" reminded me so now is a good time to talk about them.

Zappos' service is all encompassing in how it is set up.  It includes: policy, processes, customer perspective, vision, attitude and systems.  Customer service for them isn't just putting a "Contact us" or "Customer Service" link on their web site.  Pete Blackshaw explain this in more detail in "Word-of-Mouth Marketing 101, à la Zappos.com"

Don't believe me?  Then check out these examples:

Eight Business Technology TrendsTo Watch

I recently ran across an article at the McKinsey Quarterly that caught my attention.  The McKinsey Quarterly is a business journal published by McKinsey & Company, a large international strategic business consulting firm.  The McKinsey Quarterly publishes both free (with registration articles) and "premium" (for a fee) articles.  The article that caught my attention is a free article published in December, 2007, entitled "Eight business technology trends to watch" by James Manyika, Roger Roberts and Kara Sprague.  These McKinsey consultants have identified some trends that we as IT leaders need to be thinking about.  It's a very thought provoking article.  The trends they identify are:

Managing relationships

1. Distributing cocreation - the Internet offers new ways for people and teams to collaborate in developing new products and services
2. Using consumers as innovators - "crowdsourcing" allows our customers to also be contributors
3. Tapping into a world of talent - it's a big world out there and in the virtual world one with out borders
4. Extracting more value from interactions - technology can help us focus our efforts into more value- added areas and transfer transactional activities to more cost effective solutions

Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation - technology has tremendous potential for automating repetitive tasks
6. Unbundling production from delivery - we can use technology to make our fixed assets into reusable components

Leveraging information in new ways

7. Putting more science into management - we now have the ability for data-based decisions more than we've ever had
8. Making businesses from information - "knowledge is power" that can help our business succeed and develop new markets

I'm a few months behind many other reviews of this article so I won't do a detailed review.  For that you may want to take a look at some of the reviews I've listed below.  Instead I'll make a different observation.

CIOs and the Marketing of IT

Last Monday's post started out, "Marketing guru, Mary Schmidt, . . ." which was a similar start to the previous Monday's post, "Marketing guru, Seth Godin . . ."  At first blush it may seem strange to be referencing marketing experts in an IT blog but I believe IT can benefit greatly from applying some common marketing concepts.  For purposes of this discussion I mean true marketing, not to be confused with advertising or sales.  While I also believe advertising and sales can be important for IT, they are different from marketing so I'll defer discussions on those until later posts.

Marketing is at its heart a strategic approach to how you decide what your product is, what the target market is, its pricing and delivery.  The classical way of looking at it is the 4P's of marketing (also try a Google search for many more references):

1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion

Product for IT are the various services we deliver whether it is infrastructure services such as voice and data; productivity tools such as word processing; and business system whether ERP or individual systems.

Price in our case is what our user community is willing to pay for these services.

Place is our distribution method, how we deliver these services.   This is where you see client-server, SOA (service-oriented architecture), web technologies, etc. come to play.

Promotion is about how we make our users aware of our services and how we convince them to adopt new technologies.  This is often the one IT has the most difficulty with and I'll talk more about this in future posts.

The IT Career Builder's Toolkit

Matt Moran is one of my favorite bloggers.  I first ran across Matt at the ITToolBox with his Policy Parrot posts.  If you get a chance, read them.  They are classics in the realm of customer service, an area that should be near and dear to anyone in IT.  Matt brings a real-world practical approach to his writings and he's done it again with The IT Career Builder's Toolkit.  It is not only a job search guide but more importantly a career guide.  It is available on Amazon, Cisco Press or InformIT or you can read it for free online.

An example of this practicality is Chapter 3,  "Information Technology: A Great Career" where he addresses the issue of outsourcing and off-shoring head-on.  Complaining about off-shoring in particular is a favorite past time in IT with the refrain of "How can we compete with someone only paid a tenth of what we make?" As Matt points out "Outsourcing Is About Value, Not Costs"  and the key to having a successful IT career is to focus on providing value and not just being the lowest cost provider.

In another example of practicality Matt provides a list of "Actions & Ideas" at the end of each chapter to help you put the ideas of the chapter to use.  As Matt correctly states, "Looking for work, is work".  As such, you should manage your career and a job search in particular as a project.

Matt does provide useful job search tips in a number of chapters but if your focus is solely a job search you may want to supplement it with some other books that go into more detail on those specific areas.  The value of Matt's book is in building your career not just finding the next job. For example some of the chapters include:

• Chapter 16  On-the-Job Promotion
• Chapter 17  The Boundaries and Benefits of Working at Home
• Chapter 18  The Toolkit Approach to Consulting
• Chapter 19  The Move to Management

These are topics that you won't find a lot about in the other books but are a critical part of your career.

If you are thinking about your career (and you should be) take a look at Matt's book.  As a true technologist he's made it available online for free and if you like it you can purchase later.

Security and the Myth of the Superuser

Bruce Schneier runs a great blog, Schneier on Security and I stumbled across a post of his from last May entitled The Myth of the Superuser.  In a very understated way Schneier refers to what he describes as  a "very interesting law journal paper".  It certainly is.  The paper in question is The Myth of the Superuser: Fear, Risk, and Harm Online by Paul Ohm, Associate Professor of Law and Telecommunications at the University of Colorado Law School.

The abstract states:

"Fear of the powerful computer user, "the Superuser," dominates debates about online conflict. This mythic figure is difficult to find, immune to technological constraints, and aware of legal loopholes. Policymakers, fearful of his power, too often overreact, passing overbroad, ambiguous laws intended to ensnare the Superuser, but which are used instead against inculpable, ordinary users. This response is unwarranted because the Superuser is often a marginal figure whose power has been greatly exaggerated.

The exaggerated attention to the Superuser reveals a pathological characteristic of the study of power, crime, and security online, which springs from a widely-held fear of the Internet. Building on the social science fear literature, this Article challenges the conventional wisdom and standard assumptions about the role of experts. Unlike dispassionate experts in other fields, computer experts are as susceptible as lay-people to exaggerate the power of the Superuser, in part because they have misapplied Larry Lessig's ideas about code.

The experts in computer security and Internet law have failed to deliver us from fear, resulting in overbroad prohibitions, harms to civil liberties, wasted law enforcement resources, and misallocated economic investment. This Article urges policymakers and partisans to stop using tropes of fear; calls for better empirical work on the probability of online harm; and proposes an anti-Precautionary Principle, a presumption against new laws designed to stop the Superuser. "

Don't let the "law journal" label scare you away.  This really is a very interesting and thought-provoking read.  Although phrases like "exaggerated attention to the Superuser"  and "overbroad prohibitions"  mind lead you to think that Ohm is downplaying the risk of lax computer security but upon careful reading I don't think he is.  Rather what he is suggesting is a more balanced and reasoned approach to security.

Rocky Mountain High with Lost Luggage

Kevin Flynn, Transportation Writer for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver wrote a couple of articles yesterday that caught my interest.  The first one is "Airlines losing more bags" which talks about a 12.5% increase nationwide in mis-handled bags.  He reports that at some airlines the increase is in excess of 30%.  Now that's scary.

His second article, a sidebar article to the one above, "Late connection delayed bag, but airline was ready" discussed how some airlines are handling the situation.  I found two things especially interesting about this;

1. Kevin quoted my blog post of July 30th concerning my lost luggage experience in Denver where I suggested that they use the information they already have and proactively let people know their luggage didn't make the connection rather than make them wait in vain and then seek out the baggage claim people.  As I mentioned, "If you know a bag didn't make the connection, why do you insist on adding to my frustration by making me wait an extra 30 or 45 minutes, and then make me come ask you about it?"
2. The article relates another travelers experience with Delta.  Once they inquired about their missing luggage the Delta agent then consulted the computer printout and quickly handled things which was very similar to my experience with United when I got back to Houston.

What amazes me is that the airlines still seem to think that people really don't care if they get their luggage or not, its like they are saying "Maybe, we better wait and see if they will come ask us about it before we do anything".  As if I'd schlep 40 pounds of dead weight through an airport and then not want it!

I stand by my original suggestion:

Are We Too Smart For Our Own Good?

There are a lot of smart people in IT.  In fact the stereotype of IT folks are the smart guys and gals that are good a computers, math and science but are horrible at social skills.  There is some truth, I believe, in this stereotype although the stereotype is greatly over exaggerated.  It isn't that IT people don't have social skill it is just that they often choose not to use them since after all the power of their logic and the strength of their reasoning and knowledge is more than sufficient isn't it?

A recent post by Penelope Trunk at the Brazen Careerist blog entitled "Stop thinking you'll bet by on your high I.Q." would suggest otherwise.  She laments that we seem to value high IQ over social skills as if high IQ was all that mattered.  In reality it is a balance between the two.  But because we in IT are so comfortable with the technical side we tend to forget the people side.  We have to remember that success is just as dependent on the social aspects at it is the technical on ones - the old people, process and technology cliche.

As Trunk points out based on an article from the College Journal, recruiters of B-school graduates look for 5 traits:

1. Communication and interpersonal skills

2. Original and visionary thinking

3. Leadership potential

4. Ability to work well within a team

5. Analytical and problem-solving skills

Interestingly enough these traits or competencies are very similar to ones that I wrote about in regard to a Russell Reynolds (a large international executive recruiter) analysis of the competencies required for a CIO.

So why are these so important?

CIOs and Business Experience, the Career Impact

I recently did a 2 part post (Part 1, Part 2) talking about CIOs and their perception of their understanding of business.  In a bit of serendipitous timing I just ran across and article, "Salary Report: IT Execs With Business Experience on the Rise"  by Linda Tucci at SearchCIO.com.  It would seem that there is some strong evidence that career success lies beyond just being technology oriented.

The article notes, "The numbers reinforce mounting anecdotal evidence, as well as industry data, indicating that an increasing number of CIOs are gaining business experience, encouraging their employees to get business experience and training business employees in IT. "  While this is an interesting and probably not a  surprising trend it begs the question - how does having business experience affect my career?

Fortunately, Tucci provides some insight to this question.  The first is a comment by Gartner (an IT research and advisory firm) analyst Ellen Kitzis who "finds a correlation between a strong business and IT connection and company performance. Among companies where the CIO does not play a strategic role, 26% are less likely to achieve their financial objectives or open new markets, according to the Gartner research."  Well if IT is now being recognized as contributing to the company's growth and performance we would logically expect to be compensated accordingly, right?

Do CIOs Know (Their) Business? [Part 2]

In my last post we started the discussion of CIO's business knowledge.  An Accenture study had indicated a big disparity between the CIO's understanding of the business and general manager's perception of the CIO's understanding.

"While 73 percent of IT executives said they believe they understand their company’s business extremely or very well, only 43 percent of general business managers said they believe that IT executives have that level of understanding of the company’s business."

We discussed 2 questions.  The first is how well do CIOs understand business generically.  To help assess this I listed 10 question as a simple test of business knowledge.  The second question is more specific -- how well do CIOs understand their business.  As promised I've this post included 10 question to address this more specific question.

The same caveats apply The quiz is of course, capricious, subjective and arbitrary.  However, since you pick your own scoring method how well you do is up to you.

So on to the questions.

Do CIOs Know (Their) Business? [Part 1]

CIOs are uniquely positioned to understand their company's business more than many others in the company.  The theory behind this is that IT "touches" every aspect of the company and therefore IT has the broadest exposure to the business.  But does this theory hold up under closer scrutiny?

Traditionally CIO came up through the ranks of IT and were very technically focused which limited their business exposure.  And as for touching all aspects of the business that really doesn't happen until you get near the top.  Below that level you tend to focus on particular areas.  Rare is the business analyst/developer that handles both payroll and inventory for example.  Fortunately with the trend of CIOs having worked outside of IT and having an MBA you should expect to see more business knowledge.  Unfortunately the facts don't seem to support this.

Gimme The Names

A lot of the projects that we work on are touted as being labor savings projects.  I say "touted" because often even though the projects are successfully implemented we never seem to see any reduction in labor costs.  Frustrated with this one of my old bosses used to have a stock reply to labor savings projects that usually went something like this:

Requester: If we do this project we'll save 80 hours of engineering effort per week.

Boss:  Gimme the names.

Requester: The names?

Boss: Yes, 80 hours per week is 2 people.  I want to know the names of the people that you'll be firing.

Requester:  (significant pause) Um, Uh, We weren't actually planning on firing anybody.

Boss: Well if no one is leaving how are we getting any labor savings?

Requester: We were planning on using them to do something else.

Boss: Before I'll let you "rehire" those 2 justify to me the merits of this something else.

The boss wasn't really on a mission to fire people but he did want to make sure there was a sound justification for what we were doing.  Fortunately there are some things you can do to make sure you get the economic return you were expecting.

Some More Thought Provoking Ideas from Matt Moran

Matt Moran consistently writes some pretty thought provoking posts about the world of IT.  I first ran across Matt's stuff at the ITToolbox where he has contributed over 700 posts.  I especially loved his "Policy Parrot" stories.  Matt brings a practical real-world approach to IT and is very customer focused which is why I like his stuff so much.

In addition to writing at ITToolBox Matt has his own blog, Matt Moran - Caffeine / Life / Technology / Music and runs Kreative Knowledge.  He has a couple of clips posted there from his speaking engagements.  These are very thought provoking in terms of how IT conducts its business and IT's approach to customer service.  Take a look.

• IT Blackened the Eye of Business
• Everything I know about IT I learned from Mr. Coffee

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• IT as Dentistry
• Some Technology Suggestions for Airline Customer Service
• Are You a Policy Parrot?
• Or the posts in the "Customer Service" category

An Over Reliance on Technology