Beyond Blinking Lights and Acronyms

IT: It's Not Just About Technical Skills Wed 11 Nov 09

Why interpersonal skills may be more important now.

While perusing the online versions of some of the more well-know information technology journals recently, I was surprised to find one that had quite a few stories on the stupidity of users. While these stories ostensibly were presented as humor, they also represent a dark side of IT behavior: The IT guys really are the smartest guys in the room, and users are dumb and annoying.

A closer reading of some of the stories shows the fallacy of this: Users were having problems, and the IT person was more concerned with showing his superiority than in providing customer service. This type of stereotypical behavior has long been an impediment to IT's success and acceptance in the corporate world.

The good news is that this attitude among IT workers isn't nearly as prevalent as it used to be. We've made great strides in improving customer service. These stories, however, show that our job is not complete. There is more to do.

IT's Business Lesson Wed 28 Oct 09

Learning how the business side works can yield better IT systems and service.

I just returned from a week of vacation in London, which was fun as always. The great thing about being an American in London is that it forces you to rethink a lot of things. This ranges from driving on the other side of the road (I hope my U.K. friends appreciate that I did not say the "wrong" side of the road) to fries being chips and chips being crisps and so on. Many things seem the same--but not quite.

Obviously the British have no difficulty with these things. It's second nature to them, it's their culture. It is only those new to their way of doing things who have to adjust. This is the same feeling many of our users experience whenever we roll out or modify a system. We roll out systems, processes and programs that perform adequately but somehow never feel natural to our users.

PC Makers’ Unrequited Love Tue 29 Sep 09

Why Dell and Xerox are going after services companies.

Recently hardware firms Dell, HP and Xerox made a flurry of announcements about combining selling hardware and providing technology consulting services.  Dell said it would acquire Perot Systems for $3.9 billion. HP's announced it will re-brand consulting firm Electronic Data Systems as HP Enterprise Services. Not to be outdone, Xerox said this week that it’s buying Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) for $6.4 billion.

There may be some sound logic behind the Dell and HP moves, but frankly I just don't see it. Judging from how the stock market reacted to Dell's announcement, I may not be alone. Xerox's move does however present an interesting opportunity.

Making Exceptions to IT Rules - Follow-up Thu 17 Sep 09

Comments And Links On "Making Exceptions To IT Rules"

The great thing about writing a blog is the comments you receive and the discussion that ensues.  Often this is better than the original post.

Such is the case with my last post, Making Exceptions to IT Rules. So far I've received 3 comments and they are fantastic! Each one makes an excellent point(s) and is well worth going back and reading. They are so great that I wanted to highlight them and recommend that you read them.

In addition, Chris Peters provided some links to a new way of thinking about PC deployment that can help break the paradigm of a "standard" PC. Peter Thompson, provided a link to a video from TED of Barry Schwartz talking about "our loss of wisdom" which decrys the blind obedience to standards.

These comments are well worth going back to the post to read them.

Thanks to Doug Goldberg, Chris Peters and Peter Thompson.

Making Exceptions To IT Rules Wed 16 Sep 09

Treating standards as absolutes can be counterproductive.

IT folks often see things as a choice of two absolutes. It suits our way of thinking. It may have started with the days of binary coding where everything was either a 1 or a 0 and only a 1 or a 0. We like the simplicity and elegance of only having a choice between 1 or 0, right or wrong, yes or no, black or white. This black or white perspective would be nice if it could truly be achieved, but the hard truth is that we live in a gray world where absolutes are rare.

So we write our policies and develop our standards. We make them iron clad and air tight. And then inevitably comes an exception. One of the vice presidents at your company wants a special cellphone or new style of laptop. Or perhaps it's an engineer wanting to purchase a new software package that IT hasn't approved.

After a lot back and forth, we may give in begrudgingly or hold fast and have a customer grumble about the poor customer service. Either way we do a slow burn and say to no one in particular, "Don't they know what we're trying to do? Don't they understand we have standards?" The simple answer is "No, they don't."

Avoiding The IT Death Spiral Wed 02 Sep 09

Four Tips For Better IT Budgeting

Many pundits are indicating the economy has hit bottom and we are starting to come out of the recession. I don't know if this is true, but I certainly hope so. At the same time, no one seems to expect a rapid climb back, which means controlling costs will remain an important factor in our operations.

As you prepare your budgets for next year, you'll no doubt go through many iterations. You may start out with plans for new systems only to be told to come back with a budget that stays flat. Top management doesn't like what it's getting for their money--or believes it is out of sync with what the company is trying to do. Or management may simply not understand IT, and so demand you lower your costs. To appease top management, you produce a number of different plans that include more and more cost reductions.

Budgeting this way, however, can easily lead to a classic death spiral. We dutifully reduce our costs by cutting services where we think prudent; this leads to more dissatisfaction and more demands for reduced costs--and so on and so on, until the cost that is ultimately reduced is you.

Fortunately, there are ways to avoid this.

A Better Helpdesk Wed 19 Aug 09

Emphasize the customer's needs--not IT's--when you design technical support systems.

I've always believed that the quality of helpdesks and support technicians are the most important factors in shaping user perceptions of IT. Not the big application that you just rolled out saving the company big bucks, not the amount of money you've saved by consolidating your data centers and certainly not all of your promises of new systems and hardware yet to come.

Your helpdesk and support technicians truly are your Directors of First Impression by which people judge your entire organization. If you can't fix my PC quickly or are rude and provide no status information on my problem, why should I think you can deliver on the expensive new application project?

And yet so often we set up our helpdesk and support technicians for failure. As Jessica Rabbit said, "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." Likewise, our helpdesk and support technicians are not incompetent or uncaring, but the process we so often make them work with just makes them appear that way.

Saying Why Is A Powerful Tool Wed 01 Jul 09

Adding An Explanation For Our Policies Can Improve Their Effectiveness

Most IT policies are written like the Ten Commandments.  Thou Shalt Not…  Thou Shalt Not…  Thou Shalt Not…  When you read them you almost expect them to be accompanied by a roll of thunder and a flash of lightning as the rules are laid down by the IT god.

Sometimes a more enlightened IT department will write policies in a more positive fashion.  Instead of Thou Shalt Not… they write it as Thou Shall… 

What IT Needs To Give Up Wed 24 Jun 09

The best IT governance in tough times involves giving up some control--and a lot of information

Balancing requests for more services has always been a challenge but it is especially tough during tough economic times when adding more resource is no longer an option. It is in situations like this when the word "no" can be very powerful.

This may seem contradictory to my previous suggestions that IT should put more effort into saying yes but it really isn't.  The concept of saying yes is about finding ways to help rather than looking for reasons why you can't help, why something can't be done or why something won't work. I still think we should look for ways to say yes in that context.

Are You A Leader? Mon 22 Jun 09

There really is a difference between being a manager and being a leader

Arun Manansingh over at a cio's voice recently had a great post.  I was going to include it in one of my Interesting and Useful Links post but I liked it so much that I thought it deserved a special mention all of its own.

Manansingh has done some excellent research and for his post Are You A Leader? (but don't go there quite yet).  He list characteristic traits of manager and leaders in a comparison fashion which really highlights the differences.

In reading this, it struck me that many organization have the same characteristics as they take on the traits and characteristics of their managers or leaders.  It is common to hear IT folks complain of being thought of as cost centers (and we all want to minimize cost) rather then value adders (where we should invest).  I think that if you look at the list you'll quickly recognize cost center IT groups as managers and value adding IT groups as leaders.  Ok, now go take a look (but come back, I'm not quite done yet).

I'll close by adding my own comparison which is not too dissimilar to Manansingh's next to last comparison:

Manager (cost center IT): Concerned with process

Leader (value adding IT): Concerned with results

What do you think distinguishes a leader from a manager?