CTO/CIO perspectives

One key ongoing goal of mine is that I constantly strive to pay attention. In this case, specifically, through web logging reports, I can see the Google searches that drive people to this blog every day.  One of the most common of these, it turns out, is people searching on the phrase “how to improve IT department”. Another is “IT assessment”.  I somehow picture bleary-eyed CEOs and COOs, late at night, pondering how they can get more throughput or better results from IT, and turning to Google in their frustration.

Since it’s in essence a frequently requested topic, let’s talk about it.  I’ve been on both ends of such assessments, multiple times.  I’ve done them, and I’ve had them done for me.  Before entering into such an assessment, it’s worth considering some of the surrounding issues and common pitfalls.

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Yes, I admit it’s an old and hackneyed play on words, but I’ll repeat it anyway: in the course of my career, I’ve worked in IT positions in the fine States of New York, California, and Washington, but I’d have to say that the most frequent state I’ve encountered in IT matters has been the State of Denial. 

It seems to be a common trend, up and down the levels of a company, to engage in a bit of willful self-delusion about IT matters, practices, outcomes.  As I thought about this, I realized that several of my key “Peterisms” (these being sayings that come out of my mouth again and again, as already chronicled here and here) have evolved as a response to this persistent theme of “states of denial”.  So let’s talk about three more of those Peterisms in that light.

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Cultural references are among the most powerful language tools around.  The old cliche may be true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but equally, a well-targeted cultural reference, used as an analogy, can stream light onto a subject better than dozens of droning paragraphs of prose.

So here’s one that comes to mind over and over again in the course of IT management: the Wizard of Oz.  And it’s not a flattering analogy; in fact, it serves more as a warning or a reminder of what not to do.

Specifically, think about the Wizard of Oz’s behavior when Dorothy asks him to help her and her friends.  She gets upset when it seems that the Wizard isn’t going to help them, but he assures them that he will, if they do just one little thing:

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I’ve touched on this topic briefly before, but here’s a lengthier discussion on why, in general, I find e-mail to be vastly preferable to voice mail for communication in the business world.

Here’s my stance: voice mail works reasonably well on a small scale in the home (i.e., personal voice mail implemented usually with answering machines), but it tends to break down completely in a large-scale business environment.

Until I took active steps to deal with it about a dozen years ago, I was getting between 50 and 100 voice mail messages a day.  The “message waiting” light on my phone had become a night light for my office.  At an average of a minute or two each to listen and respond, these messages were taking me hours a day to work through.  I realized that our greater project team of several hundred people was able to put voice mail messages into my queue a lot faster than I could ever pull them out.  Voice mail just wasn’t a good use of my personal bandwidth.  So I took the radical step of putting an outgoing message on my voice mailbox, telling people that if they had a choice, please send me e-mail rather than voice mail, and I’d be able to get back to them a lot more quickly.

E-mail has flaws, of course, but sports many advantages over voice mail:  most notably, it can be quickly skimmed, categorized, saved, searched, archived.  What’s more, it puts you and others on the line: you can be held to what you argued, what you promised.  At most, it can be misinterpreted, but it can’t easily be denied.  And that’s healthy, for you, for your co-workers, and for your organization.  Accountability drives responsibility.

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Here’s a topic that frankly shouldn’t even merit a post — it’s that much of a no-brainer if you think about it.

Yet, in the real world, I’ve found that it’s anything but a no-brainer, at both small and large companies.  What I’m referring to is the need for organizations to track their laptops and desktops.

Shockingly, many/most organizations don’t do even close to a satisfactory job at this.  The U.S. State Department recently made the news for losing track of as many as 10,000 laptops.

OK, chalk that up to government, perhaps.  But admittedly, in any bustling, active enterprise, keeping tabs on machines, and who’s using what, isn’t a cakewalk. Even Microsoft has its issues in this arena, and turns to “rolling its own” applications as a stopgap.

Astonishingly, most organizations I’ve observed:

• Don’t know how many machines they actually have
• Don’t know their current penetration of laptops vs. desktops
• Tend to budget by the seat of their pants for replacements for the coming year
• Can’t tell you precisely where a specific purchased asset has been deployed
  
• Don’t know the “aging profile” of their population of desktops and laptops (e.g., how many are more than a year old)
• Don’t relate the actual handling of the asset (e.g., replacement after three years) to the financial handling (e.g., spreading the capital expense over three years from an accounting perspective). Replacement tends to be demand-driven, meaning (usually) crisis-driven.
• Don’t have a solid process, or any process, for decommissioning a machine that is past its useful life.
• Don’t have the ability to tell a given employee when his or her machine will be replaced.

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Let’s mix some metaphors today, and attempt to relate them all to the world of information technology and project management.

I have a good friend and colleague, one of the top IT consultants I know.  He’s able to execute crisply at the detail level while keeping the big picture in mind; he’s especially good at balancing on the fine line separating necessary diplomacy and straight-shooting directness.

For reasons I find simultaneously admirable and unfathomable, this indefatigable person, whom I’ll call Gunner here, is planning on opening a pizza parlor as a sidelight, and is currently embroiled in the process of threading the various bureaucracies and logistics to make his vision happen.  We talk about this regularly, since I am a great pizza fan.  In a recent conversation, he reported that he had just gotten city approval to use a specific lower-cost piece of equipment, news that greatly increases the chances of the pizza parlor actually becoming a reality.  So I, of course, immediately asked when opening day would be.

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Do a poll: many IT folks regard doing status reports as their least favorite task.  My point here, though, will be that a lot of people, management and workers alike, don’t fully understand the real purpose of status reports, and that status reports should actually be a “must-have” arrow in your management quiver. 

How a person regards status reports is, in my view, a litmus test that tends to reveal one’s basic approach and attitude towards management in general. Let me sketch the two diverging philosophies.

I’m a strong proponent of the first philosophy: the idea that managers and workers collaborate towards achieving common goals, just playing different “positions” in the game plan of how to get there.  The opposite view, one that is held by more people than I’d like, is that the manager assigns work, sits back, and judges how well it was done.  If you look at the status report through eyes colored by that second view, you might tend to approach doing a status report as drudgery, a checklist chore with little real utility, and with lots of potential downsides when your boss reads it and determines what you haven’t done well.  That approach can result in status reports omitting or obscuring any bad news, providing all sorts of detail meant to show that everything is going swimmingly, and in essence attempting to prove that the author is a shining star and a veritable dervish of activity.

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I haven’t given myself the luxury of telling an IT anecdote or two here recently, so it’s about time: here are two, with moral-of-the-story observations for each.  Note: these are true stories.  I may have changed some of the facts, lightly, to make them less identifiable.  They’re also always at least several years in the past, to provide a healthy amount of distance for everyone.

I’d actually like to make this post the first in a recurring motif, a series that I’ll call “Astounding IT Sayings,” for what I hope are obvious reasons.  The saying that I consider to be astounding, in its context, will be highlighted for you below in bold.

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