Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 47, By Joe Podolsky:
From: uunet!HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com!JOE_PODOLSKY
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 95 17:36:30 -0800
Subject: The IT Career Ghetto
Marty Chuck likes the spirited discussions that have occasionally erupted around a Jotting, and he suggested that we might get some reaction if I wrote one about IT career paths. Marty asks, "Do IT people like working in IT? Better yet, do IT people like being called (or pigeon holed as) IT people?" Marty says that he gets "the feeling many times that the answer is NO and NO." How would you answer those questions, and why? Here's some food for thought. In the November-December 1995 issue of _Harvard Business Review_, editor Tom Richmond wrote a short column entitled, "Identifying Future Leaders." He describes work done by three University of Southern California business school professors that argues that our normal practice of selecting people for new jobs based on their demonstrated skills may be flawed. The USC professors suggest that the new executive selection model should stress that the "...ability to learn from experience, coupled with appropriate experience, creates an opportunity to learn executive skills..." People who have these skills, "...attract the organizations' attention and investment; show a sense of adventure by taking or making opportunities to learn new things; and create a context for learning from those opportunities; and change as a result of the experience... "Still developing, high potential executives, demonstrate commitment and take action" and do so in ways that are visible to decision makers and that get the performers additional, challenging projects that give them additional chances to develop. People with the highest potential move on when their learning slows and take on new, demanding tasks including international assignments and cross-organizational opportunities. How do these findings match with HP's performance evaluation practices? Is a PRB 5 ranking necessary, sufficient, or even desirable as an aid in identifying high potential people? And, given the USC criteria, what are the differences, if any, for career options for people in the IT function versus other HP functions? One opinion comes from an article from the December 11, 1995 issue of _InformationWeek_, entitled, "The Toughest Job Around." The author, Gene Bedell is now CEO of a North Carolina company called Seer Technologies, but before that, he was CIO of CS First Boston Corp. Bedell compares the jobs of CEO versus CIO (and I, perhaps presumptuously, extend his comparison to that between business (line) managers and IT managers). He says, "It's not a pretty picture: CEOs can win. CIOs are lucky to survive to fight another day. CEOs who do their jobs successfully will succeed in their companies. CIOs who excel in their jobs can still fail in their companies... "The CEO's objective is to bring in the dough. If they succeed....everyone is happy. Contrast this with the CIO. The CIO's bottom line is customer satisfaction. If users and senior managers aren't happy, the CIO is toast. "A CIO might deliver a complex, strategically important system on time and within budget to users who fancy they could have done it faster and cheaper, or with a better interface or more functionality. As a result, they're unhappy." (Not to mention how unhappy they are when, as is often the case, we deliver late and overbudget!) "Two forces make users unhappy with even the most successful system: the learning effect and the cost of infrastructure. "(The learning effect comes from the fact that) people cannot know what they will learn until they've had the experience. But once a new system goes into production, users learn how they will really use it. If the system cannot be changed quickly and at almost no extra cost, it will fail to make users happy... "Next, users are almost always unhappy about how much they have to pay and how long they have to wait for new systems...(They) lack understanding about how much lies beneath the surface of mission-critical systems, such as the cost of infrastructure, backup and recovery, and security." (Not to mention the issues of linkage with legacy environments or dealing with incompatible software packages.) Bedell offers little hope. He says that the "average tenure of a CIO is about a third of what executives in other disciplines can expect." He suggest the following steps to "give yourself half a chance: "- Accept the fact that user satisfaction (as hard as that is to define) is the key to success. "- Build inexpensive prototypes users can learn from before you commit to large-scale development. "- Educate users on...infrastructure (costs)... "- Don't use costly, time-consuming approaches to build lightweight systems. Focus on fast and cheap when that is all that is called for. "- Spend as much time building personal relationships as you do building systems." In HP, movement from IT to business has been nil. Several present and past senior line executives (e.g., Carolyn Ticknor and Bob Puette) started in IT, but they left the function pretty quickly and earned their promotions in the business functions. Could it be that the very things that allow us to be successful as IT managers are inhibitors to successful business management? It's not just line/staff issues. Finance managers have moved into business management positions at high levels (e.g., Rick Belluzzo, Steve Gomo, Don Schmickrath). It seems important to be able to move from IT into business management for several reasons: first, to give people the choice; second, because (I feel at least that) IT skills are a vital competence as our businesses become more process-based; and, third, perhaps most important, if the business managers who are our customers see us as different from them, as not really part of their business team, as more focused on technology than on business, how can they really respect our recommendations? I'd really like to hear how you all feel about this. Thanks, Marty, for raising the subject. Happy holidays, Joe