Advice Line | Bob Lewis » Making the case with central IT

August 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Making the case with central IT

TAGS: General

Dear Bob ...

We are a small group of dedicated people working for a public safety unit under a large agency. We have accomplished the impossible and have worked in an environment of hostility towards the public safety department by other support units. There is central IT at six of the agencies and we fall under the HQ agency. Our relationship with HQ IT has always been difficult as our needs do not always fall under their standards for business operations. We are a 24/7 operation and require vertical applications and processes that relate to law enforcement.

Our staff is well versed in the specification, implementation, and support of these unique systems and we have been successful over the past seven years. At this time, we're undertaking a migration to an entirely new system that will replace most of our bread and butter applications, move from Nortel networking to Cisco, from Novell and GroupWise to Windows and Exchange, and introduce modern law enforcement systems. The training will be considerable and our group has been working on this project for three years.

We have requested that our staff be increased – finally – to best support the new systems and to accommodate new staff that has doubled since 2001. The HQ C-level staff has determined that the HQ IT staff should be directly responsible for all of our systems and the process has started with knowledge transfer and giving up our projects. This group has not been involved with the project, has limited knowledge of law enforcement systems but the CIO insists that with "good" SLAs, anything can be accomplished. With seven years of historically bad support, it's difficult to accept this change.

The HQ culture and work ethic is very different from what we've developed in our department. There is a strong case to grow our technical unit and to continue our future support. My questions are "how can I best develop a case and objective study to demonstrate that our department's needs are best met with dedicated staff?" and how can I influence the C-level managers to consider this case? Hiring a consultant to perform this on our behalf will be thwarted by central IT so that is a distant option. Any comments would be helpful.

- Case builder

Dear Casey ...

I don't think you're going to like my answer.

First, give up on the notion of winning the debate by making a strong business case. This issue isn't being decided by evidence and logic. From what you describe, at least, the chain of argument goes like this: "Here's what I want the answer to be" -> "Here's a plausible sounding statement that rationalizes the decision for me, and is good enough to shut off the argument from anyone else" -> "Stop arguing - I've made my decision and it's final."

You have two avenues to explore that I can see. One is to present an alternative that sounds a lot like what the HQ CIO has planned but gets you what you really need. It might go something like this:

* After everyone agrees to an SLA, it's still true that the more users you have to support, the more people you'll need to support them. The two questions are, how many additional support staff are we talking about and where will they sit?"

* We already have the local infrastructure set up and know the territory. Why don't you plan on seating however many you're planning to hire in our area?

It's a long shot but it might work.

The other alternative I can think of is to match clout for clout. Surely, the thought of having HQ's IT staff providing local support is making the top managers in your area nervous. If you have a good relationship with them, explain your concerns, let them know you don't have any influence over the decision, and suggest that it's up to them to make the case for local support if that's what they prefer.

There is, of course, a third alternative, and it isn't all that bad: Let things play out. If you're right, one day there will be a blow-up. When it happens, your hands will be clean and the HQ CIO's fingerprints will be all over the crime scene.

Then you can make your case to whoever is in a position to recommend a change of course.

- Bob

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Posted by Bob Lewis on August 12, 2007 09:45 PM

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