- Whether to mention a pregnancy in a job interview
- A possible meeting protocol
- What are an end-user's responsibilities?
- Another take on opening PCs, or not
- Getting some process going
- Selling a more open environment to management
- Running an effective meeting
- Licensing rules for virtual machines
- The ROI of metrics
- Legal challenges to virtual machines
February 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Just how wrong is Nicholas Carr?
I received this prediction in response to my recent Keep the Joint Running, "Carr-ied away," (2/4/2008). I won't tell you I agree with it. I will say I find it as provocative as Carr's prediction that the application side of IT will move into the business, and more plausible.
- Bob
Dear Bob ...
As always, I enjoyed your column today!
I do think Mr. Carr is a little more "exactly wrong" than you give him credit for.
Having worked for a series of financial services companies, I've noticed that more and more, the business is moving into the IT organization. I can't even begin to count how many times the business has come to me and asked how we did something (one example: how do we calculate interest rate swaps collateral movements again? - I have a Word doc on that and a Powerpoint I've explained it so many times).
I'm not alone spending time on such "2nd level support" in IT ... and I think Mr. Carr is on to something - he's just exactly wrong. The business folks are becoming replaceable units that don't add an advantage.
Look at call center outsourcing, the travel department or HR outsourcing. These are business functions that don't provide a unique advantage (unless you have scale). IT now decides how cargo, money, securities, etc. move from one place to another, not someone holding a meeting on the 14th floor that brings the really choice donuts.
Perhaps we should propose a theory of the "Utility Business Organization" where all of the management functions are outsourced except for IT (and maybe Marketing).
I'd be a lot more productive if a bunch of folks getting paid a quarter of my rate would attend a laundry list of meetings for me and then send me an e-mail of the minutes from the meeting. We could get some scale, too: One person could represent more than a single attendee.
An outsourced CEO? Seems like someone on Madison Avenue or in Hollywood ought to be able to create a "virtual utility CEO" played by an actor for a much better rate of compensation. My guess is that more people would recognize the "can you hear me now?" Verizon guy than the CEO ... why not make them one and the same?
It is all about pushing the brand to shareholders, right? Plus we could save on travel, and provide a customized look (different actor) for the different global locations that people could identify more clearly with, and we could reduce the possibility of scandalous behavior by strictly restricting behavior while "in costume."
Strategic management? When was the last time you were surprised by a good business decision that was based on actual data? Usually we know what management is going to have to decide to do before they can build the consensus for it (and the IT guys have spun the data before anyone sees it).
Why not go ahead and send that out to a contract firm, too? You could switch management companies in the event of trouble (much like switching advertising agencies). How am I not a billionaire with brilliant ideas like this? Now if I could just convince the CEO it’s a good idea ...
Oh, and this plays nicely with your idyllic future, too.
I've written code.
- Andrew
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Posted by Bob Lewis on February 8, 2008 04:59 PM
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What an outstanding idea!!
A triple-blind outsourced management structure could be set up. If the CEO, CFO and CIO don't know the identity of their counterparts, that prevents conflicts of interest emerging when they manage multiple companies.
Each company would be presented as a set of accounts and KPIs with a pseudonymous name to prevent insider trading.
I have contacts with a few VC companies with money to invest now that the sub-prime loans don't look so hot.
Andrew, we should do lunch and discuss!!
Posted by: Stephen at February 8, 2008 09:00 PMI've also run into situations where people on the business end of things have forgotten how to do things. I think that just about any time that you have a system that works well automating tasks, the "business people" will forget how things work. In my case, it was often because the people who knew how to do things tended to get promoted, and the new people never really got exposed to what was going on behind the scenes.
Posted by: Mike Swaim at February 11, 2008 07:55 AMAfter serving 25 years in financial services IT (I'm 'recovering' now, thanks for asking), I heartily concur. I liked to ask our board of directors: "what do you think our company's product is?". In reality we sold people a share of our computer systems. Each month we collected money from our customers' bank accounts and once a year we sent them a statement telling them how many units they'd bought and how much they were worth and how much we thought they'd be worth at retirement. All this information existed only as a string of 1s and 0s on a disk.
The business *is* the computer!
Of course, this may not be equally true for (say) a large manufacturing business.
Posted by: Chris Miller at February 13, 2008 01:29 PMThere is a lot of truth in what Andrew says.
I have implemented business policy decisions in code. Those policies have never been recorded anywhere else. I have had to revisit the code to reconstruct the policy and feed it back to the original decision makers.
I have also influenced business policy based on policy deficiencies that became obvious while coding.
By the way, Andrew's idea of a "virtual utility CEO" is not original - the "virtual utility CEO" for Canada, England, and a lot of other places is named "Elizabeth II" and I think she's doing a great job.
Posted by: Todd at February 14, 2008 06:53 AM|
Three books. Three ways to change the world, your life, or at least Bob Lewis' bank account. Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World distills the world of IT leadership into eight learnable skills and gives you concrete, practical techniques for each one of them. Bare Bones Project Management: What you can't not do makes project management manageable, even for first-time project managers with no formal training in the discipline. ManagementSpeak: What managers say/What they mean … well, it won't help your career, and won't make you a better manager. Mostly, it will make you chuckle, guffaw, and maybe even chortle. Make friends - it's the perfect gift for anyone who has ever suffered through one of those meetings. Order your copies today! |
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