In the wake of the brutal burst of the dot-com bubble, the corporate role of information technology and its purveyors has been at the heart of a heated debate. "Manage IT" is a just-published guide for IT managers, authored by Joe Santana and Jim Donovan.
Q. How did you come to write the book and why now? This isn't exactly the heyday of IT.
Joe: I've been in the IT profession for a little over 21 years. During this time I've seen a huge number of stellar IT individual contributors promoted into IT management roles where they began a steady descent in performance and confidence that brought pain to themselves, their teams and their company. When I looked around for books that addressed these IT management challenges, I found that none of them dealt with the possibility that the role might be the wrong one for the individual (e.g., not their talent).
I think that it is important to make sure that the individual has the proper talent, desire and willingness to be an IT manager in a specific role before we leap to training and other development interventions. Also, many of the books dedicated to IT management seem to focus on "project-management" skills or "Tayloristic" (followers of early 20th century productivity guru Frederick W. Taylor) productivity measurement approaches. Project management and reading metrics are important, but are not the only skills needed to be an effective manager.
One of my personal motivations for engaging in this project with Jim was to provide IT professionals as well as human resource and performance consultants working with IT professionals with a tool that would do two things. First, enable the IT professional considering a role in management to determine if this is the right career move and, if it is, to provide them with a basic foundation of key IT management skills.
Jim: My background for the past 20 or so years has been in human development and potential. I've authored three quite successful self-help books, delivered countless seminars, and worked with individuals and groups to help them identify the blockages to their growth and create strategies to move toward their goals. My main contribution to this book is in helping people identify their personal goals and values and applying them to their careers.
If a person is working out of alignment with his high driving values, no amount of promotion or money will satisfy him or her. Such people are continually unhappy, unfulfilled and less than stellar performers. In "Manage IT" we have provided a series of exercises to assist people to identify their own goals and values and then determine if they are in alignment with the specific management position being considered. We've also provided the IT manager with coaching tools and strategies that they can use to elicit peak performance and results from their teams.
Q. Why is there a gap between corporate management and IT management? What went wrong, what are the historical roots of this misunderstanding?
Joe: IT people that grew up writing programs or keeping computers and networks running have typically not been exposed to company strategy and objectives early in their careers. On the other hand, their "cousins" in marketing, sales and operations -- often promoted to become corporate -- were either directly part of the "core business action" or at least close enough to witness it.
A lot of effort is going into closing this gap, by pioneering innovators such as Dr. Howard Rubin, executive vice president and board member of META Group. One model developed by Rubin, the IT Investment Portfolio Model, creates what he calls a "universal translator" between the language of IT and corporate management.
In essence, Rubin teaches IT executives to look at their IT dollars as part of an investment fund and to regard themselves as fund and portfolio managers whose goal is to allocate investments in a manner that supports their company's overall business strategy. The model is an excellent tool that enables the IT function to link and drive technology investment decisions to conform to the company's business strategy. We make extensive use of this model in one chapter of the book.
Q. A growing school of economists study the "Solow Paradox," which shows that the introduction of IT has little effect of workplace productivity. From your experience, in what ways does IT change the workplace and render it more productive?
Joe: Assessing the impact of IT on productivity solely on the basis of statistical models that focus on the aggregate of numerical indicators reminds me of a story I once heard about a weatherman who denied the presence of a storm he saw out his window because his instruments indicated clear skies with a light breeze.
The impact of technology in driving up individual and team productivity can be seen in any office today where hundreds of people share information in a presentation delivered online, without leaving their desks. Unfortunately unless these individual and team productivity improvements are focused on specific areas that enhance the aggregate economic productivity of the company, they do not show up on the statistical charts.
To have a greater impact on these macroeconomic statistics, IT investments need to be better aligned with company business goals. If a company is in a business where measured productivity is highly dependent on a well automated point of sale strategy, but it is investing a large portion of its IT dollars in providing computer maintenance services, the impact of IT dollar investments on the company's productivity will be low.
On the other hand, if said company were to shift its investments from the maintenance process to improving the point-of-sale automation tools, the impact on overall company productivity would be greater. Unfortunately, according to studies by the likes of the META Group, the number of organizations where IT is well-aligned with business objectives -- and thus highly impacts productivity -- is still relatively low.
Jim: One of the things we've done in "Manage IT" is to give the new or aspiring IT manager tools they can use to better understand their role within the corporation and how they fit into the "big picture." Seeing this "big picture" enables managers to focus-lead their teams performance in a manner that contributes to corporate productivity.
Part 2 of this interview will run Wednesday. Send your comments to: [email protected].
