However, Cheryl Hannah, who has been on long-service leave from the Immigration Department for the past seven months and has 10 years experience as a senior executive in IT, including CIO from 2001 to 2006, says in her absence many highly-experienced staff have “jumped ship” because the expectations for IT staff are just too high.
“It’s not just that the staff themselves are in revolt; I think the whole foundation of what we expect IT to do for business is so ill-defined and overblown that it’s not surprising that you get huge churn, with lots of failed projects and lots of unhappy people, both in the business and in IT,” Hannah says.
A lot of the blame can be sheeted home to the industry’s habit of “convulsing over some new technology which is supposedly going to be the magic bullet and never is”, Hannah says. For example, when object-based and object oriented language for software development was meant to be the answer to everyone’s prayer in the mid 1990s, the Immigration Department invested in an object oriented language, Seer*HPS, only to find that after barely two years it was the only site left working in the language in the Southern Hemisphere.
“That wave passed over our heads costing a lot of money and caused enormous grief,” she says. “When I went to Europe to ferret out who was still successfully using it, IBM had walked away from it in Ireland, and I picked up a whole lot of programmers from Ireland that I then took to Australia to work for us because we had to find our own resources — there wasn’t anybody in the market who was still interested in training anybody or working in that system. And now the people who invested in learning Seer*HPS find their skills are completely obsolete — as anachronistic as learning Persian.
“And hard on its heels came the promise of the next wave of integration and the promise of business process integration etc, and they’re still all promises; it’s nearly 10 years later and none of that stuff has been realised.
“Underlying the discontent of staff is a fundamentally flawed approach to trying to get big blocks of IT work done, with at least part of the problem being that the products themselves are very immature,” Hannah says.
The picture is no better in New Zealand, it would seem. Hayden Searle, technical specialist for IT Connections NZI, says all too often managers of IT teams have “the same level of IT smarts as a general home user”.
Searle says that when he worked for Telecom NZ the organisation was paying $20,000 less than market rates and saw no reason to reward IT staff any better. “Many times we had system failures that were blamed on the IT guys. The fact that we had highlighted the issue months before it happened and asked for funds to rectify the problem never came into it — it was still our fault. The manager, not knowing any better, took the side of the business and blamed us too,” he says.
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