Airing Grievances
It may also be the case that IT is seen as “angrier” since IT folks have become more apt to complain in public venues. Patrick Gray, owner of US-based Prevoyance Group and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology, says he wrote about exactly this topic and got quite an earful on TechRepublic (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=546).
“I think IT tends to fault ‘management’ — those nameless, faceless corporate-types — when the problem lies on both ends of the spectrum,” Gray says. “IT people are not seen as valuable, and their positions on things like security are ignored because they are not couched in a business context. That ‘suit’ who seems to ignore IT’s recommendations really doesn’t want to hear about cryptography standards, some tidbit from DEFCON or other esoteric technical lingo. They want a dollars and cents explanation of the impact, and some options to mitigate risk. When IT can articulate a problem in that fashion, the corporate types will react.
“Terry Childs should be jailed, and anyone in IT that makes veiled threats about taking down their company’s infrastructure should face the same investigative and legal actions as an accountant that glibly threatens to steal from the company coffers,” Gray says.
“Part of the reason for IT’s poor treatment and lack of respect is precisely this type of tactless gamesmanship.”
Once Were Heroes
Of course there is nothing new about technicians holding their employers to ransom. Infonomics managing director and Standards Australia Technical Committee IT-030 Chair Mark Toomey saw his first case almost 30 years ago. In that case, he says, it was all about money — the technician wanted a bigger slice of the action. These days there can be a much wider range of drivers.
“Recently, I reviewed an organisation’s IT at the request of the board,” Toomey says. “There had been a number of fairly serious operational problems and the company was suffering because of them.
“What I found was that most people in the IT and business operations area had been working excessive hours over a very long period, and were exhausted. Of course, tired people make mistakes and this was a classic example. There was a senior executive who was getting kudos for the achievements of the heroes who worked the long hours while hiding that overwork situation from the rest of the executives and the board. Of course, the scheme backfired and with some simple changes, the overload problem went away, people were able to think clearly, and the operational problems stopped happening.
“However, nobody here was particularly angry or vindictive; they were just trying hard and hoping that they would survive. I suspect that this situation, where the risk is not a dramatic action but a progressive and serious reduction in performance, is much more commonplace and deserving of considerable attention,” Toomey says.
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