I am with you all the way ( Won't Train? Don't Complain ). I hear it all the time especially, from the absentee. Management, however, does not have in place an enforcement policy to support the training schedule. How do you address those individuals who just can't or won't learn? Shoot 'em? Isn't murder legal yet?

Any ideas? Let me know.

Lou

Dear Lou,

I am opposed to violence. First of all, it is an over-reaction . Second, if we blew away all of the people with whom we disagreed, there would be very few co-workers left to use our systems. Most important, if users could also resort to violence, there probably would be no systems people left to design systems, since they outnumber us.

A more pragmatic approach is to try to convince people of the value of training. Somewhere, someone, will listen. Then use that person or persons to spread the word. Make sure to do everything in your power to build up the stature of the people who do get trained. Tell their bosses how great they are. It may take a while, but the attitudes toward training will improve.

I enjoyed your column about trade shows ( The Art Of The Trade Show ). I also feel like a kid in a candy store at computer trade shows. One year, at FOSE, I almost punched out the guy next me to get a Microsoft Excel T-shirt. Another year , when 3-inch diskettes cost about a $1 apiece, I picked up 10 demo disks, which I reformatted. I tried to go to FOSE this year but they wanted $50. Maybe next year. Thanks for the column!

DLC

Dear DLC,

Given the price of their Office suite compared to the competition, Microsoft probably should give away a few T- shirts with each shrink-wrapped box of software. What do you think?

I, too, miss the "stuff" that I used to collect at the trade shows. What I don't miss, however, are the sales calls that one gets from depositing business cards at each booth. Why don't I miss them? Because the underlings that attend the conferences refer the calls they get from sales people to me! I might as well attend myself. At least I'd have some new "stuff".

Linda in Phoenix

Dear Linda:

Your staff has it backwards. They should be bringing some of the goodies back for you. I'm surprised that at least one of them has not figured out that the best way to ensure that they get to go again is to share some of the stuff with the boss. Maybe they need some sensitivity training.

I thoroughly enjoy reading your column in InformationWeek , as it shows real-world examples of dilemmas that all IT managers seem to face. I just finished "Serving Food For Thought" about your decision not to promote Fred, your people skills-impaired techie.

I am a manager in an IT shop with a couple of highly technically skilled people with the communications skills of a turnip. Give them a piece of hardware and they immediately enter into some kind of weird symbiotic relationship with it--but try to make them responsible for managing others or dealing with adminis trative types and you might as well kiss the project good-bye.

It is my experience that people like to be managed and dealt with in a kind way, not made to feel as if they are a member of some subhuman alien species. This provides the "buffer zone" which prevents minor irritations from flaring into full-blown disgust and anger. For instance, one of the techies in our group often gets involved with helping a user with a problem; invariably, the end result is anger and frustration on the part of both parties--the techie, because he feels the user is incompetent, and the user, because he feels the techie has a superiority complex. Send another of our technical people who is less experienced but who has a very mild disposition, and the project not only gets completed, but is completed more quickly and leaves both sides in a good relationship.

The bottom line in our IT shop is, people skills are absolutely critical. A technical person cannot expect to be given any special responsibilities unless they have first demonstrated good interpersonal relationship skills.

Keep up the good work.

Justin Labadie

Dear Justin,

Barbara Bashein and M. Lynne Markus, two excellent researchers, have recently written an article in the Sloan Management Review (Summer 1997) in which they say that trust and technical ability--in that order--are required to achieve credibility in IT jobs. Your practical experience reinforces their research.

In your opinion, what are the reasons for the intense movement that we are seeing in many big companies in order to use SAP software--even knowing that the project is complex and very expensive?

Are these companies making business cases to justify the project.

Jose Carlos Betencourt

Dear Jose:

Compani es are finding that their archaic business processes leave them unable to service their customers quickly and efficiently. The customer places an order and the service representative does not know whether the product is in stock in sufficient quantity or when it can be delivered.

The business manager does not know which customers are contributing most of the profit and which products have the highest margins. SAP offers the opportunity for a company to streamline its business processes and to provide integrated information on an as-needed basis.

As you say, it can be devilishly expensive and complex to implement. Few companies can boast of having completed SAP projects without massive overruns in time and money. On the other hand, those who have successfully implemented SAP products have been very happy with the results.

I enjoyed your column about the freebies at Trade Shows. Planning out the at tack, noting which vendors had what freebies (and, incidentally, noting which ones to revisit to actually LISTEN to their spiel), getting in line for the particularly great giveaway, regretting the one that ran out just before I arrived. Oh, the joy of the chase! Of course, that doesn't take into account schlepping two or three stuffed bags either to the afternoon sessions (assuming time for any sessions could be squeezed in) or to the hotel room that is at least half a continent away ... or the problem of getting onto the plane with six times the amount of stuff that arrived ... or the problem of finding the literature from the vendors that actually had relevant information once the trip is over.

I still use the little tool kits (from several vendors), the leather business card case, and various T-shirts, water bottles, and squishy objects intended to remove stress. I missed getting the stuffed panda, though.

Debora:

It took me a while, but I finally found out how to avoid bringing all that stuff on the airplane, or even back to the room. At one trade show, I saw a line of people near a pile of big folded cardboard boxes. Upon investigation, I learned that my compatriots were packing up their precious goodies, tossing in enough vendor literature to make it legitimate, and then shipping the boxes home. From that day forth, from where the sun stood in the sky, I lugged no more.

When idle time finds me drifting backwards into the past, my reflections sometimes come to rest on a strange dinner I had about seven years ago. I still reflect on it because, until now, the odd conversation I had with the stranger sitting opposite me made no sense. Thinking about it a couple times a year got me nowhere, but you and Cindy finally cleared up the mystery in " Serving Food For Thought ," where she said that "The less people understand about what's involved in doing something, the easier they think it is to accomplish." and thus "their reluctance to include analysts in strategy meetings at the beginning of a project."

The stranger across from me had some rank at my wife's company, so I couldn't respond as he denigrated computer professionals (upon discovering my membership in that category) and then offered the following story as "evidence" of the worthlessness of software professionals.

He put two engineers on a tiny software project to share compound documents over a network. When it was considered finished, this two person, two-solid-year effort by his engineers (who were learning programming as they went) had produced a manual tracking system that provided a computerized list of documents stored on the server. The self-proclaimed brilliant tactician went on to explain that the system was developed at "no cost" because he hadn't used any software professionals, relying instead on resources already available to him. I quickly (and silently) computed that his "free" $200,000 painfully simple work-flow system could have been developed for a tiny fraction of what he spent. (My wife, who had to use the system, didn't share the manager's enthusiasm for it.) The additional irony to his story is that the two engineers who developed his "free" system went out on their own as computer consultants after completing the system, only to fail three months later. They ended up working in a non-technical field before I lost track of them.

Tony Green

Dear Tony,

I suspect many of us have our own similar stories. I remember one in my own background before the time of the PC when an engineer spent three months writing a program, refusing to share with me exactly what he was doing. Then I found out, when he finally came to me for some help, that he was trying to fit a straight line to a set of points. You would have thought he would have been c rushed when I told him that there were scores of programs that produced the best straight line through a set of points. He wasn't. Instead, he shrugged and said it still was worthwhile to do himself, since the company was able to avoid spending any money to buy the software.

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