I just wanted to drop you a note to tell you I appreciate your columns in InformationWeek. In a recent column, you indicated that Cindy wasn't a big fan of you writing the column. Hopefully, she doesn't give you too much trouble about it. Perhaps knowing how much others enjoy the column may make it easier for both of you.

Thanks for the continuing insights and humor regarding corporate life.

Ron Rice

Dear Ron:

Thanks for your comments. I showed your letter to Cindy and she said to tell you that she is flattered that other people find some of my comments amusing and helpful. She also says that she does, too. On the other hand, she added that she has to hear them all of the time and you don't.

I read your articles all the time and relish the messages you provide. Now I have a couple of questions of my own and would greatly appreciate some insight from someone who has a higher-level view than my own.

I was hired 10 months ago as the first and only data administrator for a division of a large, well-known corporation. Then the fun stopped; they will not let me work with the obvious stuff that we discussed during interviews such as repository management, data architecture, models, etc. I have no work to do. I sit and read your articles. I am a very qualified data strategist and modeler.

Do you have a reaction? I am back in the job market.

Alex

Dear Alex,

My reaction is that you are doing exactly the right thing (that is, getting back in the job market and reading my articles). Any company that does not follow through on providing the work it promised in the interview and then, without giving you a good reason, lets you sit around idle cannot be trusted. Make sure that you ask your supervisor as to why the change. If you are not satisfied with the answer, then when you find the right job, run--do not walk--to the nearest exit. Be careful, however, not to come across too harshly about your present employer in job interviews. People may question as to what you did to deserve such treatment if you are too vehement about what happened to you.

Just a note to let you know that your articles are the highlight of Information Week for me. I turn to the last page first and read your column. I go into a funk when you're not there. Here's an interesting experience that you may want to comment on or give consideration for a future article, which could be titled, "How to make it hard for people to become effective." I am a contractor who just started working for a large high-tech multinational corporation. This is my saga of getting on the network, E-mail etc.

First my contact manager had to submit a form to get me a user ID--five-day turnaround. Then I had to get an ID for accessing printers and E-mail. Two separate requests. A five-day turnaround to get that ID. then another wait to get technical support to configure my machine. Another 3-5 days until it was finished.

Then my manager determined that I needed dial-in access to E-mail. It took one day to find out the way it's done and six days to complete. Finally as a last request, because of the work I'm doing, I needed to get another ID to get past their intranet firewall to the Internet. For this, I needed to submit a request which was only 48-hour turnaround. Things were looking up! (Little did I know!) The rules of the corporation require that you have a unique employee ID to get an ID for the Internet. But since I was a contractor, I had to submit yet another request for--are you ready--a "pseudo-unique" (whatever that means) ID The turnaround time? Once again five days. The saga continues. You can imagine the reputation (or dis-reputation, actually) of IS in this organization. They could have made it SO simple. They made it simply awful and complicated.

Please, please, let your IS colleagues know that security and convenience CAN go hand in hand--if people think about servicing the ir internal customers first and the technology second.

Lastly, love your articles! Keep them coming! Regards from a victimized (but not the only one, by a long shot!) contractor.

Ron Smith

Dear Ron:

Thanks for a great idea for a column. What a beautiful example of why businesses--and IS shops in particular--win awards for incompetence. Or maybe it's a just a brilliant subterfuge by management to keep people from using up scarce computer resources. In any case, just think of all the opportunity new technology gives to build a bureaucracy behind the statement: "We need to do it that way for the sake of good corporate security."

Of course, these clowns you are talking about probably go whining to corporate management complaining about how understaffed they are. If they actually made the process of getting an ID simple, not only would things move more quickly, but there would be at least a few extra people available to do productive work instead of passing paper back and forth to each other. By the way, I appreciate your comments about the column. It's been moved, though. Look for it a few pages in from the back cover.

I have noticed a very disturbing segregation happening in today's IT industry. The vast majority of up-and-coming undergrads are either technologically inept business-types, or disinterested tech-heads.

My question is: With the demand for IS professionals exceeding the supply, can we afford to specialize in either technology OR business processes? Even more so, can we fall in love with a particular technology when the market is so vast and diverse? In taking a "between-er" approach to technology and business, am I losing out on opportunities?

Thank you for your time

Brian

Dear Brian,

Simple answers frequent ly over-simplify. Recognizing that risk, here goes: The conundrum is that the person with a high degree of specialization (example, SAP or Java knowledge) finds it easier to get a job than the person who is a generalist. However, it is the generalist who more frequently gets promoted into the higher ranks. Bottom-line: both types of people are needed and the real gold goes to the individual who is equally at ease in either camp.

I read " Break The Jargon Habit ." Great story! You hit one of my pet-peeve nails right on the head.

When I was 18 years old, I was a temporary replacement secretary while a computer science engineering student at the local university. I used to listen to other students and also IS managers where I worked use a lot of fancy $100 words.

I've told my kids that they should have more than one way of saying anything--it provides an opportunity to inform m ore people. As they got older, they began to better understand when someone was speaking big words but not saying much. This is a fact of life that IS managers need to take into account--that repeating the most recent buzzwords doesn't get the message across. In fact, we begin to sound like we're talking in circles and not really saying anything. Don't get me wrong. I believe in creating new titles for new techniques or concepts; however, we need to be able to lay out constructively a path from where techniques and concepts originate to the "real" world.

Thanks for the article. I hope many people listen.

Bill

Dear Bill,

We do not comprehend the damage we do to our own creditability by continuing to speak in jargon. Some of us use jargon without realizing it; others of us use jargon to make ourselves seem intelligent. We forget the objective is communication, not trying to get people to think we are smart.

That was a great column on jargon. Such honesty and humbleness is so refreshing in this bizarre reality that is the technology industry. It's good to see someone take a public stand against mind-numbing buzzwords. I think you're right--some IT professionals, vendors, editors, and consultants gain a sense of self-importance when they use them, as if they mark their membership in a special club. However, they only serve to alienate themselves from others in their organizations who use normal, everyday phrases in their speech. Buzzword mania is getting so bad, I'm going to start taking barf bags along to technology conferences.

Mary

Dear Mary,

I love your idea. Maybe we can all take barf bags and at the appropriate time lift them to our faces and cough suggestively. It would sort of be like breaking into spontaneous applause at a really goo d part of a speech, only in this case the opposite!

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