InformationWeek

September 29, 1998

Your letters to my print column and this E-mail forum ask some serious questions about managing information technology in today's world. Since today's world is essentially absurd, my serious responses may sometimes sound a little whimsical, and my occasional whimsical ones, serious. In any case, if you want to participate, write to me at lovelace@home.com. I'll respond to those letters that I can. I reserve the right to edit for size and content. Just sign your E-mail the way you want it to appear online.

Dear Herb:
As your article "What To Do? Just Sue!" implies, the year 2000 problem will be a nightmare for our tax structure and it will break down, but thinking about beating the IRS at the tax game when the year 2000 comes is the wrong attitude.

Do you think you are the only one this clever? Millions of others will be counting on the confusion. So what if the public utilities don't get any money--who needs clean water, anyway? I meet far too many people who feel they are going to put one over the IRS and the banks when the year 2000 breakdown comes, and your article seems to be making light of a very serious problem.

It is attitudes like that and an indifferent attitude to this problem by the general public that will cause the majority of panic and chaos. I assume you are not just another Dilbert manager and realize the enormity of year 2000 in every aspect of everything we use.

Use your reach to inform about a serious problem and not make light of it, but then I guess your multibillion-dollar corporation has checked with every vendor and checked every line of code internally and every piece of data received externally to ensure compliance, hasn't it?

I wish I could smile like you, but people who are in important positions are the ones that should be out doing something and not sitting around smiling at the coming chaos that you know as well as I do will not be funny at all.

Ben

Dear Ben:
I really don't know how bad the year 2000 problem will be--but on the other hand, I don't think anyone really does. Like you, I've read all the predictions of horror as well as the few folks who say it will be a big yawn. And also like you, I am taking the problem seriously. My particular company has a compliance team working to ensure that we have catalogued the potential problems and how we will react to the unanticipated ones. Perhaps you have not been a long-time reader of the column, but there has been quite a bit in them about the year 2000 situation. In addition to "What To Do? Just Sue!" I have written about the problem in "The Year 2000 Advantage" and "2001: An IS Oddity" In both articles, I stressed the importance of developing SWAT teams to handle situations in which we had not properly corrected code. In "1998: Year Of Conversions" I pointed out that we needed to concern ourselves with instrumentation problems in plants and factories as well as business system implications of Y2K. From time to time, I have amplified on the year 2000 issue in this on-line column. You might look at the May 12, 1998 edition where I attempted to dissuade Frank G. from being so eager to assume that there were no real difficulties with process-control systems. If I had to make a guess--and that's all it is--I suspect that there will be a few major incidents such as scattered power outages for a few hours, a bank or two that is non-compliant and has to scramble, and some governmental difficulties in tax-compliance software. All in all, however, I expect us to muddle through the problems.

Dear Herb:
I am a Wharton MBA student working on a high-tech marketing project. My sponsor is a very large software company, and my enviable chore is to find IT managers in other industries and survey them. What would be an efficient way for me to identify some potential subjects?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Lost In IT Land

Dear Lost:
Probably the most efficient way of earning what your sponsor is paying is to write to the various columnists in computer magazines and ask them to give you recommendations on how to gather lists of IT managers whom you can survey. On the other hand, I think that when Tom Garrity became dean of the Wharton School, he had other ideas as to how you might enhance your academic training experience.

Since I think that you should try to make Tom happy, it is desirable for you to discover on your own how to gather the information. Perhaps I can give you some help on how to get started.

Let me suggest that you go to the excellent library you have on campus and begin a literature search of the top IT executives in the corporations in the United States. You will find this information contained in volumes that list the officers of the major companies. You can also find the same information on the Web. In addition to this method, you can obtain the names of IT executives from publications, including InformationWeek's annual InformationWeek 500 listing. Other computer magazines have other lists.

Dear Herb:
I am a graduate student in library and information science, and I've seen numerous references to the potential of people from my field becoming CIOs. Can you give me an idea of the real-world likelihood of this happening?

S.

Dear S:
I have been unable to correlate the educational training of the CIOs that I know in any meaningful way. I know CIOs who were engineers, scientists, accountants, musicians, career military officers, English majors, and business school graduates, among others. In fact, I suspect that if you named a major taught in a university, somewhere there is a CIO with that degree.

The dominant indicator of success at obtaining a CIO job is initiative and performance in management positions that have been assigned to you. Having said that, I am sure that the training that a person receives in a good information sciences program provides a strong technical background that would be useful to a potential CIO.

Dear Herb:
I think your column "So You Want To Be A CIO" was one of the best ever. Unfortunately, I shared my only copy with someone just before I went to Brazil on business and when I returned, it had disappeared. Could you please send be a copy via this medium?

I would appreciate it much.

Regards,

Jim

Dear Jim: Thanks for your kind words. You can read the column by clicking here. You can find archived print columns using the search box at the bottom of this page.

Dear Herb:
I wanted to respond to your column "So You Want To Be A CIO."

Thanks. I thought it was good, and a good discussion of many seemingly endless no-win situations. It is a good description of the job, and I am thankful that you are seeking to prepare people for that role. As a system administrator who has considered a CIO role, believe it or not, I have already encountered a lot of similar situations.

One thing I disagree with in your article is the statement that there aren't any wrong answers. There certainly are answers to each of the questions that are clearly better than others, or clearly worse.

For example, in No 3, you are asked for a quick-and-dirty estimate, and promised you will not be held to it. If I were in that situation, I would try to get all the information I could, then try not to give any estimate without a whole lot of data. Any estimate I would give would be shooting far in excess of the real estimated time to give us room for failure.

Wanna-Be CIO

Dear Wanna-Be: Unfortunately, in a real-life situation, it's unlikely you could get away with refusing to give an estimate. If people need to make a business decision, they will rarely settle for anything but an answer. You will hear comments like, "Well, just give us an educated guess. Surely you can do that."

If you high-ball the estimate in order to protect your staff, it won't take long before your reputation will be set in mud, especially when someone's cherished project bites the dust because of the numbers you have given.

Sorry, but I stand by my conviction that there are some fairly heavy downsides to just about every way of handling a lot of situations faced by CIOs--and, for that matter, other people in business.

Dear Herb:
I can't thank you enough for your column "IT People Aren't Plumbers" on the severe disconnect between corporate business management and their IT counterparts. Your words were right on the money; They describe my world exactly.

In my experience, far too many business leaders view IT as a necessary evil (if not the enemy within), rather than a viable, valuable business asset that needs to be brought out of the basement, into the boardroom, and made to permeate the entire business operation. This transition appears to be extremely difficult to learn, judging by the number of IT professionals who are virtually forced to leave company after company in search of an organization that solicits, implements, and appreciates their input.

Thanks again for the fine words.

JC

Dear JC: There is a tendency for people to belittle anything in which they don't understand the difficulty of achieving good performance. As a result, you hear comments about all sorts of professions and occupations, from medicine to sports. Envision the guy sitting home in front of the television set with his beer and pretzels shouting, "How could that bum drop that pass, he should have had it!"

Likewise, systems people have had to put up with a lot of carping about what they do for a living. What is ironic is that companies would get a lot more out of their high-priced IT help if they treated them as members of their permanent staff instead of as a bunch of contractors. Then these same executives wonder "Where has all the loyalty gone?" which, by the way, was the original title of the column.

Dear Herb:
The lack of appreciation illustrated in your column "IT People Aren't Plumbers" has been going on for years. Had I known it was going to take CIOs until 1998 to figure it out I would have told them years ago. If you wrote this article just to try to appeal to IT professionals, we are smarter than that.

John

Dear John: This lack of appreciation has been going on for more years than I can remember. I wasn't trying to appeal to IT professionals when I wrote the column. I was trying to comment on a situation that I think is damaging to the relationship between companies and their IT employees--and hurts both.

Herbert W. Lovelace is CIO at a multibillion-dollar international company. Herb practices his day job under an alias and has changed the names of colleagues to protect the guilty.

View past issues of "Ask The Secret CIO"