InformationWeek

December 22, 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:
Loved your column entitled, "What To Do? Just Sue!."

We have built a very profitable practice around serving the year 2000 compliance needs of small banks here in the Dallas area. A major program is our legal services officer-director liability protection planning, which is headed by a former FDIC section chief. Our package ties the technical, regulatory, legal liability and public relations management into one package for the banks.

We are currently positioning the business to be acquired by EDS, Keane, or a similar company.

Howard

Dear Howard:
Sounds very impressive. I especially like the public relations part of your package, although you might have difficulty getting your message out post-Jan. 1, 2000, if the year 2000 problem hits very hard.

Smart move to position yourself for sale to one of the big boys. Might be a good idea if you try to sell out within the next few months or so, however. You could be facing a real Texas-sized drought if this big crisis we all fear just doesn't happen.

Dear Herb:
With respect to your article, "The Pre-Need Apology," there is a related problem that we in the IT world have.

In an effort to explain to our non-IT management what we have to do to implement a new system for them, we simplify the explanation so that we can explain it in a reasonable amount of time. Then it sounds so simple they wonder why it takes so long, costs so much, and doesn't do everything we promised when it's all done.

Thanks for your column. I try to read it all the time.

Ken M.

Dear Ken:
You have hit upon the core of the problem. In order to explain what we want to do, we simplify the idea so that we can provide a rudimentary outline in the amount of time others are willing to listen to us. Of course, they don't realize that when the project fails because they didn't invest the appropriate amount of time in really understanding it, they will be spending an inordinate amount of their valuable time trying to figure out where it went wrong, or at least how many people to shoot for the failure. The assignment of blame takes priority over analyzing the disaster for lessons on how to avoid repetition of the fiasco in the future.

However, this problem of short attention spans and long failure reviews is not unique to the information technology field. In the movie industry, it is well-known that the concept pitch for a multimillion-dollar film need last only a few seconds. For example, we can imagine the concept pitch for a biblical spectacle about Adam and Eve going along the lines of, "Boy meets girl in Paradise. Some snake sells her on giving it all up for an apple! Boy sticks with girl even though they lose their lease and get the boot. Closing scenes about the tension between their sons that is a perfect setup for the sequel."

I am sure that somewhere, at least one executive-level approval meeting for an enterprisewide system such as SAP or Baan had to be sold with just that level of detail.

On the other hand, if we could cast Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise as project managers in our companies, maybe no one would care what we promised that our systems would do.

Dear Herb:
I read "The Real Power Broker". If you want to place your money on Gornish, fine--but if you want to keep your good employees, be a leader, and not simply "a boss," spend more time with Stephanie.

Keeping your pay rates competitive will not keep your good people. I know that when they check out, they always say it is "for more money," but that is rarely the real reason. Generally, they are simply too polite to tell you that the work/policies/working conditions/whatever simply were lousy. Read the data presented in InformationWeek a few months ago. It will tell you the same thing.

You are expected to fight it out with Gornish, that is part of the job. But a bigger part is to keep your employees. With whatever training you have been able to give them, your investment in them far outweighs any overhead cost blip you will see from going along with Stephanie and seeing what it will take to retain them.

Pete M.

Dear Pete:
You are correct that while most people make more money by switching jobs, it's frequently not why they start thinking about moving, nor is money enough to keep them from leaving. However, I don't think that the column disagreed with that point of view.

Stephanie is a bureaucrat right down to her wing-tip pumps and, if you re-read the column, you'll find that what she was proposing was a whole set of employee conclaves to discuss problems, formulate options, and ensure everyone was simpatico with the company's objectives while fulfilling their own career goals. Her focus was on getting them to understand that what was good for the company, was good for them. She thought that just talking about the issues was enough to show that the company cared. Nowhere did she advocate that we actually do something about them.

While I have my battles with Sid, it was clear to him--and I agreed with him--that her plan would just stir up discontent. I suggested paying them market-rate salaries and stop treating them as a bunch of contractors who were a necessary evil. I felt that we needed both elements--a fair wage and the respect due them for their contributions--in order to resolve the difficulties that we faced.

Dear Herb:
Enjoyed "The Real Power Broker".

Reminded me of the time our local fire department insisted on opening up our dead-end street in the name of safety. We neighbors petitioned against it as unnecessary.

To make the story short, I got the fire department's attention at one meeting when I suggested that perhaps we need to review the budgets and pensions. Wow, what a reaction! I hit a nerve.

In the end, we came to a mutual compromise--a gated fire access to be used only during emergencies.

By the way, where do you spend your daytime hours?

David A.

Dear David:
It is amazing how easy it is to get people to work with you on solving a problem once you get their attention. You may not have made many friends at the local firehouse, but it does seem as if a sensible solution was agreed upon which was satisfactory to all.

I get a lot of letters similar to yours, asking me where I work. So, with regard to your question as to where I spend my daytime hours, the answer is at my desk doing needless paperwork and at useless meetings in the corporate headquarters building.

Dear Herb:
I much very much enjoyed "The Real Power Broker". Your suggestion to "simply pay people the market rate" really hit home. But where I work, there's another dimension to the dynamics and I'd like your opinion on it:

Although all employees at this company are requested not to discuss salaries (definitely not "open book management" here), many are aware of what their peers are making, and it seems most are making about 10% to 15% below industry averages. Of course for an average to be such there must be someone at the low end, so that's not the odd part.

What seems more significant to me is that the company has a fairly high turnover rate and maintains what appears to be a rather large recruiting staff--approximately one full-time recruiter for every 40 employees.

In my limited experience, the number of recruiters here is three times greater than any number I've seen anywhere else. Does this strike you as a high number?

Given that the company tends to hire young people fresh out of school, pays them substantially below average, and appears well-equipped with recruiters to replace them easily, it would appear as through the company has a business model which favors short-term gains from suppressing salaries over the long-term benefits of retention.

Some at the company say I'm paranoid, and the company justifies the seemingly large number of recruiters with "We need to have that many to process the number of resumés that come in," but since processing resumés is not part of the core business this seems an odd investment.

What do you think?

- Anonymous (of course)

Dear Anonymous:
It is possible that you are being a paranoid. However, you should remember that even paranoids can have people plotting against them.

It could be that your company views their IT professionals as job shoppers and has made a conscious effort to work the neophytes as hard as possible and then replace those who leave. Their rationale might be that it is cheaper to do so than either outsource everything or pay higher wages to everyone. The large accounting firms have been accused of such a strategy, dangling the potential of a partnership for the few who survive the struggle.

On the other hand, don�t discount the possibility that your company doesn't have a clue as to how to motivate people and has just given up on trying to retain their professionals. Certainly the ratio of recruiters to staff is very high based on what I am accustomed to seeing in any well-managed IT shop.

I would not focus on the apparent 10% to 15% percent differential in pay that people can get for leaving the company. Let me let you in on a secret: Practically every company figures that they have to pay anywhere from 10% to 20% to get a person to change jobs. Now, let me let you in on an every bigger secret: The assumption underlying that willingness to pay the differential is that over time--if the person sticks with you--the salaries will even out as a manager gives merit increases in his or her organization. In other words, there�s rarely a free lunch--even in information technology.

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.

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