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IT Excellence: The Human Component

The two events converged when Gregor Bailar, CIO of CapitalOne--the financial services powerhouse that took the top spot in the InformationWeek 500 ranking--spoke at the conference. He told attendees to think out of the box, to try new ideas like using the iPod in a business setting as a way of getting end-users excited about technology.

Other speakers echoed the theme. Michael Hammer, organizational guru, talked about improving business processes, although not at the expense of common sense. He also exhorted ITers everywhere to become more collegial, aggressive, and able to handle ambiguity. That means banishing old thinking including the favorite: "'If they don't know what they want, I can't write the spec,'" Hammer said.

For his part, MIT professor Michael Hawley said he worries that a willingness to settle for mediocrity could hold back technical progress. "We're duct-taping our way through," he says.

And so, after reading all these wonderful reports, here I am noodling over *how* to put this stellar advice into practice within any given group of IT people. Specifically, how to foster and reward innovation within IT, to help IT staffers think like the customer, how to infuse excitement and to help IT people "talk business." Because none of this is likely to happen on its own.

Given today's realities, most IT folks--most of the ones I know, anyway--are technologists first and everything else second, third, or fifth. And in, fact, they have very specialized areas of knowledge. Someone who knows Windows XP well enough to troubleshoot it probably doesn't also know Oracle's database and Cisco's router hardware at that same level. Nobody can know that much--and if you do, I hope you're being paid exceedingly well.

For many IT staffers, the question becomes how to open up their extremely deep wells of knowledge and help them share what they know as well as learn new business-oriented skills. And I wonder--can one person serve in both functions equally well?

As one answer to that question, I keep coming back to a bit of advice from my church's previous minister. When he decided to move on in his career, a bunch of us started brainstorming about the type of minister we'd like to hire next (and yes, we get to interview and hire our minister). What kind of skills would we want her to have? A rabble-rouser who works for social justice and is a 'public face' for our church within the community as a whole, someone who can visit shut-ins and the sickly, help raise money for all types of new church programming, and of course handle all the administration tasks needed. Why, yes, that would be just swell, a bunch of us opined.

After hearing all this, our outgoing minister just smiled and said, "Something tells me that the type of person who's called to visit the hospital-bound may not be the same type of person who wants to be out protesting in the streets. Good luck in your search."

And so I wonder - are we (the industry as a whole, that is) putting a set of unrealistic expectations on IT staffers? Are we expecting one person to be able to 'do it all' -- have exceedingly broad and deep technical knowledge and skills, have great people skills, and be able to understand and 'speak' many facets of the business side too? (Conversely, I wonder if the business people are also expected to understand IT in the same ways that IT staffers are expected to understand the business.) How many of us are really that well-rounded?

In the spirit of learning from each other, I invite you to share your stories of what's worked for you. Have you worked in a line of business as well as in a central IT group and, if so, how did that go? How else have you learned 'the business,' and how has your employer helped you do so?

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