I’m reminded this week of one important success factor of the edge-of-network platform, as well as other software projects I was involved with in the past: the lack of involvement of IT people.
The less IT department is involved in a project, the more likely it is to succeed and provide more benefits to its intended users.
Usually, in budget-based organizations IT is a mix of phone-holster nerds and types without any engineering background, people who “decided to take a shot at this IT thing,” at some late point in their lives. The mentality in most of these departments is “users are stupid, we are protecting them from themselves,” which is a shorthand for “we need to hide our incompetence.” Most places I’ve seen, there is more bureaucracy coming from IT department then from HR and accounting combined.
The story is always the same: everything starts out fine and friendly; development is usually a honeymoon. When the first deployments bring good feedback, as a rule, the IT person identifies himself or herself with the success, becoming Mr. or Ms. Successful Product. When the time comes to move forward to the next version, suddenly Mr. Success becomes anxious and aggressive, blocking any kind of progress. Better to sacrifice those that might benefit from improvements than to risk the position of “success.” Or to relinquish control.
Dilbert’s IT preventer comes to mind. This cartoon is so real-life, it’s scary.
Working with professional non-IT people is usually the opposite: focus is always on making sense of technology in the context of the concrete problem; it’s all about how technology can help and where it cannot. It is refreshing to be around people who know how to ask why?
Of course, there are always exceptions; really constructive people in IT departments do exist – usually they become bosses and I had the pleasure of meeting a few in my career. Past few years though, the rule was without exception on every project I participated in. Whenever there was an IT person involved in decision-influencing role, the project finished either with abandon or fell short of expectations.
2 responses so far ↓
Tim France // November 30, 2007 at 11:26 |
Nice one Damir, I hope you feel better with that one off your chest.
Do you know what your description reminds me of? The rise and fall of the architects’ profession.
There was a time, not so long ago, that if you needed to build anything (buildings, I mean) you had to start by appointing an architect. seeing as how they drafted the plans for the building, it was also assumed that they were in a good position to run the whole building project. Then without warning, along came a new breed: Planning Engineers.
Two good links:
Planning Engineers Organisation and
Mace
With the appearance of Planning Engineers, it took about two seconds for everyone to realize just how crap architects had been doing at delivering projects on time/budget, and how they had been hiding it for decades. The new kids on the block really knew how to manage construction projects, and how to understand what their clients wanted – within less another decade they totally pulled the carpet out from under the architects’ feet (laughing all the way to the bank, incidently).
Getting back to the IT-preventers, I think you are right on the button – they are just like the architects were ten years or so back. Question is though, where is the disruptive force going to come from to pull the rug from under them? I would suggest that it might not be like architects’ collapse at all, but will be more like Skype’s disruption of the long-distance telephone industry: Users will just vote with their feet and start adopting alternative (i.e., user-friendly) tools that don’t need a nerd to make them work. They will go around the IT-preventers.
My biggest concern (now I think of it) is that once the shit hits the fan for the IT guys/girls, those very same people will move sideways into another ‘let’s have a go at this’ career path. Please don’t let it be into my back yard!
Damir Simunic // December 2, 2007 at 20:49 |
Tim, agreed: probably it won’t end like the architect’s profession. Because in this case there’s really no profession to talk about.
I guess today’s popular trends, ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Enterprise 2.0′ are all about people slowly realizing there’s much more to software than constant ‘no can do’ excuses and bureaucracy of IT departments.
Even the infrastructure maintenance role they provide to the organization is becoming less important with advances in hardware. I envision 10-15 years from now having IT department role merging with building maintenance. Every large company employs electricians, and in the same way it will employ IT maintainers.
Producing easy to use software requires completely different skill set than an average IT department has. It will probably take the next generation of management to realize this and make the necessary transition. Today’s management is too invested into the current, central role of IT department.