I previously talked about the difficulty I have getting through the dozen or more computer industry magazines a month. They seem to multiply in the night. Its easy to do – well more than half of them are free and every single one started out with my reading a really good article in someone else's copy and filling out the subscription card. But now I find I regularly have 80 hours of reading a week to fit into my 8 hours of allocated reading time. I rarely seem to get all the way through even the ones I desperately want to read. But I try – really publishers, I try every week.
I try for the same reasons we all do. The current rate of technological change is so high it require Herculean efforts to stay up with even the high points. There is little hope for most of us to really be knowledgeable and current on anything but our own narrow specialties, and even there, its often a struggle. Keeping the current systems running, planning and budgeting for the new system and educating ourselves through technical journals leaves precious little time for most people to have a personal life. This pressure causes stress, burnout, personal problems and ultimately, the loss of skilled staff members.
InformationWeek recently had a little blurb on a management survey of some of the largest companies in the country. The number one Information Technology concern of these managers was they may not have enough skilled employees to make their current technology investments worthwhile. They also believe difficulty in finding these skilled employees will be the most significant negative effect on their companies ability to implement IT projects over the next three years. In a similar vein, their second most pressing concern was the small size of the staffs working with their new systems. Somehow, this seems at odds with the flurry of hype about a programmer-less future I read in the PC rags (aah, magazines) and wrote about last column.
Let me jump back briefly to the other major theme I see in the trade
press – the search for the 'killer app'. It seems that everyone is
once again searching for the silver bullet, the killer application, to
leapfrog them over their competitors to the top of the heap. In my
humble view, this type of mentality is perhaps the primary motive driving
the merger mania we are seeing in the market place. The easy solution
to any business problem seems to be to stumble on a company that's the
perfect complement to our problems and merge with them. I hope for
everyone's sake that most of these mergers turn out better than I expect
(see my column in the
August N&R).
To recap for a moment, we have extreme rates of change with individuals (both management and programmers) having difficulty keeping up. We have serious concern by senior management that lack of skilled staff is, and will be for the foreseeable future, their most serious Information Technology problem. In the face of this we have articles touting various staff reducing technologies such as Rapid Application Development. And finally, we have a widespread search in both vendor and endures communities for the Holy Grail, a 'killer app' that will save our fannies without any fuss or muss. Let's examine for a moment the way these various observations interact.
In my job as a consultant, I am constantly immersed in companies under stress filled with people under stress. Top management is more widely read and technologically aware than ever before, and at the same time, just as ignorant of what it really takes to deliver as ever. This puts middle management in a bind. They are often asked (or worse, told) to deliver state of the art system "just like in that article" without the knowledge, the training, the budget or perhaps even without the business justifications to make it work.
The analysts and programmers who's ranks have been thinned through cutbacks and efficiency drives, are now asked to produce new systems when they have no handle on the new technology. Also, they usually have to maintain the old systems while working on the new, further stretching resources. Notice, the survey did not mention budget as a problem. Money is often available, but spent in thoughtless ways. Consider what message you are sending to your current employees if you hire new people or an outside company to do the new systems and leave them in the rear of the bus. You could be isolating and alienating your best resources and your best business knowledge when you need them the most. All to often its obvious to the current people in the trenches that the new project will fail to deliver the promised improvements (or fail outright), but they are never asked for their input. Pick shops are particularly vulnerable to these problems because they may appear to be more outdated, while they are actually delivering better solutions with less hardware and less staff as starting points.
The road to success is not easy. There is no silver bullet, no killer app to fix years of decline and neglect. The brunt of the effort falls on the middle management layers of a company. You are the ones who need to take charge of your company's Information Technology future. I'll leave you with a few honest consultant's suggestions on how to start.