Truth from the Valley

A Practical Primer on Future IT Management Trends

Mark Settle

• Editorial: Productivity Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000026955
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Gestione dell'informazione

Management challenges faced by IT leaders in Silicon Valley will eventually be encountered by IT leaders everywhere. Successful Silicon Valley firms operate in radically different ways when compared with their conventional Fortune 500 counterparts. Valley firms rely almost exclusively on cloud-based business applications and cloud-computing resources to conduct daily business. In addition, they are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools to extract business information from vast quantities of data. Valley firms are operating on the leading edge of the changes taking place within the IT industry. In some cases, they are literally defining the leading edge of such changes!

Truth from the Valley provides insight into ways in which people, process, and technology management challenges have been addressed by IT leaders in Silicon Valley. This book provides a comprehensive portrayal of the trends that will shape IT management practices in the next decade, and it challenges its readers to find ways of converting these challenges into opportunities that will enable their organizations to become more efficient, more impactful, and more business relevant in the future.

PART I

People

“Talent wins games, teamwork and intelligence win championships.”

Michael Jordan,
14-time NBA All-Star, 6-time NBA Champion

Whether we like to admit it or not, IT organizations and their leaders spend far more time trying to remedy the technical debt within their systems than remedying the talent debt within their teams. Leaders and staff members pay lip service to the importance of people in their organizations but if you truly examine the ways they use their time you’ll discover their actions belie their words.

For the purposes of the following discussion, the term “talent” is used in the broadest possible sense. It refers to more than simply skills, knowledge, and experience. It includes personal aptitudes, attitudes, and abilities. It encompasses a willingness to learn; the ability to work collaboratively with others; the willingness to share; the ability to challenge; an aptitude for assessing risk and embracing change; a sense of personal dedication and accountability; an innate curiosity about how the business works; and much more. Talent on a professional sports team is more than simply performing at your assigned position. It’s making others around you better as well. In sports and business, we call that teamwork.

Every organization has talent gaps and people issues. Some have festered for months or years without being addressed in any meaningful fashion. In contrast, production issues occurring within technical systems are routinely documented and tracked. They’re ranked in importance as Priority 0, Priority 1, and Priority 2 concerns. They’re addressed with commensurate levels of management attention and urgency. Severe production issues receive the highest level of management attention and are monitored obsessively until they’re resolved.

It’s curious and revealing that no similar system exists for managing talent-related issues on a routine basis within IT organizations. Although employee performance ratings are supplied by managers, corrective action plans discussed during normal review cycles are primarily viewed as an employee’s responsibility. In many cases, such plans are never explicitly developed or documented. In other cases, they’re developed but rarely discussed until the next review cycle. When performance improvement plans are more formally documented, their intent is frequently to establish a rationale for eventual termination, not to correct the underlying issues that are responsible for an employee’s performance deficiencies. The resolution of employee performance issues clearly lacks the level of accountability that is routinely applied to production support issues.

Why is there such wholesale avoidance of people-related issues? The first and most obvious answer is that most of today’s IT managers started their careers as individual technical contributors. They never aspired to people management roles and consequently they never went out of their way to develop people management skills. They do, however, like to be promoted and consequently they find themselves assuming people management responsibilities in exchange for more pay and grander titles.

Most first-time managers with technical backgrounds abhor annual performance reviews, are clueless about how to respond to issues identified in employee engagement surveys, and struggle to complete succession planning exercises because they can’t imagine that any member of their current team is potentially capable of performing their jobs. Most are notoriously inept people managers which is a direct reflection of the importance they place on the development of their team members or the depths of their personal insecurity in dealing with people-related issues.

A second factor that contributes to the avoidance of talent issues is the difficulty of effecting change. IT may not have the funds needed to expand the skill base of the organization. The existing workforce may be complacent and largely satisfied with the status quo. They may resist the introduction of new technologies or work practices through passive–aggressive behaviors in which they publicly extol the value of such initiatives while doing everything they can to undermine them. The HR processes required to put employees on notice for performance deficiencies may be cumbersome, time-consuming, and onerous. Furthermore, managers may be reluctant to trigger the anxieties of other staff members by dealing forcefully with performance issues. Finally, hiring managers may be genuinely concerned that they won’t be able to find or recruit the human resources they need to fill open positions. Consequently, they resign themselves to the status quo as well.

A third factor that distracts organizations from confronting their talent debt issues is the “superhero culture” that pervades so many IT shops. No matter how unreasonable the demands are from IT’s business partners or how desperate the crisis may be with an existing system, it always seems that selected members of the IT team can muster superhuman efforts to deliver a satisfactory solution. If every demand can be met and every crisis resolved, then there can’t really be skill or capability issues within the IT team, right?

Individual leaders may suffer from a personal superhero complex. Leaders operating under this delusion subliminally believe they are smart enough, insightful enough, and influential enough to solve all problems and overcome all obstacles. As these individuals progress in their careers and assume progressively broader responsibilities they ultimately come up against the scalability challenge. They are forced to realize – sometimes painfully – that no matter how smart they are and no matter how hard they work, they simply don’t possess the breadth of skills and reservoir of time needed to make all the critical decisions within their organizations.

Superhero cultures are not a sustainable means of supporting the demands of an expanding business. It’s the responsibility of every IT leader to ensure that their business colleagues are not misled by tactical successes that disguise the strategic talent deficiencies within their organizations.

The Five Levels of CIO Consciousness

Several years ago, I was asked by a journalist how the role of the CIO had changed over time. (This is a very popular interview question. I’ve been asked it multiple times.) I told her that I found it difficult to separate how the role had changed from how I had changed after holding a series of CIO positions. That was clearly not the answer she was expecting.

As a first-time CIO I spent most of my time trying to prove to myself that I was capable of doing the job. I worked long hours and did my best to acquaint myself with all the activities being conducted within my organization. I thought I was being hugely helpful. Individual staff members seemed to welcome my interest at the time but with 20/20 hindsight I’m sure that many managers and technical leaders thought I was micromanaging their responsibilities. I’ve followed first-time CIOs in two subsequent positions. In both cases the teams I inherited were relieved to discover that I didn’t devote the same attention to operational details that my predecessors exhibited. I’ve concluded that obsessive micromanagement is a common curse for most if not all first-time CIOs.

As a second-time CIO I focused on convincing my direct reports that I was capable of managing them and orchestrating their activities. I was continually seeking validation that they were benefiting from our team interactions. I wanted confirmation that the injection of my knowledge and insights into our team discussions was adding value and assisting them in performing their duties.

In my third incarnation as a CIO, I inserted myself into activities or decisions where I thought I had sufficient knowledge and experience to provide useful advice. I wasn’t terribly discriminating in determining when or where to provide such advice. I simply thought that if I had a point of view on a particular topic, I would try to be helpful by sharing it. In retrospect, I’m sure that I participated in way too many meetings where I was subconsciously trying to prove that I was the smartest guy in the room. I try not to dwell on this level of CIO consciousness because I suspect I was insufferable.

In my fourth CIO assignment, I tried to function as the Chief Quality Control Officer of the IT organization. I chose to participate in major vendor selection decisions and in the planning of major business initiatives. I had come to realize that I didn’t have the bandwidth to involve myself in all the critical decisions taking place within my organization, but I did my best to become involved in those that would have the greatest strategic impact on the IT budget or relations with our business partners. I deluded myself into believing that I could participate in these types of activities as a peer, offering my opinions for objective consideration by others. In retrospect, I’m certain that the majority of managers and staff members involved in these activities interpreted my opinions or suggestions as decisions and responded accordingly.

As my technical skills atrophied and my management responsibilities broadened, I reached the highest level of CIO consciousness. I realized that the easiest, perhaps only, way to succeed was to build really strong teams. Steve Jobs once said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” I have lived by this principle in my most recent CIO roles and it has paid major dividends. This is the fifth level of CIO consciousness: building effective teams and not personally managing specific activities. Fifth-level CIOs focus on three things: obtaining resources, managing company politics, and providing performance feedback to their leadership team. Departmental leaders are responsible for managing the organization. The CIO is shaping it, guiding it, and focusing it on areas where it can have the greatest business impact.

As my career has progressed my experience has become more valuable than my technical knowledge. I’m generally pretty adept at asking all the right questions and usually pretty clueless about what constitutes the correct answers to those questions. I’ve also discovered that suppressing my micromanagement compulsions – whether they are overt or subliminal – unlocks the creativity and initiative of the individuals in my organization.

Too many IT organizations pay too much money to too many individuals and then either tell them what to do or place cultural boundaries on their freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of action. Jobs was right. Why pay so much money for smart, accomplished people if an organization isn’t willing to truly leverage their capabilities?

It can easily be argued that talent and teamwork are the sole remaining sources of competitive business advantage within most IT organizations. SaaS applications and cloud-based infrastructure services can be readily procured at a wide variety of price points. Dozens of consulting firms are available to assist organizations in implementing best practices for Service Management, Agile Development, DevOps, Project Management, Vendor Management, etc. If technology and best-in-class operational practices are readily available to all, talent and talent management emerge as the principal means of differentiating the effectiveness of one IT organization from another.

Very few IT shops can claim they’ve developed proprietary processes or unique uses of technology that are a source of competitive advantage. Companies operating within the same industry are likely to employ many of the same business applications, infrastructure resources, and operational practices. Their IT teams undoubtedly possess many of the same skills. The difference in performance and business impact comes down to people and team culture. People are the catalyst that ultimately allows the combination of skills, processes, and technology in one organization to deliver business value that far exceeds the value created by comparable teams possessing the same structural capabilities.

What’s required to reach the moment of enlightenment in which an organization’s talent issues take center stage? It may be an event. Perhaps a competitor has accelerated the time-to-market of new products, improved customer satisfaction, or reduced operating costs through the innovative use of some new technology. Perhaps it’s a merger or acquisition event that exposes the talent deficiencies within the acquirer’s team when they’re compared to their counterparts in the acquired company. Perhaps it’s the arrival of a new CEO, CFO, or COO who simply has higher expectations regarding the role that the IT department should play in promoting the growth and profitability of their company. In most cases, however, enlightenment occurs over a longer period of time through a series of missteps and failures that expose an organization’s talent deficiencies and undermine its credibility, influence, and business relevance.

Five-Stage Program for Confronting Talent Debt within Your Organization

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was a famous psychiatrist. She chronicled the emotions that humans experience in coming to terms with severe illness in her widely acclaimed book On Death and Dying. While in no way meaning to diminish the significance of her observations regarding the ways that individuals cope with personal tragedy, the five emotional stages described in her book provide a useful framework for characterizing the stages of self-realization that IT organizations experience in coming to terms with their talent debt.

Kubler-Ross identified the following progressive stages of dealing with severe illness: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. For the purposes of this discussion, we will modify the last step of this sequence and turn Acceptance into Action.

Denial. Organizations in denial believe that their existing talent pool is sufficient to address their near-term needs. They may acknowledge gaps in skills, breakdowns in teamwork, or the presence of underperforming team members but conclude that none of these issues is materially impacting the effectiveness of their team. Dysfunctional families display similar characteristics. They tolerate conflict and misconduct, openly neglect selected family members, and fail to hold one another accountable on such a consistent basis that they tend to treat such aberrant behaviors as perfectly normal and acceptable.

Anger. After a prolonged period of denial, organizations are forced to acknowledge lapses in performance due to a lack of talent and teamwork, usually through the failure of a major business initiative or a critical business system. Business executives ask: “How could this happen?” and “Who is to blame?” IT leaders and team members ask themselves the same questions. After years of denial this is the stage in which teams and their leaders feel victimized by circumstances they personally tolerated and perpetuated.

Bargaining. Organizations initiate a series of superficial, half-hearted initiatives at the Bargaining stage of the process to camouflage their deficiencies. These initiatives might include such things as outsourcing selected services, hiring contractors possessing much-needed skills, employing management consultants to re-engineer internal processes, etc. None of these initiatives, pursued individually or collectively, can fully address skill gaps, performance deficiencies, and teamwork lapses within the existing workforce.

Depression. At this stage it has become clear that the piecemeal solutions launched during the Bargaining stage are not addressing the systemic talent management issues within the organization. As the she...

Índice

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Author
• Introduction
• Part I People
• Part II Process
• Part III Technology
• Epilogue
• Abbreviation Glossary
• Index