By

4 Comments

The One True Way syndrome exemplified: the overstated case against code comments

I write frequently, and not without some exasperation, about the perennial search for the “silver bullet” in IT: the holy grail, the end-all, be-all solution to preventing IT failure.

The silver bullet has a very close and similarly pernicious internal twin cousin: the One True Way. That’s a technique or practice that is (usually) adopted by its IT aficionados as the key to overall success, with the important insistence that it will work as long as you follow it to the letter, in all cases, no matter what.

So this post will seemingly be about a specific (and low-level) development issue, but it’s only to serve as an example to illustrate this One True Way syndrome that is so prevalent in IT. At core, my takeaway boils down to the same old message I usually have when it comes to IT matters: be wary of something promising to fix all your problems. Be wary of absolutes. And be especially wary of the combination.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Anecdotes, General, Industry trends, Personal
By

1 Comment

The value of DOING for the CIO: test-driven development

“How technical are you?” This common challenge, almost playground-aggressive in nature, can turn into a sore spot for the CIO today. It’s inevitable (and actually desirable), you see: as you move up to executive rank, you lose your day-to-day involvement in the actual nuts-and-bolts implementation of technical details. Many executives respond by essentially abandoning all direct personal engagement with technology. But to do so across the board is a mistake.

Here, I seldom post directly about technologies or techniques, because, quite frankly, I’ve found in business situations that technology in and of itself is very rarely either the real problem or the real solution. Despite this, I still see technology as an ongoing crucial area of expertise for the CTO/CIO (contrary to the claims of some pundits that I’ve written about before). To maintain this vital expertise, the CIO’s dilemma is as follows: you have to keep your hand in, but you won’t ever have the time or focus to try out every technique, tool, or approach. You’re going to be, at best, a dilettante.

However, just because you’re doomed, as an executive, to be a dilettante doesn’t mean you should give up all efforts to stay current, or that such efforts won’t provide you with useful CIO-level insights. Even a little goes a long way. This post describes one example of that, as a case study.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Education, Personal, Personal R&D
By

10 Comments

“No IT projects”? A practical take

If you follow the news, it’s quite clear that we’re in the “silly season” of politics, that time when people eagerly grab hold of any questionable statement of their opponent and use it to extrapolate rank incompetence or dastardly intentions (or worse). Language is frequently quoted out of context, definitions become blurred, things get inappropriately juxtaposed. We’ve all seen it.

That’s why they call it silly season. And that behavior isn’t just true of politics, but also can appear in normal business life, on Twitter, and (often) in IT matters as well. When I run across items I disagree with, though, I try to remember that rather than expressing categorical disagreement (let alone outrage), it’s far more useful to look first for common ground, then aim to identify the areas of contention or difference in perspective. That struck me recently when I read Todd Williams’ (@BackFromRed) recent blog post with the title “Stop All IT Projects!” and recalled that another esteemed colleague, Steve Romero (@itgEvangelist), has expressed views along the same lines.

Todd and Steve are both smart, experienced IT professionals whom I highly respect. In Todd’s case, we’ve met in person; in Steve’s, we’ve exchanged numerous emails and blog posts over recent years. Both of them unquestionably “get it” when it comes to IT matters. I generally agree with what they post or tweet; they’ve each written books that I recommend to others. In fact, I even agree with much of what Todd writes in this particular post. But still, with consummate respect, I think these colleagues (and others) are picking the wrong battle when they insist so staunchly on “no IT projects”. Here’s why.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Pillars of Purview, Process, Projects, Stakeholders
By

2 Comments

Valuable vs. fun: learning to love IT Asset Management

My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength.

— Michael Jordan

As with so much in life, so it goes with IT: the parts that are fun aren’t always valuable, and the parts that are valuable aren’t always fun. Let’s talk about a hugely valuable side of IT that isn’t really much fun at all. And when it’s not fun, that means that it’s often neglected, and thus turns into a great weakness.

IT assets (hardware, software, systems, services) represent a major investment for most firms today. For “new economy” companies in particular, the cost of such resources (both bringing them on board and maintaining them as corporate assets) often exceeds expenditures in any area other than wages and benefits.

It’s astonishing, then, that firms (not to mention IT management specifically) don’t always embrace the ongoing hard work required to maximize the value of those expenditures and minimize the corporate risks involved. All too often, I see IT asset management (ITAM) neglected by IT executives because, well, it involves a discouraging amount of drudgery to do it right, especially over the long haul. This neglect occurs even more often when an executive succumbs to the latest faddish push for IT to focus on strategy and innovation to the detriment of fundamentals.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Anecdotes, Book reviews, Financial, Process, Recommended reading, Vendor management
By

1 Comment

More timeless, still-relevant information technology jokes

One of my most visited blog posts noted that certain IT jokes tend to come up again and again. That post covered four such familiar jokes, along with what I felt were some common themes uniting them: IT hubris, narrow perspective, self-righteousness. Each of those jokes contains a “grain of truth” to it that makes it funny, to IT and non-IT people alike.

Along those same lines, here are three more time-honored IT jokes, ones you’ve probably already heard if you’ve spent much time in the industry. Again, take a few moments to revisit them and consider what makes them timeless: how the common situations they describe seem to never quite go away. And then I’ll talk about what I think unites them thematically, and the resulting lessons for IT professionals.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: General, Humor
By

2 Comments

IT entropy in reverse: ITSM and integrated software

Why am I an IT professional? Here’s one major compelling reason: you simply can’t rest on your laurels. You can’t stop learning and growing and examining and improving, in all aspects, or you stagnate and die. The best IT professionals, I’m convinced, work energetically and on an ongoing basis, actively striving to push the scales from their own eyes at every juncture. It’s part of the job.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend what was my first industry conference in almost 8 years, Knowledge12, put on by ServiceNow, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of IT service management (ITSM) software. (See my post explaining why I’ve tended to avoid industry conferences in recent years). And to my surprise and delight, I discovered that it was well worth the time. Let me share my thoughts on why.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Anecdotes, Education, Industry trends
By

13 Comments

IT consumerization, the cloud, and the alleged death of the CIO

As with just about any area, IT is a discipline subject to fads and memes, “received truths” that seem to arise in the press or the blogosphere and then ricochet around the echo chamber until they sound plausible even to skeptics. A number of these roll across my Twitter stream every day. But one such meme rises so high to the top that it has to be the sole focus here. And that is the much-repeated “death of the CIO” meme, coupled as it is currently with dreamy visions of the world brought to us by the consumerization of IT and the cloud. They’re all linked, at least in many pundit eyes.

Here’s the gist of their argument: users can go out and get their own technology now; they don’t need IT to do it for them. End-users are now IT-savvy, and can fend for themselves.They’ll bring their own devices (BYOD); they don’t need or want IT to provide devices for them. They’ll procure the services they need and want from the various SaaS offerings in the cloud or from outsourced vendors, and they’ll handle it all themselves.

All this ultimately gets not only expressed as the question of who needs a CIO anymore, it goes even further: who needs an IT department at all anymore? Says one article, “If IT does not provide the end user with the infrastructure they need, the latter can rent it, by the hour or month from companies like Rackspace or Amazon… All you need is a credit card and no approval from IT.”  Other CIO “thought leader” articles feature astonishing blanket statements like, “With the consumerization of IT, consumers can create value for themselves and the enterprise, using technology that costs the enterprise nothing.” And people even take this so far as arguing that the CIO at this point should just leave technology up to the VARs.

Let me be clear once again: this frequent linking of cloud and IT consumerization to the looming demise of the CIO and IT is not just misguided, but actually gets it completely backwards. In fact, I argue that IT consumerization and the cloud will actually elevate the importance of IT within a company, as both a service and a strategic focus.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Role definition, Strategy, Top 25 posts
By

1 Comment

Novels of IT, Part 3: Adventures of an IT Leader

My long quest for an insightful, broad, and practically applicable “novel of IT” finally met with resounding success, once I got my hands on the outstanding book that is the subject of this post: Adventures of an IT Leader, by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, and Shannon O’Donnell.

To recap: I was looking for a book that was both reasonably engaging as a novel and one that accurately portrayed a broad swath of the inner workings, nuances, and personality types that are typically part of the landscape of IT in today’s world. Reading the book should provide a window into common dilemmas and disagreements regarding IT issues, lending perspective and insight into all parties’ motivations and interests. See my earlier posts on Chris Potts’ FruITion and John Hughes’ Haunting the CEO.  Again, my views aside, I should emphasize that all three of these “novels of IT” are worth reading and forming your own opinion.

Adventures of an IT Leader comes by far the closest to meeting the criteria I had outlined for a “novel of IT.”  It opens with an executive, Jim Barton, being unexpectedly tapped as CIO by the new CEO of his firm, after long and successful stints managing other areas of the company.  In short, Barton isn’t an IT person by training or experience. In fact, one reason for his selection as the new CIO is that he has long been the foremost critic of the IT function at his company. And now, unexpectedly, he has to walk a few miles in IT’s moccasins, so to speak. The novel then follows Barton and his numerous IT challenges and crises for about a year.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Book reviews, General, Overview, Pillars of Purview, Recommended reading, Top 25 posts
Mastodon