Vengeance is Mine, Sayeth The Techies

Article appeared in: CIO
Author: Sue Bushell
Date: 4th November 2008

When Terry Childs locked down San Francisco’s data network, it sent shockwaves through the IT world. Think it can’t happen in Australia? Think again.

“IT is a fickle industry where companies want the best staff but aren’t prepared to pay for them,” Searle says. “And IT staff, who realise that they won’t get what they’re worth, have to slave their guts out for minimal pay and work in poor conditions, where it is a constant fight to get resources or capital to purchase equipment to stop things breaking.”

“The IT department and systems are the lifeblood of any company these days, and are one of the hardest working departments, with long hours, weekend work etc. Yet we seem to be given the ‘short end of the stick’ when it comes to pay reviews or money from the budget.

“I would bet that 95 per cent of IT managers wouldn’t be able to do a tenth of the jobs performed by their staff, let alone understand what most of us talk about. And the general feeling from people I have spoken to is that CIOs are either promoted accountants or so far out of touch with technology that they wouldn’t have a clue.”

Another barometer comes from the recruiters. Peter Acheson, COO of Peoplebank, says that as a leader of Australia’s largest ICT skills provider his phones start ringing with employees looking for a new job in direct proportion to levels of discontent.

Acheson knows that when he gets multiple calls (in one recent case, 40-50 calls in a single week) that the levels are rising fast. And in subsequent interviews, Peter is able to get a clear fix on both the severity and causes of smouldering discontent among workers.

Acheson says while he doesn’t believe such anger is endemic it certainly exists, most usually in organisations where management hasn’t got the brief about IT as a key business enabler.

“Five or 10 years ago, when CIO stood for ‘Career Is Over’, IT was largely treated as a necessary but expensive evil,” Acheson says. “As a direct consequence, IT managers and their teams weren’t afforded much respect, and levels of frustration were high.”

Now that most organisations see IT as an enabler, like sales or marketing, and a potential source of competitive advantage, Acheson sees that most have employed skilled CIOs and IT managers who have implemented up-to-date workplace practices that protect the broader business.

“So in short, endemic dissatisfaction is largely confined to the ‘odd angry workplace’ that’s characterised by poor management and/or a lack of respect for IT,” he says.

Airing Grievances

It may also be the case that IT is seen as “angrier” since IT folks have become more apt to complain in public venues. Patrick Gray, owner of US-based Prevoyance Group and author of Breakthrough IT: Supercharging Organizational Value through Technology, says he wrote about exactly this topic and got quite an earful on TechRepublic (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=546).

“I think IT tends to fault ‘management’ — those nameless, faceless corporate-types — when the problem lies on both ends of the spectrum,” Gray says. “IT people are not seen as valuable, and their positions on things like security are ignored because they are not couched in a business context. That ‘suit’ who seems to ignore IT’s recommendations really doesn’t want to hear about cryptography standards, some tidbit from DEFCON or other esoteric technical lingo. They want a dollars and cents explanation of the impact, and some options to mitigate risk. When IT can articulate a problem in that fashion, the corporate types will react.

“Terry Childs should be jailed, and anyone in IT that makes veiled threats about taking down their company’s infrastructure should face the same investigative and legal actions as an accountant that glibly threatens to steal from the company coffers,” Gray says.
“Part of the reason for IT’s poor treatment and lack of respect is precisely this type of tactless gamesmanship.”

Once Were Heroes

Of course there is nothing new about technicians holding their employers to ransom. Infonomics managing director and Standards Australia Technical Committee IT-030 Chair Mark Toomey saw his first case almost 30 years ago. In that case, he says, it was all about money — the technician wanted a bigger slice of the action. These days there can be a much wider range of drivers.

“Recently, I reviewed an organisation’s IT at the request of the board,” Toomey says. “There had been a number of fairly serious operational problems and the company was suffering because of them.

“What I found was that most people in the IT and business operations area had been working excessive hours over a very long period, and were exhausted. Of course, tired people make mistakes and this was a classic example. There was a senior executive who was getting kudos for the achievements of the heroes who worked the long hours while hiding that overwork situation from the rest of the executives and the board. Of course, the scheme backfired and with some simple changes, the overload problem went away, people were able to think clearly, and the operational problems stopped happening.
“However, nobody here was particularly angry or vindictive; they were just trying hard and hoping that they would survive. I suspect that this situation, where the risk is not a dramatic action but a progressive and serious reduction in performance, is much more commonplace and deserving of considerable attention,” Toomey says.

Toomey also says it was once the case that IT specialists were heroes, working grossly excessive hours as they wrangled raw new technology into submission. Those days are gone — the technology now submits much more benignly, and the wrangling has moved from the technology arena to the business arena, where the new problem is the business use of IT.

Now, he says, everyone knows business depends “pathologically on IT” but too many business leaders are oblivious of their responsibility to use the tool properly and to thoroughly understand the constraints and to accept a level of responsibility. At the same time demands on every technician are far greater, forcing even the most low-level technical people to have an understanding of the business context in which they operate.

And, Toomey says, too many business leaders failed to consider the long-term consequences of their decision to downsize IT after Y2K and GST projects were completed, which has directly contributed to the current skills shortage and hence pressure on the industry.

“Bottom line: organisations are at risk not only from discontented IT workers, but from the broad negative messages that business gives to the marketplace about IT,” Toomey says. “Smart organisations will adopt practices that align with ISO 38500, the new international standard for corporate governance of IT, ensuring that they have the right mix and calibre of skills to ensure that their organisation performs as it should, with very clear understanding and quite deliberate attention to the myriad human behaviour factors that will underpin the performance.”