The Dilbert Life Series – A Bad Manager’s Priorities

As usual the normal disclaimer applies: don’t take yourself to seriously. Relax

Where great managers can make a serious difference in many ways to both the success of a company and to the personal achievements of their employees the opposite also happens. Many types of managers exist. Dealing with or even controlling them, depending on whether you live above or under them is well documented. The aim of that is to get the best out of the resources and people available. The better the managers, the better this will work out. Perfection is not of this world and you won’t have the best possible manager for every possible position. That’s a given, just like they won’t have the best possible employee or consultant for every job or project. So there is no need to get emotional about it or expect perfection before calling something good. There is however one type, the bad manager, that should not be controlled. They should be dealt with in only one way which is termination. If that’s not possible you need to get as far away from them as possible. Mind you the latter is only an option if you’re a subordinate employee. If, as a boss you run away from bad subordinate manager than you really need to reconsider your career choices.

Me, Myself and I

A bad manager will never choose you over his or her own priorities, nor will they put the organizations needs first. The first is by definition. Don’t take it personal. The company does not exist for your needs. The second is more problematic as the organization’s needs are priority one. Let’s take a look their priorities in order of declining importance as determined by experience.

1.  Me, myself and I. This is normal and it applies to everyone. But there is more to this than just plain self-interest. People who are given or rise to power, have a strong tendency to put their own needs and interests above those of others. Your manager’s ambitions & agenda (professional, personal and financial) will always take precedence of any need you might have. They need to fill their treasury and the pressure to “live up to expectations” of their overlords is on.
2. Reputation. Managers need to be seen & act as very reliable, trustworthy persons who can get results. With some luck they are. But we all know about “perception is reality”. This is true until you hit the ground after jumping of the 36 floor because you pretend you can fly. Whether a bad manager actually delivers anything is irrelevant as long as the perception is there. Office politics are part of the game and they don’t take prisoners. Your boss is going to be more prone to protect his or her reputation than to protect yours. That’s why managers get pissed off about even only a perceived loss of reputation. In the dog eat dog world they’ll even ruin your reputation if and when needed as they can’t be seen as the root cause of problems. They’ll blatantly steal your work and take credit for all that goes well in the same way. You’re an expendable asset and you should never forget it.
3. Their superiors. This is both hierarchical and functional. It’s not only the fact that a lot of people feel the need to please others for whatever reason. It is also just self-interest (promotions, ego) and self-preservation. So realize that your managers will almost always choose to follow their bosses or the peers they fear or need in order to gain a stronger or more favorable position with them. Yes, they will do so even if it is bad for the company or organization. This holds a warning: if you’re a functional superior to your managers than you’re a threat and they might try to get rid of you.
4. Customers. You can forget about being more important than the needs of the customers. Whether these are external or internal customers is irrelevant. Your managers job is to serve the need of the customers. Your managers will not get ahead if he doesn’t serve their needs.
5. The team. Yes the team, the assets are more important than you. As long as managers can have the team do what needs to be done, they have a way of serving the above priorities, which are more important. In that respect the ability of a manager to keep the team running is paramount. They’ll feed the teams just enough to keep them alive, hopeful enough to carry on and will challenges them to keep them sharp. Keep ‘m mean, lean & hungry.
6. You. Sure you have some skills they needs. If not they might keep you around just to add another FTE to the head count in order to proof the importance or the weight of their jobs. So he won’t kick you most of the time and will even throw you a bone every now and then. Good doggy. But you know that saying “People are our biggest asset?” It’s a lie, especially to them.

How to deal with this?

The above is always true in a lesser way for all individuals and as such also for managers. The big difference is that the balance has totally shifted to the dark side with really bad ones. In essence you have a couple of options. Grow a pair of balls and make sure you have some power as well, play the same game and get them terminated. If your upper management is worth their pay they might be way ahead of you and that will bet the end of it for you. If it has to come from the bottom realize that this is not easy. Terminating a manager from lower in the hierarchy always upsets the powers that be. To them such an event is highly disconcerting and visions of guillotines, tar, feathers and pitch forks pop up. Another option is to take evasive maneuvers. You could do so by moving laterally or vertically in the organization out of harm’s way. Last but not least. Leave. Yes, that might not be fair on you and what you already accomplished at the company but life is not fair and is certainly too precious to put up with the above. In the end you must know your opponent and know yourself. Perhaps you can live with them and there are various ways of dealing with various types of managers, who all have their weaknesses and strengths. It’s a personal decision, but a real bad manager, that’s something you really can do without and shouldn’t tolerate ever, for your own health and well-being.

Key Take Aways From MMS2013

Introduction

I’ve parked myself at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas awaiting the start of my long haul home to Europe. The new terminal is inspiring me to share as I reflect on the past week and on what’s happening at work.

ICT in the 21st Century

A lot is going on and moving in ICT and even more is coming our way. In the Microsoft sphere we got the official heads up at MMS2013 that new features would be publicly discussed at TechEd 2013 (USA or Europe). So you might want to attend that one. I for one think that’s great. We need that information to verify we’re still are on the right track and fine tune our course. Especially in those areas where we can get quick wins with sometimes significant cost savings & benefits.  I could start telling you about all the great sessions and products at MMS2013 whilst quacking like a duck “cloud, cloud, …, cloud, cloud, cloud, … cloud”. But I will not. You can watch it all here.  I will reflect on the key take away.

Cheaper & Faster

Cheaper AND faster are the new mantra or’ “fast is the new cheap”. Cheaper makes everyone happy especially when quality remains high. Faster is sometimes a bit more of a challenge to sell. “New features, already?”  you say. Yes. The nature of our economies and industry is being transformed by the cloud and commoditization. It brings a lot of benefits, especially in a high speed, low drag world.

Fast is actually faster. For many years now any strategy & execution plan that took more than a couple of years was doomed. You get bypassed and your big investments will never live up to their potential. So, apart from the necessary larger and more long term investments, we evolve more and more towards a perpetual improvements & rapid adoption model. Innovation and the subsequent commoditization of it is pushing this. That’s not bad. By making constant smaller (easier to fund) investments that deliver fast results we get to a more adaptable, agile environment for lesser costs. It’s not that all long term, large scale projects are going away but the ratio is shifting. In smart countries this is already being done for building hospitals and other infrastructure that evolves fast. It’s not unique to ICT. Massive projects taking too long and too much funding lead to out of date solutions at the time of delivery at huge costs. Use this approach where needed but forget about it for the other projects. Cloud will be an important tool in all this, not the goal.

A Word of Warning

Fast and cheap shouldn’t translate into mediocre crap at dump pricing that will bite us. It should also keep in mind the ecosystem and don’t act like a shock & awe offensive leaving everything in it’s track in disarray. It needs to fit into a plan with clear goals an knowing where it fits in and helps.  It’s about balance. That’s the art. Knowing what, where, when and with/for who to do it. Not easy. Now let’s hope some of my managers read this blog. It might help them. As the question beckons an answer: who is it that will lead us in this new era? Well not one single person, far from it. It’s a team effort and to lead a team takes competence and some character.

It takes competence and personality

Competence and personality, combined with  applying both these (skills and  drive) diligently in a sustained fashion. That requires a lot of effort, even when no one is watching you, or perhaps better stated, especially then. Do what needs to be done where and when needed. Not because it could get you promoted or more money. That’s the character part. That’s what drives us to learn by participating in our ICT communities, presenting, attending conferences and networking. But also in those hours spend reading, studying and working in the lab alone or with a buddy. That’s what will make us able to handle the though and bad situations you’ll encounter and overcome them. It’s your resourcefulness that will make you seek and find opportunity in adverse conditions. People like the team members amongst whom I have the distinct pleasure of working. You can’t find such synergy if it’s only about personal gain and getting ahead. There is both a broad and deep skill set needed by all involved and doesn’t come easy nor can it be bought. It has to be acquired through work and experience. The transformation of the ICT landscape is uncharted domain for all but a few of us so it’s going to ask a lot of effort, often outside of our comfort zone.

Sure there are cynics who laugh at this and can’t imagine why someone would do all that without personal and immediate reward. Those are the ones we don’t need and who won’t be there at crunch time. Only after the facts they seek the spotlight to poach the glory if things went well or to condemn those that failed whilst trying. Well, the last so called leader who did that doesn’t work with us anymore. Enough said.

Interviewed by Kerstin Rachfahl on what it’s like to be an MVP

At the end of the 2013 MVP Global Summit I was interviewed by Kerstin Rachfahl @ItsmeKerstin on what it’s like to be an MVP. You can find the results of her diligent & rendering work here or click on the picture for the link.

If you notice that I mention meeting, learning from and interacting with a large number of intelligent and passionate people a couple of times as one of the best thing about being a MVP than that is because it just is

I Was Honored With The Dell Rockstar Recognition

Yesterday I was informed I have become a Dell Tech Center Rock Star. I’m honored to be recognized as someone who has leveraged DELL technologies (client, server, switches & storage) to provide both excellent and cost effective solutions to my employers & customers whilst sharing my insights with others. Thank you!

I became a DELL customer by chance late in the previous century but it was one of the better experiences with a hardware vendor I have ever had. This has remained till this day. The DELL employees I have worked with in my market segment have always gone the extra mile to serve our needs. So Dirk, Luc, Willy, Wim, Koen, Peter, Florian … thanks for answering all our questions and serving our needs. Without such a dedicated service I would not have been such an avid user of your gear and this Rockstar recognition would not have happened.

On top of that I’ve also had experiences with support & gear of their main competitors and I can tell you that, while perfection is not of this world, they are doing a great job.

I’m fortunate to be able to work with great colleagues, technologists & vendors in a very rapidly changing world. People in this community are independent experts and as such we can discuss both the good, the bad and the ugly. We share the good and help fix the rest

Yahoo’s “Physically Together” is Management Failure

I’m awaiting boarding at SEATAC and browsing the news. I suggest you read “Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More and consider the quote below.

“… Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home  …”

If I was working for Yahoo I’d be jumping the ship. That mentality just doesn’t compute. If anything I have seen the working conditions become worse and worse in offices over the past decade. All the new open/flex work office plans with the continuous interrupts, office chit chat & gossip, noise and countless never ending meetings (I guess partially to escape the louse desk experience) are probably very good for the bottom line but all the rest of it seems to be working out a lot less well.

Granted, part of that is because of bad execution. It works if you can and will adopt that culture. But more often than not they just transplant the old ways into the new office environment with disastrous results. But the savings are there; so they don’t really mind. Just like they don’t mind outsourcing or consultants. Those don’t come into the office either but they do help reduce head count and CAPEX, whatever helps the excel sheet look better. Speed and quality can often suffer as well in these cases but then the response is to have better governance and processes , not to drag them all into the landscape office meadow.

And as far as speed and quality … I’ll be crystal clear, I’m not buying that for one second. If I had not been responding to alerts (we have no on call) on weekends the company would no longer exist. It would have lost it’s entire infrastructure a couple of times with little or no hope of recovery. If they force me to be at the office between 08:30 and 17:30 every day they would not get that commitment and I would work a lot less hours. The same goes for my team. We expect a lot and we give a lot. Checks and balances. How are you supposed to build a top notch team on mediocre management practices is beyond me. We put in the effort because that’s what we give back to our employers in return for a lot of flexibility and freedom on how we organize ourselves and the team.

Some middle management that wants hot bodies in the seats to respond to every question they have is very worrying to me and those people have no sense of real priorities. Perhaps of self importance, yes, but not priorities Look organize yourself any way you need to to deliver what ever it is but the above quote executed across the board is sad in it’s simplification and denial of realities.

But go ahead. Sacrifice your agility and flexibility to be able to keep operations going during snow storms, flu pandemics and go on wasting time and resources commuting during peak traffic hours. The trick to making all of this work is to make it part of the normal way of working. The ration of type of flex and telework might change during such times but that’s it. Any organization who cannot see this, act on it and leverage the new possibilities technology offers us is a victim of management failure. These across the board decisions are a clear sign of that and make me list Yahoo on the “Unsuitable Employers” list. As their speed and quality may very well suffer from this decision.

Are you perhaps saying your employees are goofing of at home and are under performing? Well if physical presence is the only way to make sure they are doing a good job you’re really in trouble. You have many other and more serious problems I think and good luck to you if you think pulling then back into the office will fix this. Probably this is really the issue. They’ve lost insight in who does what and why. End states are not defined, lack of accountability, … or otherwise put: management failure.

Or are you a serious professional who can’t stand the idea of your senior engineer sitting in his pajamas writing code or building a cluster at 10:00 or 22:00 hours? You think he needs to be in khakis and shirt? If it’s the pajama image you could consider hiring super models as engineers, the idea will become a lot more pleasant,  I guarantee it . Or are you worried about the odd working hours and the impact on the well being of your employees? Changes are they’ll do that anyway or even more when having to be in the office. They can’t get the real work done when having to sit in that sub optimal cube all day and dealing with all the senseless interrupts.

What if people don’t flee you because of this policy but just zone out. They show up for whatever mandatory time they need to. When shuffled like cattle into their cubicles and or pastures (open landscape offices) they’ll put on their noise cancellation headsets, run of to meetings (anything to escape the chaos and interrupt hell the modern office environment has become. Their talent, engagement, motivation and zeal will go to what they love to do and those organizations will end up as mediocre players putting in the bear minimum. Well played. Look, today we’re expected to be able to work from anywhere at any time and indeed technology has enabled this for a significant amount of people. A lot of us do that and we’re very flexible about it as we commit to our jobs and working lives in ever more flexible ways. Now on top of that they expect us to show up on the clock and proof attendance in a rather than creating a win-win situation?

On top of that they do this in a time where managers claim that talent will flee companies that do not allow BYOD or other consumer IT.  Really, but having old school office organizations wont? Flexibility works both ways. Employees can be very efficient and committed. But any manager looking to extract every last ounce of profit or plays power games because they can’t deal with end state management will loose more then they will ever gain. A BYOD device policy cannot attract and retain the best of the best. Trust me, those fine employees will figure out very fast that they’ll choose flex time, telecommuting, better pay and extra paid holidays over that stupid iPad or iPhone. Consumerization of ICT means they don’t need your technology and devices. They’ll buy their own and use it for their own advancement and interest and you’ll be left in your holding the short end of the stick. You shouldn’t care that your  employees make you money while stepping on a cross trainer at home or even from their bath tub.

I really don’t buy into the fact that this is all complicating the creation of products or the delivery of services. It also doesn’t ruin any long term supportability. People will go where they think they are best off.  So what is this move? A need to reduce head count and trying to achieve this by people calling it quit voluntarily? So basically you’re even unable to fix performance issues with your feedback/planning and evaluation system? Oh boy. So what if your best quit and the worst show up at the office? Yahoo’s in a pretty bad state it seems.

Is it a power play and about limiting options for people to see how obedient they are? If all the “our employees are our biggest and most important resource” is true some things would be really different. For one your employees would tell you to stop considering and treating them a resource to move around at will. After all this is not an national crisis and this is not the military at war. In a real war for talent employees would interview you whether to see if you’re even worth working for. Most companies don’t like the power to shift to the employees to far. They have seen this for short periods of time in certain professions and they still haven’t recovered from that shock to their system. They’d rather have less of it, not more. It’s all way to complicated for them to handle and manage. It also costs them more.

Are Data Tsunamis Inevitable Or Man Made Disasters?

What happens when people who have no real knowledge and context about how to handle data, infrastructure or applications insist on being in charge and need to be seen as taking strong decisive actions without ever being held responsible? It leads to real bad, often silly decisions with a bunch of unintended consequences. Storage vendors love this. More iron to sell. And yes, all this is predictable. When I’m able and allowed to poke around in storage and the data stored I often come to the following conclusion: there’s a bulk amount of data that is stored in an economical unsound fashion. Storage vendors & software vendors love this, as there are now data life cycle management tools & appliances to be sold.

The backlash of all this is? Cost cutting, which then leads to the data that has valid needs to be stored and protected not getting the resources it should. Why? Well who’s going to take responsibility to push the delete button to remove the other data? As we get ever better technology to store, transport and protect data we manage to do more with less money and personnel. But as is often the case, no good deed goes unpunished. Way to often these savings or efficiencies flow straight into the bottomless pit caused by that age old “horror vacui” principle in action in the world of data storage.

You get situations like this: “Can I have 60TB of storage?  It’s okay, I discussed this with your colleague last year, he said you’d have 60TB available at this time frame”

What is the use case? How do you need it? What applications or services will consume this storage? Do you really need this to be on a SAN or can we dump this in cost effective Windows Server Storage Spaces with ReFS? What are the economics involved around this data? Is it worth doing? What projects is this assigned to? Who’s the PM? Where is the functional analysis. Will this work? Has there been a POC? Was that POC sound? Was there a pilot? What the RTO? The RPO? Does it need to be replicated off site? What IOPS is required? How will it be accessed? What security is needed? Any encryption required? Any laws affecting the above? All you get is a lot of vacant blank stares and lot’s of “just get it done”. How can it be that with so many analysts and managers of all sorts running around to meeting after meeting, all in order to get companies running like a well oiled slick mean machine, we end up with this question at the desk of an operational systems administrator as a result? Basically what are you asking for? Why are you asking this and did you think this through?

Consider the following. What if you asked for 30 billion gallons of water at our desk and we say “sure” and just sent it to you. We did what you asked. Perhaps you meant bottled drinking water but below is what you’ll end up with. And yes it completely up to specifications, limited as they are.

The last words heard while drowning will be “Who ordered this? You can bet no one will be responsible, especially not when the bill arrives and when the resulting mess needs to be cleaned up. Data in the cloud will not solve this. Like the hosting business, who serve up massive amount of idle servers, the cloud will host massive amounts of idle data as in both situations it’s providing the service that generates revenue, not the real use of that service by you or it’s economic value to you.

The Zombie ISV®

The Zombie ISV® is the type that should have been extinct based on the current state of technology. Let me give you an idea what that current state of technology means in our neck of the woods. Last week our team started deploying some DELL R720  PowerEdge servers to replace the last W2K8R2 Hyper-V cluster in the company with a Windows Server 2012 one. The older hardware will be recycled. Some will live on as test servers, backup media servers. All running Windows Server 2012 of course. One of them will become our physical (SAN) LUN to VHDX converter server so we can move our large LUNS (2T-15TB) to vhdx. Later this year 10Gbps networking, RDMA Mellanox cards and ODX will provide for fast vhdx movement to their new virtual hosts. Work in progress, but it should give you an idea about what we’re working with.

It may surprise you but even we have 2 Windows Server 2003 physical servers left. One is a DELL NX1950 Storage server that has been serving local workspace to a team that does image parsing (12TB). That one is >6 years old and is slated for retirement. We don’t need this concept anymore. We can build anything we want for such purposes using Windows Server 2012 Storage spaces and if required leverage the in box iSCSI target. To build it we can just draw disk bays, disk, servers from the retired hardware shelf, no sweat. We have plenty of spare parts and it works just fine. If it’s cost efficient and an effective solution, we roll that way.

The other one is a server for the financial software sold by a company (the Zombie ISV®) that does not believe in virtualization. It’s running code that’s over a 12 years old (legacy java run times and even that was a success because it used to be JInitiator until a a few years ago). There is no life cycle planning what so ever and when after 5 years the hardware needed replacing we got nothing but silence form the vendor. After months of asking for a meeting on the what and how (OS upgrade, x64, virtualization) and being ignored we just took a decommissioned server that had two years of warranty left and transplanted the disks. Even if the warranty runs out on that one we have some of the same model in the spare parts cabinet.

The workload itself runs just fine virtualized but they don’t support that. Luckily for the people that have to do it in their environment they run zero change of that Zombie ISV® ever noticing that a server is virtualized anyway. They also don’t get the concept of a dedicated service account in windows. So they end up with the database or BI services running under their remote support credentials that expire and get disabled by the helpdesk. Sigh. They don’t see the need to proactively support operating systems above Windows XP or browsers after IE 6.0. We did a lot of hacks to keep that system working and came to despise the total lack of technological expertise and professionalism of the vendor. Their “consultants” that’s don grasp x64 bit, or they download installers for 4 hours during a paid day of consulting … sickening to the stomach. Meetings with the account managers (they seem to travel in packs) is a lot of vacant bank stares and apathy. They don’t have answers, they don’t look for answers, they simply don’t care. The idea was to replace the package, but it was not to be. But in the end we settled for throwing all responsibility for it so they’ll find a place to host it and our bookkeepers can access over a secure remote connection. At least we have gotten rid of this security risk in our environment.

That people, is the miserable state of some ISVs in the 21st century. But it’s not just them. It’s a testimonial to the degree in which companies get tied up and locked in to mediocre solutions and technology debt. In the infrastructure world (storage, networking, servers, virtualization) people who know what they’re doing do not allow this to happen. As more and more decisions on software and applications are made by business & analyst types we are seeing an increase in technology debt and lack of any life cycle management. So where we have seen infrastructure get more and more bang for the buck we’ve also seen the software & services cost explode and on top of that incur technology debt, expenses and risks on the business. That’s pretty bad. I see a growing divide in a lot of companies between ever more efficient and cost effective infrastructure (combined with cloud solutions) and the slowness of getting custom software into production combined with issues concerning supportability and upgradeability. All this at ever increasing costs and FTEs. That’s not supposed to happen but it is, despite the high investments in * analysts, business consultants, architects, * coaches, project managers, IT managers etc. in the era of the cloud. This is regression.  It all sounds like the result of the feel good EQ approach to business without results but hey, no one feels left behind . I believe a mate of mine calls this the race to the bottom. No wonder some companies that I know have done away with all this and just let business units organize themselves organically. They either fail and disappear of thrive and prosper, but a no time to they fall in to the trap of over organized pseudo flat structure (i.e. pass the hot potato and no responsibility) that still manages to create ever more managerial positions (flat?) whilst realizing ever less results. We’ve seen the financial and housing market charades collapse. Guess what’s next? There won’t be a bail out for you or me, beware of that.

2012 Was A Great Year, 2013 Looks Great

Well the end of 2012 is approaching fast and we’re about to dim the lights a bit for the festivities. 2012 was a great and action packed year.

Being awarded with the MVP title turned out to be an awesome experience. The MVP summit, the frequent interactions with colleagues and Microsoft employees, … I learnt so much form that and them that I feel privileged to be part of that ecosystem. It makes me feel I stand on the shoulders of giants. We teamed up informally and delivered some top notch sessions on Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, learning again form each other and the questions and feedback of our audience. I met a lot of people and “networked” all over the planet.

Locally I Belgium my involvement in MEET offered me to some new opportunities like public speaking and introduced me to some great an knowledgeable experts while helping put and sharing knowledge. Thanks Arlindo!

Then there was my team, that bunch of great, smart, hardworking people who make a big difference in job appreciation. This year has had its challenges, but they’re a real crew alright. They were also there at crunch time, standing tall and saving a business. Twice for good measure.

We deployed a new storage infrastructure (DELL, Compellent), rolled out Windows Server 2012, transitioned our clusters, got  backup hardware in place etc. All this as part of an ever to deliver more value at less cost. We still have a lot to do. Not just operational but also optimizing ROI, TCO and seeing where we can replace products and software that fails to deliver value for money. Trust me, telling me that your solution is best of breed, industry leader doesn’t cut it. In this economy even less so, you deliver value and keep delivering value or the bell tolls for thee. 2013 is shaping up to be yet another a busy and interesting year.

It looks like we’ll learn a lot, work a lot, an have fun doing so. I feel truly fortunate to be able to have a good, interesting job that I enjoy.  So let’s go for another great year in 2013 . I whish you all the very best for 2013!

The Right Stuff

You all probably know that to get a difficult job done well and fast, you need the right people in the right place at the right moment in time. Those people also need the right tools. This requires people who can think on their feet, people who are resourceful and who will always seek and find opportunities under adverse conditions.

The placement and timing of these resources and assets is more than just management of some table matching names to roles. It’s not enough to have the right resources and skill sets. You need to know who and what is available and what these or they can contribute. Management is often not very good at this, so in a crisis they need to let go and rely on their people. Free Tip: you can’t start building a team when the crisis arrives

It’s the boots on the ground will have to deal with the issues at hand and take the decisions. In a crisis time is of the essence. There is no place for too many layers of management, let alone micro management, only the ones with the right responsibilities insight and knowledge are needed and helpful. The decisions become tactical and operational within the context of the situation at hand and it its relation to the entire environment. So they have to be made by people who preferably know the environment well and have a very good skillset, drive and motivation. Basically this is what I refer to when I talk about the right stuff.

If you have ever worked or work in that sort of environment you know what I’m talking about. The knowledge that no matter where you are going for whatever reason, you’re doing so with a team of very skilled people who are the very best in the business, at the top of their game and ready to roll with any situation thrown at them. They are capable to react in a moment’s notice and focus entirely on the job at hand. If you’re interested in building such a team I suggest you select your team members very carefully. Head count doesn’t mean jack shit if they are the wrong people for the job and the team. Don’t ever lower the bar, it’s there for a very good reason.

This year I had misfortune of having to respond to two major HVAC disasters at night in a weekend. I had the good fortune of having the right stuff at my disposal. There is no “On Call”, there is no monetary compensation. This team is my crew and they are all volunteers who will do what is needed when it is needed. Why because they have professional pride and know that at these moments the very survival of the business they work for depends on them acting fast and correctly. To them it’s not about “somebody should do this” or ”that’s not my job”. It’s not about “this should be taken care of” or “I never had a template telling me what to do”. No, they step forward and get it done. This weekend, from the very first alert, 4 people were mobilized in 30 minutes and acted at the speed of light. This led to the emergency shutdown of a data center in a city 60 kilometers way to prevent a catastrophic meltdown of millions of euros in hardware (not even trying to put a value on the data loss). Two people were acting remotely and 2 (including me) were heading over there to have boots on the ground. The reason for this is that “the away team” could deal with anything that couldn’t be handled remotely and coordinate with facility management. Having people on site is important to all involved (two is preferable for safety reasons) for assessing the situation and for the sake of speed. More people often becomes less efficient as numbers are not the same as capability.

So to my team, I’m proud of you. I quote Beckwith “I’d rather go down the river with 7 studs than with a 100 shitheads”. You all know you’ve got the right stuff. Be proud of that!

The shortage of skilled employees, are we making it worse?

We still have a serious problem in ICT. Even in this second decade of the 21st century. While the entire industry has been buzzing with IT-Business alignment for many, many years now, I often notice that we have not gotten very far. For one the divide between business & IT is an artificial disconnect. This artifact does exist, but we’ve created it, and all we need to do is stop doing that. No one is giving this much attention to the struggling relations of business with the HRM or the finance departments.

In contradiction of what we might expect, while this artifact is detrimental to the success & profitability of IT, it is not taken seriously enough. Sure the business absolutely needs to define what they need. But in an ever more rapidly changing technology world they do not have the knowledge needed to do that. So we need bridge builders, people with the skills to translate technology used in IT into competitive solutions and highly efficient & profitable systems. It takes a special breed & some serious skills to act on opportunities and see them materialize with the help of IT solutions. It also takes a whole lot of common sense. The latter often seems to be lacking. Why does this happen?

This is not just about business and not just about technology. It’s something in between. As a result it’s often seen as not that critical and this leads to staffing these functions with the wrong skillsets. At best they are populated by people who want to get into the IT sector but don’t like technology that much. This is enforced by all those campaigns to make IT more sexy and attractive to the new generations who associate IT with nerds. It’s beyond me why we’d want to attract people who think so superficially but hey, that’s just me. But aren’t we building our own future nightmare this way? At worst it is used to get people in better pay grades. The functions might very well mandate better pay due to its complexity and the required skill set but this only holds true if you get the right people in those functions. Whatever the reason, this is a major pain point. Why?

The neglect of these bridging functions lets people without the necessary skillsets take responsibility for decisions they are incapable of making. Their knowledge of the technical matters is not up to that task and business wise they’re often in the same boat. So now we have a bunch of people who have way too little understanding of what IT and business is and what they themselves should achieve in that bridging role. Oh great, so fundamentally critical decisions are being made by the unqualified. People who lack skills, experience and context will fall back to methodologies & theories. They use them as cook books. Unfortunately reading and using a cookbook doesn’t make any one a chef. And these are the roles where we need chefs’ people. In reality there is a giant gap between reality and all the theories, methodologies & real or perceived knowledge on how IT can be better aligned with the business and be run more successfully and profitably.

I can only conclude that allowing this to happen means that the functions that are supposed to be bridge that cap is not taken seriously enough. For all the lip service to these efforts it cannot be for lack of acknowledgement of the pain points. But the solution often seems more of what doesn’t work, thereby eroding any credibility of the bridging functions. This is costing us dearly and it will only get worse if we don’t stop this madness. There is of cause the fact that projects become more and more expensive with all the * architects, * analysts & * officers. On top of that the complexity keeps rising and we don’t seem to be very good at managing that. Ask any engineer what the worst enemy in any project is and you’ll get uncontrolled and unmanageable complexity as an answer. But even worse, you are faced with the fact that best people in the business, bridge and technical positions eventually leave. Tired & worn out by the environment that doesn’t value them as they don’t understand their true contribution and skill set.

This means that even today IT retreats into its technical areas of expertise and the business doesn’t learn what IT is & can do. If we don’t get better at bridging that gap we are doomed to keep failing at ever higher costs and you’ll lose ever more valuable employees. The only difference will be we’ll have more parties than IT and business to point our fingers at as the ones to blame.