8 Things We Hate About IT

AI is transforming the world. And it starts with the right compute. ARM is the AI compute platform trusted by global leaders, proudly NASDAQ listed, Built for the future. Visit arm.com discover. Hello, this is Paul Michelman from Harvard Business Digital, and I'm on the phone today with Susan. Susan writes the having it your way blog for HarvardBusiness.org, susan, thanks for taking the time to chat.

My pleasure.

Okay, Susan, so you've got a new post on your blog called 8 Things We Hate About It. Now, before we jump into this, I need to make this very clear. I do not hate it. I in particular do not hate the people who are involved in the production and upkeep of this podcast, who maintain the servers that drive this podcast, and who are responsible for ordering my new MacBook, which needs to get here before the end of of our fiscal year. With that disclaimer, yes, with that disclaimer, we can now move forward. I just want our listeners to know, and particularly our IT department to know, that I do not subscribe to the theories of your blog.

Well, it's never personal, right?

But that said, a lot of other people do share the sentiments that you describe, and I actually want to quote the opening line of the blog as a setup for our conversation. You write, you may think that hate is too strong a word for feelings toward a corporate department. I don't. Susan, where do these strengths of feelings come from about business and their perspective of it?

The strengths of the feelings, what's articulated in terms of the eight points, are really derived from my 30 years of experience working on both sides, if you will. If there are both sides, we prefer there only be one side. But again, as my experience as an IT professional, an IT leader, a cio, and then kind of stepping out of that role in working within a certain CFO role and a general manager role, and within the IT role, you can always feel the sense of pressure and always feel that you're not doing enough. As you look and you step out as a business partner, there's this feeling that you don't really control this resource and for executives not to have control. That's a very, very frustrating experience. And it leads to strong emotions.

So the point of your post is not just to have a list of gripes, but but really to set the stage for a productive conversation. Right. You call out these eight core points, the things that have led to this great frustration that people outside of IT feel towards IT as a means to moving a conversation forward, to overcoming these things. So let's walk through these eight points, if we could. The first one you list is IT limits managers authority. Explain what you mean here.

Well, you've got very senior executives running tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billion dollar budgets, if you will, who cannot approve IT projects on their own. And we're not talking about IT projects that are $100 million, $200 million. We're talking about IT projects that are $1 million. And that as you can imagine, feeling that in the progress of running your business that you're going over these speed bumps and needing to justify your IT enabled business plans, when in fact the IT component may be a relatively small component of the overall program, can be very frustrating.

Why does this apply to IT and not other parts and not other expenditures in budgets?

In the US over 50% of the capital expenditures are related to it. And it is a more complicated investment than the investments, for example, to build a plant or to open a new market. And it's more complicated because IT has got a lot more things that haven't been done over and over again. You will be dealing with creating something that hasn't existed before and using technology that hasn't existed before, and changing business processes in ways that they haven't operated before. You combine that with the fact that a lot of the people who are wanting to make this investment don't have personal experience with managing technology, much less experience than they do with managing people, for example, or other hard capital investments. And so what will happen is this concept of governance, and so oversight has been put in place to ensure that these investments are well run and that governance creates bureaucracy.

So keeping on the governance theme, you note your second point, that IT is missing adult supervision. You're saying that there is an IT leader, the cio, but most people on the business side are not going to deal with the cio. Rather, they're going to deal with someone who is, for lack of a better word, lower in the organization, a relationship manager who may not really be at your level of the organization. Is that part of the problem?

Well, they don't have your background, they don't necessarily speak your language, and they are at a lower level. So they don't quite have the breadth of viewpoint or perspective that you have. Let's assume the CIO reports to the most senior levels of the organization, which is not the case in at least half the organizations. But let's assume that that CIO is a senior executive. Well, that cio, as they look to the left and look to the right, will have, say, a dozen, if you will peer executives to work with. And then as you think about who is actually going to be driving the demand for it on a daily basis, it's going to be one level down or even one level down from them. And so what happens is the CIO rightly should be focused on making sure the organization is architected correctly and setting strategy and influencing the senior level. It means there's a lot of other executives that are looking for some guidance and support. And when you look at a typical IT organization, there is a huge gap between the CIO and their director. And that gap exists for a number of reasons. But that gap is painful when you've got somebody at a senior level trying to talk to IT and trying to talk to somebody with authority, which often this relationship manager will have limited authority.

So authority is a big theme here. We don't have authority to make our own decisions, and we're not trusting in the authority of the people who are making the decisions.

Yeah, many IT organizations are organized functionally, and so all the roads lead to the CIO's office. And so there isn't a lot of authority that can be devolved at lower levels.

So the third reason we hate it is they're financial extortionists. What do you mean by that?

Well, operating as a cfo, this one was very near and dear to my heart because you expect when somebody comes in and says, okay, this is what it's going to take to run my organization and to push these initiatives forward, you expect a level of what a common term now? Transparency. You expect somebody to be able to show you what's driving the demand and what's driving the cost, and to be able to show you that they're realizing year over year productivity improvements and that they're realizing value from the investments. And it cannot document a history or a track record on either one of those fronts because, well, on the value side, it doesn't own what I call the three Ps of value. They don't own the people, the process, or the P and L. And only I think it's less than 10%. Considering this study, less than 10% of businesses hold business leaders accountable for realizing value as an outgrowth of their IT enabled business investments. So you've got it who would like there to be a track record for value. And you've got their business counterparts who are not held accountable. And it doesn't have obviously the authority to mandate that. So there goes the value track record. And then on the cost side, it costs 75% of them are infrastructure Related and infrastructure is like a geological formation, not only in terms of the layers of complexity of technology, year over year, system over system, change over change, but also the costs that come along with that. And so it has been working very hard to put in what financial people know as activity based costing, but to be able to tie their cost to services and to customers into, if you will, applications or products. It is working very, very hard, but it is a difficult task. And a lot of times it is working within organizations where the sophistication on the financial side is not there in order to support this capability.

So our next frustration is that it's projects never end.

Yes, it's true. It projects never end. And all the research that's been done on it enabled business initiatives underscores what we all know in our heart, that when things get really, really big and we're trying to do new things, it's really hard to predict what the result is going to be. Also, there's a lot of ideas that we all have about how to make our business better, but a lot of our ideas aren't right. So any kind of innovation requires iteration. And unfortunately, the approach that's used with projects is often called the death march, where they just sort of see the hill and they're just going to line up and try to take the hill as opposed to recognizing that it's going to be a series of experiments. And so this concept of staged funding and to be able to judge this experience over time is important. So a couple points from that. One is expect projects to be iterative, make them short and understand that you need a kill switch. So you need to know when project's not delivering on the hypothesis so that we're not exerting tyranny on our organization by being unwilling to kill things that were a dumb idea.

So you're saying there's some shared responsibility for managing that one. Next point, the help desk is helpless. I have never heard anyone with that sentiment before.

Yeah, I know that feeling. I particularly felt that way last week when I'm on United Airlines and I can't figure out how to work through the voice response system. We've got a challenge that we have a very, very complicated infrastructure. And not only the business counterparts have difficulty in navigating through and understanding how it all fits together, but so do the technologists. And then we put these poor people at the front of this complicated environment and ask them to send these calls. And many of the people at the front end have never been involved in developing the technology to Begin with. And so the only thing they know about the technology is through training they've received or on the line of fire in terms of answering the calls. And there's a high level of turnover and burnout within these organizations.

Okay, next up, they let outsourcers run amok. This really isn't it's fault, is it?

Well, it depends on who you're talking to. Right. If I've agreed to partner with a business partner, even if I did so reluctantly, then it's my responsibility. I'm held accountable. Many of IT organizations feel that they've been forced to take outsourcing further than they were comfortable. And it was really kind of a knee jerk response at some senior level of the organization in order to try to get a handle on how can we improve the performance or at least the cost effectiveness of it and where ifault it is. It doesn't play offense on outsourcing.

Okay, your next point actually took me by surprise. You say it is stocked with out of date geeks, but I think of IT people as the ones who are up on all the latest gadgetry.

Well, imagine how frustrating it is being a business partner and wanting to learn more about technology and you find that all of your technologists are over subscribed, working on projects or dealing with day to day issues. And then you, if you are the type of person who really is self learned then you are going to go home and you are going to play with some of this yourself and you are going to learn a lot from your 12 year old and a lot of that is okay. I think we all have a personal responsibility of educating ourselves and being up on technology. The ironic part about it is that organizations need to constrain their technology purchases in order to manage their costs. So they have these things called refresh cycles. These refresh cycles often put the organization far behind the individual in terms of their level of technology. And so from a consumer technology standpoint, it's affordable and you want to get a hold of it, but you go to work and you can't do so. You also combine that with the fact that a lot of the technologists again are using older technology and and work very long weeks. These are very difficult jobs. And so these people don't have a lot of time to play with technology themselves unless they are truly the types that are going to stay up until 2am and most people always are a little concerned about anyway.

Okay, so we're going to round out our discussion today with the eighth reason we hate never has good news and.

Think back on any IT conversation that you've been a part of and you're going to hear we need more money. We can't do everything that everybody asked us to do or even all the stuff that's important. And the initiatives are running late and delivering short of expectations. That's a lot of bad news.

Is there ever any good news?

Well, I think that there is good news. Research shows that organizations that manage technology well get a premium in terms of value realized from their technology investments. And the problem is there's not enough organizations that manage technology well. And that's really the focus of this have it yout Way blog.

Susan Cram, thank you very much. Clearly there are two perspectives to these eight points and coming up soon, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Susan, you're going to be writing about these points from it's perspective.

Exactly. And the point there is that when you understand both perspectives, I think you can get at some root causes and then you can start talking about how to chart a better path.

Great. And speaking of talking, we've got a great discussion going on your blog and I'd like to invite all of our listeners to participate to come read Susan's having It yout Way blog and talk about her ideas and your ideas about how to better manage it. Please visit blogs harvardbusiness. Org.