Archive for January, 2010

It Turns Out That Personal Skills ARE Important For IT Leaders

Thursday, January 28th, 2010
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Sure We’re Nerds, But We Still Need To Have Social Skills

Sure We’re Nerds, But We Still Need To Have Social Skills

Why Does Hacking Still Work So Well?

So here’s an interesting question for you: in this day and age, why is it still so easy to hack into a corporate computer system? I mean we’ve had years to invest in sophisticated encryption systems and multi-step identity verification systems. The answer is surprisingly simple – the weakest link remains the people who use the systems and a smooth talking criminal always seems to be able to get the info that he / she needs out of these people.

What this realization means is that no matter how sophisticated we make security technology, it’s always going to be personal skills that we’ll be battling against. This leads to another interesting point: just exactly what personal skills do IT Leaders need to have in order to do their (non-hacking) jobs well?

IT Leaders Don’t Know What They Don’t Know

I can almost see you grimacing when you read the words “personal skills”. Technical professionals have a tendency to poo-poo these types of discussions because we view these skills as being something that can’t be measured. This means that we don’t really value them – why bother if you can’t become Cisco certified in personal skills (would that be CCPS?)

Times they are a changing and IT Leaders are going to have to change along with them. Luis Fernandez-Sanz?” href=” http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MC.2009.329”>Luis Fernandez-Sanz has been taking a close look at what employers are looking for in IT Leaders and he’s detected a change in the requirements.

This all starts by taking a look at what skills IT Leaders often don’t bring to the table. Sure, we’re skilled technical professionals, but that doesn’t mean that we have all of the skills that will be needed to lead a team. Here’s where we often come up short:

  • Organizational abilities
  • Political skills
  • Public speaking
  • Understanding of business language and jargon

Fernandez-Sanz has found that IT Leaders are often viewed by the rest of the company as being good at what we do – solving technical problems. However, since we often work remotely from the rest of the business, we are also viewed as needing to improve our interpersonal skills.

What Social Skills Do We Need To Have?

When we sit down and try to determine just exactly what skills IT Leaders need to be working to acquire, we find some good news. Fernandez-Sanz has found that the needed skills are not unique to IT Leaders – they are the same skills that any business professional needs to develop.

Analysis of job postings for IT jobs has revealed a wealth of data. The first discovery should come as no surprise to any of us: IT is still a rapidly developing field and new types of jobs are constantly being created. Additionally, IT jobs can be classified into over 250 different areas that run from software development jobs to systems engineering jobs.

Studies of IT job postings over the past 16 years has revealed that not only is IT a growing field, it is also dynamic. It has been noted that the languages, tools, and technologies that are called for have changed dramatically over that time. Clearly this means that by entering into the IT field we have all signed up to a lifetime of constant learning.

In the area of IT leadership, the studies have revealed the top 5 personal skills that IT Leaders need to have. These results have been culled from descriptions of the skill sets that CIOs are asked to have:

  • Proactive behavior
  • Team management
  • Leadership
  • Teamwork
  • Communication skills

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT Leader, you will always be expected to be working to improve your skills. The challenge is to determine just exactly what skills you need to be working on. The technical skills that you’ll need to maintain will be constantly changing as IT moves forward.

Your real challenge will come in identifying the personal skills that you’ll need to be able to bring to the table. Although it is much more difficult to measure these skills, they are just as if not more important than your technical skills.

It turns out that the personal skills that you need to hone are the same skills that ever other business professional is working on. This won’t make your task any easier, but it certainly means that you’ll be in good company!

What do you think the most important personal skill for an IT Leader to have is?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Times of change can be difficult for everyone, including IT Leaders. We all know how hard it can be to lose your job. What this means is that we all have a basic understanding of what to do if it happens. But what if you don’t lose you job, it just changes on you. What do you do then?

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How To Keep Your Team From Leaving As The Economy Improves

Thursday, January 21st, 2010
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Your Team Is Going To Be Jumping Ship If You Don’t Do Something

Your Team Is Going To Be Jumping Ship If You Don’t Do Something

I don’t want to say that it’s been easy to be an IT Leader during the recent global economic crisis. However, as the world economy tanked and countless people in all industries lost their jobs, the one thing that IT Leaders really didn’t have to worry about was having members of their team jump ship to go to work for other firms – there were no other jobs to be had. Well as the economy improves, this is going to change. Got a plan for keeping your team on board?

Don’t They Love Me? Why Would They Leave?

I’ve got an ugly history lesson for you – the experts tell us that when we’ve had a recession in the past, it’s during the recovery that you’ll see a big increase in people leaving your company for other career opportunities as more and more jobs become available.

So what’s an IT Leader to do? The last thing that any one of us really wants to do is to provide our staff with the skills and training that will boost their ability (and desirability) to leave. However, that’s exactly what we should be doing.

The Big Secret

Dr. Elizabeth Craig has been looking into this issue and she has made some surprising findings. What she’s found is that the members of your team will stay longer if you actively work to provide them with the very skills that they are looking for to make themselves more valuable in the job market.

Specifically, what Dr. Craig says is that the IT Leaders who provide the members of their team with the most opportunities to increase their value in the marketplace will get the greatest benefit by doing so. This breakthrough realization is something that too few IT Leaders fully understand.

The Three Secrets To Retaining Your Team

As an IT Leader, you need to start to take action to retain your team before it’s too late. There are three specific steps that you can take:

  1. Grant New Responsibilities: especially in the world of IT, your team members really do want to be challenged. In surveys, team members reported that having the ability to work on tough problems and being given more responsibility are the #1 things that determines their level of career satisfaction.
  2. Boost Skills: look, you’ve got smart people working as a part of your team right now. They realize that they don’t know everything, but they have an unquenchable desire to learn more. You need to do what you can to help sate this need by providing your team with ways that they can learn more about things that are outside of their day-to-day jobs. In IT this especially includes providing the opportunity to learn more about how the company works and the basic underpinnings of business.
  3. Networking: the ability to reach out and connect with others both inside and outside of the company is another critical desire on the part of your team members. Sure, their motivation may be to primarily build connections that could help them find their next job, but it will also help them gain fresh insights into how to solve the problems that they are working on right now.

What All Of This Means For You

When we were all children, one of the games that we used to play was called musical chairs. It involved constantly finding a new chair to sit in. As the global economy improves, the desire to play musical careers will start to seize your team and you could end up losing a lot of them.

It’s difficult and costly to replace critical staff. You need to start taking action right now to retain your team. This means that you’ve got to provide them with new responsibilities, opportunities to broaden their skills, and ways to connect with more people both inside and outside of the company.

This all may seem counterintuitive to you – it’s almost as though you are helping them to prepare to leave. However, this is not the case. It turns out that if you provide them with what they are truly looking for in their career, then although they could leave, they won’t.

Do you think that member of your team are going to leave once better opportunities start to show up?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

No matter how sophisticated we make security technology, it’s always going to be a hacker’s personal skills that we’ll be battling against. This leads to another interesting point: just exactly what personal skills do IT Leaders need to have in order to do their (non-hacking) jobs well?

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Google’s Lessons For Managing Tech-Savvy Teams

Thursday, January 14th, 2010
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How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

How Does Google Solve Common IT Manager Issues?

Sigh, if only we all could work for Google, right? If there is one company out there that seems to “get” IT, it would have to be Google. The stories that float around about how nice the Google campus is and all the free food and other perks sure make it seem like a Shangri-La. Hmm, but wait a minute, no matter how nice it seems, they’ve got to be dealing with the same IT Leader issues that we all are. Maybe it’s time to have a talk with their (former) CIO…

It’s All About Choice

One of the big issues that IT Leaders have to deal with on an almost constant basis is the issue of keeping our teams up and running. This comes down to making sure that they have the right laptops, the right operating systems, etc. If you are not careful, this can eat up a lot of your available time.

Over at Google, Douglas Merrill who was their CIO up until April of 2008 said that the model that they used for solving the individual system issue was freedom of choice: employees got to choose both their machine and their operating system. I’ll bet that pretty much eliminates any complaining!

You would think that this would make support from an IT perspective a lot more complicated / expensive. You’d be right, but Merrill said that it didn’t boost costs all that much in part because of Google’s extensive use of self-service. They maintain internal web sites where users can go to download and install any software that they need. They do this by themselves and it places no additional burden on the IT department.

What About Security?

I can almost hear what you are saying / thinking right now: man, that must cause all sorts of security nightmares. Any IT Leader that you talk with these days probably has one or more horror stories about a team member downloading (or clicking on) something that they shouldn’t have and causing a mess that took forever to clean up.

Merrill says that they look at things a bit differently at Google. Most companies try to secure their networks by locking down the endpoints: our laptops and our smart phones. He feels that this really doesn’t work very well — thus all of the problems that we still have. At Google they put the security into the infrastructure.

What this means is that, yes, they still have antivirus and antispyware applications running on everyone’s laptops, but they also have a lot of software running on their corporate mail servers and infrastructure. When taken together, they feel that they have solved the problem of just how you can secure your corporate network.

Just in case you need more convincing that they really take their security seriously, Merrill states that Google has over 150 engineers who work on nothing but security. They’ve worked very hard to make sure that security is not something that is handled by “some group” and instead is worked into everything that they do. One of the ways that they make this happen is to use automated tools to check each developer’s code before it gets put into production.

What All Of This Means For You

No, most of us are not going to end up working for Google (unless they take over the world, at which this turns into a different discussion). However, how they run their IT shop does hold some clues for the rest of us.

When it comes to resolving issues regarding the technical environment in which their team members work, they’ve turned over the decision making to each employee. We can’t necessarily set up the same system, but it does provide some clues. Where possible if we allow the team to decide things like what code editor to use or what template to use then all of a sudden it’s not “my” decision, but rather “our” decision which is always a lot easier for everyone to live with.

Security is another issue that just doesn’t seem to want to go away. Google’s approach is to do the baseline needed at the edge of the network and then focus on securing the core. This just seems like an overall good idea. Additionally, setting up ways to carefully check your team’s products to ensure that they are secure is always a good idea for any IT Leader.

It looks like Google is running a pretty tight ship in their IT department. Even if we can’t all work there, we can still learn from their example…

Do you think that working at Google is all that it’s cracked up to be, or is it just like working in any other IT department?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As the world economy tanked and countless people in all industries lost their jobs, the one thing that IT Leaders really didn’t have to worry about was having members of their team jump ship to go to work for other firms – there were no other jobs to be had. Well as the economy improves, this is going to change. Got a plan for keeping your team on board?

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Posted in employee motivation | No Comments »

Doing More With What You Already Have

Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Image Credit You Get No More Resources, But Still Need To Find A Way To Innovate

You Get No More Resources, But Still Need To Find A Way To Innovate

As an IT Leader, you’ve got a bit of a challenge on your hands right now. There is probably no way that you’re going to be getting more funding or headcount in the immediate future (or at least not enough to make a difference).

Yet at the same time your senior management keeps talking about the need for the IT department to start showing some innovation. Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into yet another bind. How about if we take a look at how you can exceed your expectations using what you already have…

It’s All About The Information

Eric Lundquist over at eWeek magazine points out that one way for an IT team to show innovation is for it to create new ways to leverage company information. Two ways of doing this include taking existing company information and combining it in different ways and the other is creating new information from resources that already exist.

Within IT we all know the dirty little secret: our systems don’t talk to each other. What this means is that we have databases that are stuffed with silos of customer, product, and operations information sprinkled throughout the company.

It does not take a genius to realize that simply by creating an application that has access to two databases that have not previously been connected an IT team can create a new information tool. By creating this type of data “mashup” multiple times, the innovation that has been requested can be delivered.

It’s Time To Optimize

Anyone up for more layoffs? Ok, so that’s not the type of optimization that we’re talking about here. Any company runs by executing processes. IT has the ability to help optimize those processes. The first step in doing this is to measure the processes as they exist today in order to be able to determine what parts of what processes need improvement.

In the old days, this type of process measurement simply focused on people and documents. Now we realize that there’s more than meets the eye here. If you look at the full infrastructure of what it takes to run a company and execute a process, then you need to account for things like electricity, air conditioning, physical space, etc.

Most companies that compete against each other end up with very similar processes. If your IT team can come up with a way to make your company’s process better / quicker / faster than the other guy’s process then that truly would be an innovation.

Risk Is What You Make Of It

Risk to a company comes in many forms. Most firms focus on making sure that they are complying with both state and federal regulations. Rarely does a company see risk management as an avenue to innovation and so more often than not they end up trying to do the bare minimum needed just to get by the regulators.

There is a different approach that you can take with your IT team. If you assign them the task of determining where the risk to the company lies, they just might surprise you with what they come up with. Once they’ve identified where the risks are, assign them to create solutions that will either minimize or eliminate these risks. You just might be surprised with the level of innovation that empowering your team creates.

What All Of This Means For You

Innovation is currently a popular buzzword both in business and in IT. As IT Leaders we are being asked to create innovation within our teams using the resources that we currently have available.

If we take the time to look around, we will find that we have three opportunities to make things happen using what our teams already have. The first is to bring silos of company data together in order to create information that doesn’t currently exist. Next we have the opportunity to measure existing company processes in order to find out where IT can help optimize the processes. Finally, IT has a key role to play in minimizing the risk that the company faces and by empowering your IT team you can uncover hidden risks.

Innovation is there, you just have to take the time to uncover where it is hiding. You need to move quickly, because there’s a lot more that your IT team needs to get done after this!

Do you think that your IT team has the ability to work with other IT teams to create company data mashups?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Sigh, if only we all could work for Google, right?  Hmm, but wait a minute, no matter how nice it seems, they’ve got to be dealing with the same IT Leader issues that we all are. Maybe it’s time to have a talk with their (former) CIO…

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Posted in innovation | No Comments »