Archive for April, 2010

IT Leaders With No Time Find An Alternative To An MBA

Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Image Credit If You Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time, Maybe There’s Another Way…

If You Really Want An MBA But Don’t Have The Time, Maybe There’s Another Way…

As IT Leaders who live in troubling times we are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and be more successful. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Well that’s all great and fine if you’ve got four or five years to burn, don’t need to do anything else at night, oh and have a big chunk of cash sitting around that you had no other plans for. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

Say Hello To The Alternative To The MBA

Before you decide to either quit your IT job and go back to school in order to get an MBA (really, really expensive) or start going to night school to get an MBA (just really expensive), maybe you should take a moment and consider all of your options. Maybe what you really want is a specialized Master’s degree.

Yeah, yeah – I know what you are thinking. >We’ve all been drinking the “get an MBA” Kool-Aid for so long that it’s hard to imagine doing anything else. However, depending on what you want to do with your life, this might actually be a better solution for you.

If having spent time being on the IT side of the company has gotten you interested in what goes on over on the business side, then getting an advanced business degree of some sort is probably a good idea. However, one of the things that keeps us from doing this is often the time involved to get the degree.

The Appeal Of Specializing

Business schools are starting to get the message. They are beginning to offer more and more specialized business programs that are only 12 months long. In the 2008-2009 school year there were 645 programs offered. This is up from the 614 programs that had been offered just two years earlier.

What these types of degrees offer are parts of the typical MBA curriculum, but they are often more technical in nature and generally spend less time on general management skills.

Here in lies the rub: these types of specialty business degrees are not designed to get you promoted to eventually become the CEO. Rather what they are designed to do is to sharpen your business skills in a narrow area and make you more valuable to the company in your current job. Since we’re interested in becoming the CIO, not the CEO, this might be just what we’re looking for.

This type of continuing education especially appeals to nre IT professionals: those who don’t have the five years of work experience that most MBA programs require for entrance. No matter if this is your case, or if you’ve just found some part of the company’s business side that you are really drawn to, a narrowly focused master’s degree might be just the ticket for you.

What To Do With Your New Degree

Ok, so let’s say that you bite the bullet and run off and skip the MBA and instead get a very focused master’s degree in marketing, finance, or some other business discipline. What then?

It turns out that taking this path, might feel like the right thing for you to do, but as they like to say on TV, your results may vary. Since specialty master’s degrees are not as well known as MBA’s you’re going to have to deal with some lack of recognition issues.

Although it may change in the future, right now MBA students still seem to get the best deal when it comes to getting the economic benefits from going through the effort of getting an advanced degree. The people who design the GMAT test that everyone takes to get admitted to graduate programs are reporting that MBA students are saying that they get a 73% increase in salary after graduating while students with specialty master’s degrees are only reporting a 26% increase.

What All Of This Means For You

In the end the decision rests with you. We all know that continuing our education is an important thing for every up-and-IT leader to do. Going back to school almost seems like a no-brainer until you realize that you need to spend some time thinking about just what you want to get out of doing so.

A specialty master’s degree offers IT professionals who have been working for less than five years or who found one particular part of the job most interesting with a new option. By investing 12 months of study, they can walk away with both another degree as well as a deep understanding of one area of business.

The value of taking this educational route will really depend on the career that you want for yourself. If you are comfortable working inside of the business instead of running it, then a specialty master’s degree might be the right way to go for you!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Knowledge

Question For You: Do you think that specialty master’s degree will become more or less valuable in the future?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Is it possible that the challenge of managing a team of IT professionals could have anything in common with the challenge of curing global illnesses? Good management is something that we can always learn from and healthcare has a lot of similarities with IT: it uses highly trained workers, it’s always experiencing lots of changes, and technology plays a key role in every part of how it’s done. Tachi Yamada is not only a doctor, but he is also the president of the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. He’s got some great insights that can help us do a better job of managing IT teams.

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Posted in career development | No Comments »

Why Performance Reviews Don’t Work In IT

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Image Credit
Performance Reviews Should Be Kid’s Stuff, But They Aren’t

Performance Reviews Should Be Kid’s Stuff, But They Aren’t

For just one article, let’s be brutally honest here. Let’s spend just a moment talking about that annual rite of passage that all IT Leaders and workers go through: the annual performance review. These conversations are lies and falsehoods build on conflicting goals that serve nobody’s best interest. Do I have your attention now?

Performance Really Doesn’t Relate To Pay

Think about the last time that you had a performance talk with your boss. You entered his / her office (or these days you picked up the phone because they are located “somewhere else”) and you steeled yourself for “the talk” . No, we’re not having one of those “the birds & the bees” talks, rather we’re getting ready to have a talk about something far more difficult to talk about: money.

Let’s put a stake into one of the longest running myths out there: this talk has nothing to do with the amount of raise that you are (or are not) going to be getting. The amount of a raise that you are going to get in any given year is determined by market forces, not your boss.

In fact, it’s probably your boss’ boss who is setting the raises for this year. Toss in a bit of consideration for the company’s annual budget for that year and you’ve got the makings of a done deal long before you sit down to have a discussion with your boss.

Unfortunately what this means is that the discussion that you will be having with your boss or that you will be having with your team is really just an attempt to justify the predetermined amount of raise that is being doled out. At the end of the day, a performance review really has little or nothing to do with your (or your team’s) performance.

Just How Objective Is A Performance Review?

As long as we are taking a swing at performance reviews, let’s go all out. Another myth that we need to dispense with is the assumption that a performance review is an objective review of a person’s accomplishments or failures.

Look, there’s no way that this could be objective. Dr. Samuel Culbert said it best when he said that an evaluation is a way of confirming that “Where you stand determines what you see.”

In the end, a performance review of an IT worker is probably as much about how the manager sees the worker as it is about how the worker has actually performed. That doesn’t really seem fair, now does it?

What All Of This Means For You

So the performance review system is broken. At least that’s something that we can all agree on. It’s not enough to just sit there and complain, we need to find a way to fix it. It turns out that the solution is actually rather simple (in concept).

What’s been missing all along is the idea of having a manager and the worker sit down BEFORE the performance period and agree on what needs to be done. Since the real job of any IT Leader is to work with their team and coach, teach, guide, and assist them to be successful, it sure seems to make sense that agreeing on what needs to be done before the work is to be done is a good way to have a shared sense of what needs to be done.

This simplifies the post work communication. Instead of having a meaningless discussion about a bunch of vague performance characteristics, you can have a detailed discussion about actual goals and what happened with them. This is much harder to do, but ultimately much more useful to all parties involved.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Knowledge

Question For You: Do you think that doing performance assessments before the work was done would work at your company?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As IT Leaders who live in troubling times we are always trying to do two things: hold on to our jobs and be more successful. One of the best ways to do both of these, or so we have been told, is to go out and get an MBA. Well that’s all great and fine if you’ve got four or five years to burn, don’t need to do anything else at night, oh and have a big chunk of cash sitting around that you had no other plans for. Maybe it’s time to look for a better way to accomplish what we’re trying to do…

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Posted in review | 5 Comments »

Turns Out There Is Business Value In IT, You Just Have To Unlock It

Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Image CreditUnlocking Business Value In IT Is All About Having The Right Key

Unlocking Business Value In IT Is All About Having The Right Key

As though managing a team of IT professionals wasn’t enough, now we’re all being asked to become more valuable to the business – to start thinking about the company’s bottom line. What part of working in a company’s cost center are they missing? It sure seems as though the pressure on IT managers to deliver more business value isn’t going to go away anytime soon. If only there was some methodology that we could use to unlock all of that business value that we know is within the IT department. Oh wait, there is: it’s called the IT-CMF.

What Is The IT-CMF?

A consortium of industry and academic players have gotten together and created what they are calling the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). The thinking behind this new model for operating the different parts of an IT department is that IT Leaders need an end-to-end integrated framework to help them boost their team’s IT capabilities while at the same time providing them with a way to show the rest of the company that IT can deliver bottom line value.

IT Investment: Not A Pretty Story

It turns out that most companies end up spending roughly 1% to 5% of their annual revenue (note that that’s revenue [a big number], not profit [a smaller number]) on their IT activities. However, there’s never really been a way for firms to do a good job of either measuring or maximizing the return that they’ve been getting on this investment.

You might think that IT departments would like this state of affairs: no measurement means no oversight. However, that’s not the case. Despite having become more strategically important to a company’s success, IT departments have been stuck as a cost center. What’s been missing has been some way to align what IT Leaders do with the business results that they produce.

How Does It All Work?

Clearly, trying to operate any part of an IT department can be a big challenge. The IT-CMF framework tries to simplify this by breaking a big problem up into several smaller pieces.

At a high level, The IT-CMF breaks an IT department down into four main macroprocesses:

  • Managing IT like a business: this requires an IT Leader to shift their focus from the technology of IT over to both customers and services.
  • Managing the IT budget: : keeping track of where the money goes in order to make sure that the company gets the best performance and value for their investment.
  • Managing the IT capability: : this consists of making sure that you have the IT assets where you need them as well as ensuring that you are developing the competencies that the company will need in order to succeed.
  • Managing IT for business value: : clearly showing how investments in the IT department tie back to clear benefits for the business.

    • How To Use The IT-CMF

    Each of the four major areas of IT operations is then further broken down in the IT-CMF model. It identifies a total of 36 different categories that are then distributed among the four major macroprocesses. This is where the IT-CMF can show an IT Leader where their team fits into the overall IT department.

    The IT-CMF classifies everything that an IT department does up into five different stages of maturity. We all do the things that are needed, we just don’t always do them as well as we should be doing them.

    Once you’ve taken the time to classify your IT operations using the IT-CMF model, you can then benchmark your team against other companies in order to find any process maturity gaps.

    What All Of This Means For You

    It’s never been easy to be an IT Leader and the current global economic troubles certainly haven’t made it any easier. More and more IT Leaders are being asked to focus on how the actions of IT can leveraged to boost the company’s bottom line.

    In order to justify the company’s ongoing investment in the IT department, IT Leaders need a framework that will allow them to demonstrate the value of IT. The IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) provides the framework that IT Leaders can use to identify IT process maturity gaps.

    Moving what your IT team does from being a cost center to becoming a value center has always been the goal of IT Leaders. The IT-CMF now provides IT Leaders with the tools that they need to accomplish this. Now is the time for IT Leaders to use these tools to show the rest of the company the value of the IT department.

    Question For You: Who in a company do you think would have to champion the use of the IT-CMF in order for it to be successful?

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

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    Let’s spend just a moment talking about that annual rite of passage that all IT Leaders and workers go through: the annual performance review. These conversations are lies and falsehoods build on conflicting goals that serve nobody’s best interest. Do I have your attention now?

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    Posted in IT Value | No Comments »

    Say Hello To Your Next Monster IT Project: GRC

    Thursday, April 8th, 2010
    Image Credit Screw Up A GRC Project And You’re Gambling With Your Career

    Screw Up A GRC Project And You’re Gambling With Your Career

    As IT Leaders we are always looking forward to our next challenge, the big project that looks impossible at the beginning, but which through our superhuman efforts turns into a technical and business success story. This is all great, but we do need to be careful because there’s one big project out there that could do us in – governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

    Looks Like You Need A Strategy

    When they come looking for you to work on the company’s GRC project, I don’t want to say that you should start running in the other direction, but you should at least be careful about what you agree to. A GRC program gets started when the company finally wises up and realizes that they need to use their IT systems to mange governance, compliance, and regulatory issues. If this sound straightforward, it isn’t.

    Our world is filled with lots of compliance requirements depending on what business your company works in: Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), etc. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg – there’s a lot more where those came from.

    If this project is going to be successful, you’re going to need to have a strategy. This will not be an IT-only project, it’s going to take both IT and the business working together to do it correctly.

    Why Is GRC So Hard To Do Right?

    What sounds simple on the surface, quickly turns complicated when you start to dive into the details. The two areas that seem to create the most conflict for IT Leaders are creating rules and privileges that determine who can access what information along with agreeing on where company data will be stored.

    From an IT point-of-view, one of the most important things that you can do is to take the time to actually identify the owner of each part of the company’s data set. Once you know who owns the data, you will have found the right person to make decisions about what to do with and where to store that data.

    The Four Types Of Risk

    As you undertake a GRC project, you need to keep in mind that not all risk is created equally. The four primary risk challenges that you’re going to end up dealing with include:

    • Business Risk: these are the risks that could bring the business to its knees. They can include risks to things such as the products and services that it sells, and any intellectual property or critical business records that are used to create / deliver products. The ultimate source for identifying what business risks you have to worry about need to come from the business side of the house.
    • Technology Risk: There is no way that you can possibly protect all of the company’s data and so that means that you need to do some prioritization. This is the kind of information that you are going to need to have in order to be able to build the right infrastructure and determine just exactly how to protect the data that needs to be protected. .
    • Legal (or Regulatory) Risk: Since the legal regulations that apply to your business can be changing all the time, this area can be challenging to stay on top of. The most important thing that you can do is to establish clear processes and procedures that line up with the existing regulations. The ability to show that you are compliant is key. .
    • External Risk: These are the threats that get the most press and so we generally do the best job of dealing with them. The most important thing to remember is that outsiders generally are trying to get their hands on your company’s data and so you’ll want to make sure that you secure what you have and properly dispose of what you no longer need.

    What All Of This Means For You

    Are you up for a major IT challenge? GRC is becoming a hot topic in IT and sooner or later they will be coming to you and asking you to help implement the company’s GRC project. You need to be ready.

    The biggest challenge presented by a GRC project is finding ways for IT to work smoothly with the business side of the house. Creating rules to restrict who can access what data and then determining where that data will be stored will generate some very heated discussions.

    The thing about a GRC project is that failure is not an option. Using the company’s IT systems to properly secure the company’s assets is a major challenge. If you and your team are able to accomplish this project successfully, you will have shown the company that there’s nothing that you can’t do.

    Question For You: Who should lead a GRC project – the IT team or the business team?

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

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    It sure seems as though the pressure on IT managers to deliver more business value isn’t going to go away anytime soon. If only there was some methodology that we could use to unlock all of that business value that we know is within the IT department. Oh wait, there is: it’s called the IT-CMF.

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    Posted in risk | 1 Comment »

    How To Really Screw Up You Next Job Search

    Thursday, April 1st, 2010
    Image Credit
    You May Be Damaging Your Job Prospects And Not Even Know It

    You May Be Damaging Your Job Prospects And Not Even Know It

    IT Leaders may be very good at managing a team of IT professionals and harnessing their skills to accomplish challenging IT goals; however, all too often we do a really bad job of looking for our next job. I’m not talking about poorly formatted resumes or even answering questions incorrectly during a job interview. My point is that it’s all the other actions that we take during a job search that really end up shooting ourselves in the foot. Still confused? Maybe I should explain myself…

    The Problem With Black Lists

    When you are in the middle of a job search, it’s pretty easy to start to think about the firms that you are trying to get an interview with as being these big, impersonal “things” . In reality, you are really dealing with a small group of people that can include recruiters and members of the company’s HR staff.

    Working in IT has conditioned all of us to view the world in pretty narrow terms: things either work or they don’t. We have a bad habit of bringing this view to our job search. This is what can get us into hot water.

    It turns out that all of the people involved in the hiring process, recruiters, HR staff, etc. all talk to each other. When we tick them off, they’ll put our name on their personal “blacklist” and then life just got a lot harder. This is something that we tend to forget.

    Reasons That We Screw Up

    When we think that we’re being clever and trying to get a job interview with a company by going in through the front door (job postings on their web site) and the back door (with a recruiter) at the same time, we end up making everyone mad at us.

    Recruiters don’t like it when you’ve gone direct because they don’t make any money if they place you and the company already knew about you. HR staff don’t like having your name show up multiple times for the same position. What can happen very quickly is that your name gets place on a “blacklist” .

    Once your name is on the unofficial black list, you’ll find that recruiters won’t return your calls (they talk to each other also) and the company won’t acknowledge your emails.

    How To Fix Problems That You’ve Made

    Getting off of a black list once you’ve landed there is very difficult. First off, you need to understand that it’s going to take time to get off of the list. It took time to get on the list, it’s only fair that it should take time to get off of it.

    Your first action should be to stop doing whatever got you blacklisted in the first place. Just because you soured your relationship with one recruiter doesn’t mean that you have to compound the problem with other recruiters.

    Next, you need to find ways to be a giver, not a taker with the recruiter / HR staff that you’ve offended. This doesn’t mean sending them gifts – those look fake anyway. Instead, you should look for ways to make their jobs easier. One way would be to send them highly qualified candidates for their open positions (no – you can’t recommend yourself). Also, acting as a good reference for someone that they are considering can also win you points.

    Things You Should Never Do

    We are living in the 21st Century and that means that the number of ways that you can hurt your job search efforts have multiplied. Here’s a quick list of other things that you should never do:

    • Don’t post anything on Facebook or MySpace that you wouldn’t want your mother to read / see.
    • Don’t bend the truth in your resume.
    • Don’t spam the world with your resume.
    • Don’t submit the same cover letter for multiple positions in the same company.
    • Don’t send your resume to multiple recruiters and HR hiring managers at the same company.
    • Don’t apply for jobs for which you don’t even meet the basic requirements.
    • Don’t send your resume to the same recruiters over, and over, and over again.

    What All Of This Means For You

    Looking for your next job has always been a challenge. In today’s online hyper-connected world, some things have become easier while others have become much more difficult.

    It’s all to easy to become too eager when looking for your next IT job. If you work with too many people or send your resume out too far and wide then you risk being black listed by recruiters and hiring managers.

    Keep your job search focused and stay honest with what you tell people about yourself. You will find that next job but only if you treat the people who will help you to find it with respect.

    Question For You: Do you think that you should apply directly for jobs even when you are working with a recruiter?

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

    What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

    As IT Leaders we are always looking forward to our next challenge, the big project that looks impossible at the beginning, but which through our superhuman efforts turns into a technical and business success story. This is all great, but we do need to be careful because there’s one big project out there that could do us in – governance, risk and compliance (GRC).

    Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
    Posted in it careers | 2 Comments »