Sergey Aleynikov Has Been Accused Of Taking Code - Where Where The IT Leaders?

Sergey Aleynikov, 39 years old,  was arrested by the FBI as he got off a plane at the Newark Liberty International airport. Aleynikov is being charged with stealing data with “the intent to convert that trade secret to be economic benefit of someone other than the the owner”.

Keeping in mind that everyone in this county is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, this appears to be a case of an IT worker who seems to have made some bad decisions. However, I believe that the case shows that there was an IT Leader who made some even bigger bad decisions…

Just The Facts Ma’am

Sergey Aleynikov was a Goldman Sachs vice president who quit his job last month and took a new job with a Chicago based financial trading company called Teza Technologies. From all accounts this sounded like a good career move – his salary was going to triple.

Goldman Sachs’s corporate computer systems detected that on four separate occasions Aleynikov scooped up a series of files, encrypted them, and then transferred them to an outside web site. Goldman then notified the FBI and the rest, as they say, is history.

IT Leader Failure

No matter if Aleynikov had criminal intent, or if Goldman is just trying to use him as an example so that nobody else leaves, this is clearly a failure of IT Leadership. Here’s what’s gone wrong at Goldman:

• Code Policy: Lots of IT employees work from home these days. It’s not clear that Goldman has any policy that states just where their precious computer code can reside. Can it be downloaded to a home computer, worked on, and then uploaded or does all work have to occur online using company approved code editors.

• Check Out Policy: Who has what code and when do they have it? It appears as though Goldman has a policy that says that “… any nonpublic documents obtained while working for Goldman need to be returned” once you resign. How can you tell what code someone has (and how can they remember) if you don’t have a code checkout policy in place?

• Computer Monitoring Reminder: The easiest way to prevent code theft is to constantly be reminding everyone that their every online movement is being watched and recorded. Tell them that you don’t have time to review it every day, but you can if you have to. This will reduce the possibility of theft.

Final Thoughts

The case of Sergey Aleynikov could have been prevented if Goldman’s IT Leaders were doing their jobs. Creating policies and tools that make it easy to comply with company code tracking policies are a good first step. This has to be followed by a consistent education program that lets everyone know what is permitted – and what isn’t. If the IT Leaders at Goldman can figure out how to do this, then they will have found a way to transform themselves from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Do you think that Aleynikov was stealing code to use at his new job or just an innocent IT worker? Do you think that Goldman’s IT managers did a complete job or is this a screw-up? Could something like this happen where you work? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT Leader, you’ve got some challenges facing you. You’re managing a diverse and potentially distributed work force of highly skilled and talented IT professionals. You need to find a way to keep them challenged, and yet at the same time enable them to find ways to work together. Have you considered Alternate Reality Games?

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Post tags: career, code, detection, employee, Goldman Sachs, information technology, it, IT manager, job, leadership, management, manager, retention, Sergey Aleynikov, Teza Technologies, trade secret, trade secrets, web site

We all deal with problems that flare up at work, but some people do a better job than others. In fact, some people deal with workplace problems so often and do such a good job of dealing with them that they get awards, bonuses, and eventually promoted. Phred Dvorak over at the Wall Street Journal took a look at this situation and discovered something that most of us have suspected for a long time: some people are creating workplace problems and then jumping in to solve them. What’s up with this?

A business professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Nathan Bennett, has come up with the phrase “munchausen at work” to describe the phenomenon in which workers actually go about causing problems so that they can come back later on and take credit for fixing them. In the medical profession, there is an equivalent syndrome called “muncheausen” which is a mental illness in which someone makes someone else sick so that they can be a caregiver to them.

This workplace equivalent of arson is very hard to detect. The folks who set the fires are often the ones who show up when the problem is burning out of control and through their Herculean efforts are able to get the problem back under control. One reason that this behavior is hard to discourage is because companies often reward it with either recognition or promotions. Hey – it worked to get me promoted last time, why wouldn’t I use it again to get my next promotion?

In my career I’ve seen a lot of this. The challenge to the fire starters seems to be in determining just how big of a problem to cause. If it’s too small, they won’t get any recognition, if it’s too big they won’t be able to fix it or someone else will be brought in to solve the problem.

One interesting observation is that the munchausen at work syndrome is often seen among workers who have moved on to other jobs. They set fires so that they can swoop back in and solve them thus showing that they are still be best person for that job in the company.

You may be able to spot muncheausen at work staffers as they go about setting their fires. Common sparks that they set to dry timber include layoff rumors (so they can save your jobs), relationship problems (so they can “patch things up” between teammates), and reports of angry customers (so they can smooth things over with them and keep them as a customer).

Although the current downturn of the economy that we are experiencing may serve to reduce the number of fires set by munchausen at work suffers, spotting the deception is a good first step in stopping the behavior. Additional steps that you can take to put an end to this special form of workplace violence are:

• Be sure to always stress teamwork over individual problem solving achievements.
• Stay away from creating “office heroes” because it encourages munchausen syndrome.
• Keep an eye peeled for information hoarders – they may be trying to start a fire.
• Make sure that managers are always working to find out what employee needs are.

In this age of looser gun control laws, you might think that you’d be able to see any workplace problems walking down the hall towards you. However, munchausen at work may be a problem that you already have and yet didn’t realize it!

Have you ever worked for someone who suffered from munchausen at work? What kind of fires did they start and how did they put them out? Have you ever caused a problem at work with the hope of being asked to solve it? How did this work out for you? Leave a comment and let me know.

Tags: munchausen, IT employee, personnel, promotion, information technology

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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If you thought that just barely getting by using skills to manage your IT staffing needs using both home grown talent as well as warm bodies that you purchased off the street was tough, just imagine how challenging it is when you try to move things up one level and adapt your IT organization to the uncertainty in demand for IT talent. Just think about that for a moment: how would your life be different if instead of running around trying to fill holes in your organization as they occur, you could actually be ahead of the 8-ball and be ready for changes as they came?

Here’s a fundamental thought that will help you to solve this staffing problem once and for all. It’s based on lessons that our supply chain friends learned the hard way a long time ago. Instead of trying to stock your IT department with every body that you think that you might need both today and for the next x number of years, instead do what the supply chain guys do. Bring in small batches of what you need more often. This will allow you to not have to attempt to predict your staffing needs so very far out.

For a good example of how the current IT hiring/staffing process is broken, take a look at how recent college graduates are brought into the organization. Most firms do almost all of their new graduate hiring right after the students get out of college. This means there is a wave of new recruits that enter the firm in June. Even if you allow for some new-hire orientation and perhaps some training, the firm still has a need to carve out a substantial number of new-hire spots all at once. If the company is struggling in the current quarter, then this can be especially difficult.

A different way to handle this issue would be to take this single large problem and divide it into two smaller parts. Not all college graduates really want to go to work immediately after finishing 4, 5, or 6 years of intense schooling. Some would more than willing to delay their start date by 3-6 months. If this was done, then the firm would only have to process half as many new recruits at a time. More personal attention could be paid to each incoming employee and better fits for talents and interests could be made. Having fewer number of new hires to place but having them more often makes the staffing challenge much easier – you never have too many or too few. Retaining non-working students for 3-6 months can be as simple as agreeing to pay them 1/2 salary until they start working full time.

Long and expensive training programs present the same challenge. A two year management training program could be broken up into four 6 month programs. Each smaller program could have its own goals and forecasts. The benefit of doing training this way is that should an employee in training decide to leave the firm, then the entire training program expense may not have been spent on them.

Finally, within IT organizations different programs are often allowed to maintain and run their own talent management programs. The end result of this is that all too often, one program will have too many potential managers and another will have too few. Since there is no centralized way to communicate these supply issues, the firm generally just deals badly with the imbalance. If talent management within the IT department was centralized, then this issue would not occur.

So now we have an understanding of where to find IT talent and we now know how to deal with fluctuation in the need for IT talent, I guess the next thing that we should talk about would be how to improve the Return on Investment spent on developing employees…

How does IT staffing work at your firm? Do you seem to have waves of new employees sweep in every so often? Is your department set up to handle this flood of talent? Have you ever tried to manage the process by adding fewer new employees more often? What was the result? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: it, employee, personnel, employee motivation, training, staffing

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