Posts Tagged ‘information technology’

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Tomorrow’s IT Managers Can Be Found Locally

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

IT Leaders Know That Solving Staffing Issues Starts At The Local Level <p><div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/somewhatfrank/3508260479/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=Even in tough economic times, IT Leaders are still concerned about losing talent. Studies are showing that we are losing our IT Leaders at a much faster rate than new ones are being produced. On top of this, up to 30 million managers and leaders are going to become eligible to retire in the next five years. How can an IT Leader help to replace these leaders?

Defining The Problem

The loss of leaders in the IT field means that executive recruiters end up having to move thousands of managers not only cross-country but all between industries each year. This challenge has been complicated by what firms have been doing for the past few years.

In order to become leaner and reduce their operating costs, many firms have been removing layers of IT management. These tactics were a good idea when lean and nimble competition was showing up and taking business away from established firms. However, there has been a cost.

Those layers of IT management that have been removed used to provide development opportunities and ways for the next generation of IT leaders to grow. This has resulted in a situation where as the current crop of IT leaders get ready to roll off into retirement, there aren’t enough replacement candidates waiting to take their place.

Solutions Start Locally

The key to solving this IT department staffing crisis is for IT Leaders to sit down with their HR departments and establish good hiring practices in their local branches. These practices need to create a good flow of diverse talent.

The goal must to be find ways to recruit and grow employees at the local level. Once this is done, then the future leaders can be fed into the company’s core operations and this will provide a way to not only fill higher level positions but also solve the challenge of creating a diverse workforce.

Final Thoughts

Since we work in IT, we always look for a way to solve our problems using IT tools. Ensuring a steady flow of IT Leaders can be accomplished by creating an automated tracking system to identify those candidates who posses both the skills and the experience to handle new opportunities when they open up.

This type of system allows the firm to fill open IT positions much faster and with better suited candidates. If you can find a way to help your firm accomplish this, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

With the critical importance of IT solutions to existing company operations and increasing global competition, it’s possible that firms need IT workers more than IT workers need the firm. What’s an IT leader to do?

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Staffing Diversity Challenges IT Leaders

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Manage Diversity In Their Teams<br><div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/clevercupcakes/2980544017/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href=They say that the world is becoming a smaller place – I think that they just might be right. IT Leaders are starting to realize that coming up with ways to staff their teams so that they are diverse is quickly moving from being a political nicety to now becoming a business necessity. Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?

The Problem

Most IT departments are no longer single site operations. In fact, with the growth of outsourcing a single IT department may now have offices in multiple countries: China, India, Russia, etc. This type of distributed operation is a great way to ensure that more work gets done at a lower price; however, it also poses a significant staffing challenge for IT Leaders.

It’s all too easy to think that we can take a few high-performing IT Leaders from the U.S., plunk them down in one of our remote offices and have them be a an effective leader. The reality is that all too often, this doesn’t work. If you haven’t groomed someone on your team to step in and run / interface with a remote office, then they aren’t going to be able to do it.

In the U.S., IT managers are encouraged to use frank talk and direct confrontation in order to deal with team issues. However, especially when dealing with teams in Asis, this can come across as being rude and offensive.

What’s An IT Leader To Do?

The trick to solving IT staffing challenges for remote offices or just to deal with remote offices is to create what the experts call a “talent plan“. Doing this will allow you to provide unique levels of value to your remote IT offices.

The first part of a talent plan is to identify what positions on your team you are going to have to fill and what types of cultural skills those  positions are going to require. It’s important to note that it’s not always necessary to hire a person of a given nationality in order to deal smoothly with a remote office that has other staff members of that nationality. Finding someone who is sensitive to that nationality and who has dealt with them before can fill this need.

Filling a position to manage a remote office should not be a sudden effort. IT Leaders realize that every position will eventually need to be filled because the person in that spot now will be promoted, let go, or will move on. A key part of any talent plan is to early on identify who the potential replacements are. This allows an IT Leader to take the time to make sure that the potentials get an opportunity to get trained in both the skills and the corporate values that they will need if they fill the position.

Final Thoughts

Staffing mistakes can be very expensive and picking the wrong person to lead a remote IT office or to interface with such an office can flat out be disastrous. IT Leaders realize that if they wait until the last minute when an position suddenly has to be filled, then it will be too late to do it correctly.

Instead, if they take the time to create a talent plan then their investment of upfront time and effort into grooming the right replacements will ensure that the correct staffing decisions are made. Learning to add diversity management to your IT team will mean that you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Even in tough economic times, IT Leaders are still concerned about losing talent. Studies are showing that we are losing our IT Leaders at a much faster rate than new ones are being produced. On top of this, up to 30 million managers and leaders are going to become eligible to retire in the next five years. How can an IT Leader help to replace these leaders?

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Making Changes To Your IT Department – 8 Things An IT Leader Should Know

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

IT Leaders Need To Learn How To Implement Changes In Their Teams

IT Leaders Need To Learn How To Implement Changes In Their Teams

Have you ever heard the phrase “When senior management doesn’t know what to do, they reorganize”? I’m not sure if this is always true, but it sure seems as though when times are tough reorganizations, restructuring, and even re-engineering are things that can happen to any department in IT. What’s an IT Leader to do about it?

Change Sucks

One of the weirdest facts about a career in IT is that the thing that draws us to this field is that it is so dynamic. However, its been my experience that IT staff can be some of the people who are the least open to accepting changes from the way that things are currently being done.

As an IT Leader you are dealing with two issues at the same time: you need to personally come to grips with the change and you need to find a way to get your team to accept and embrace the change also. Have you ever been trained on how to do this?

8 Ways For IT Leaders To Deal With Changes

On one hand you have “the change”. On the other hand you have your team. As an IT manager you need to find a way for these two things to live together in harmony. I’ve got 8 tips on how you can make this seemly impossible task possible:

  • Don’t assume that people have a natural ability to change: all too often IT Leaders think that they can just tell their team about a change and it will automatically become part of the routine. Most people are going to need constant encouragement to make and stay with any change that disrupts their existing routine.
  • Don’t assume that people will function rationally: once again, assuming that members of your team will do what  you expect them to do once a change is announced is foolish. Instead, think for awhile about how people might react if they don’t like the change – how would you go about resiting or subverting the change if you were just being told about it? Take steps to make it easy to comply with the change.
  • Don’t assume that change is automatic: just saying that things have been changed does not mean that people will automatically change their behavior. You need to set things up so that doing things the old way is now hard, but doing them the new way is easy.
  • Don’t assume that organizations are naturally dynamic: changes that require people to stop doing jobs or start doing new jobs are the toughest to implement. You need to understand that when you make changes to a workflow it’s going to slow everything down and it will take awhile for the team to get back in the swing of things again.
  • Don’t assume that company culture is easy to change: “but that’s the way that we’ve always done it” is a powerful statement. Changes that span multiple departments take longer for everyone to accept because they are changing the company’s culture. It doesn’t matter if the company had a lousy culture, change is still not appreciated!
  • Don’t assume that every aspect of the project will work out as planned: the larger a change is, the more steps will be required to implement the change. Plans are great things, but rarely do they work out exactly the way that you wanted them to. As an IT Leader you need to be ready to step in when something goes wrong and fix it.
  • Change managers can’t be effective without explicit authority: the best way to implement a change in an IT department is to have helpers – feet on the street who will be responsible for making the actual changes that are called for. These staff members can’t hope to be successful if you don’t make it clear to the rest of the team that they have your full support and authority to make the change happen.
  • Don’t just assume that anybody can be an effective change manager: since nobody likes change, nobody likes a change manager. When you pick your lieutenants you need to make sure that they are made of the right stuff and will be able to tough it out and overcome team adversity to make sure that the changes get made.

Final Thoughts

It sure seems like the world continues to move even faster these days and changes just keep on coming. New company owners, new management, new technology, and new competition all seem to be working together to keep things quite dynamic.

IT Leaders need to develop the skills that are needed to implement changes within their teams. No, they won’t always agree with the changes that they are being asked to implement, but they are obligated to implement them anyway. If you can figure out how to do this correctly, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever been asked to implement a change that you thought was the wrong thing to do? Were you able to convince your team to implement this change? Has there ever been a change that you were not able to implement? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s starting to look like the economic winter just might be getting ready to thaw. Once this happens, IT Leaders realize that they’re going to have a massive task added to their already overloaded plate – recruitment…

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Arrest Of Goldman IT Worker Shows Failure Of An IT Leader

Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Sergey Aleynikov Has Been Accused Of Taking Code - Where Where The IT Leaders?

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.

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

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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Handling A Promotion Is Something That An IT Leader Needs To Know How To Do

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

When IT Leaders Get Promoted, That Changes EverythingIt may seem a little crazy to talk about how to handle promotions during an economic downturn, but they are still happening (hey, sometimes self-promotion yields results!) Additionally, once the world economy picks up again, there will be even more of them. What’s an IT Leader who was once “one of the guys” to do when he /she is suddenly their boss?

Definitions Count

Nell Minow is the co-founder of The Corporate Library and she’s gone through this very experience. One of the lessons that she’s learned is that how you go about defining things really counts. One of the biggest changes that Minow had to go through was how she defined “we” and “they” (we ALL use these terms everyday). What she discovered was that the wider she made her definition of “we”, the better off everyone was.

Parenting Skills Help

When all of a sudden you find yourself in charge of a group of IT professionals, you may discover just like Minow did that your built-in parenting skills are going to be called on. Your interaction with your team is going to be broken into two types of activities. They will come to you and say “Look at what I did!“, and you’ll have to say “Good job – do more!” Likewise, sometimes they will come to you and say “He took my stuff!” (budget, staff, office) and you’ll have to say “Give it back.”

What To Do Right After You Are Promoted

Immediately after you are promoted, you need to have a talk with your former colleagues. Minow points out that your relationship with them has been changed and this needs to be addressed. She used this as an opportunity to say “If you have a problem, then I have a problem.” However, at the same time she told them “I refuse to be responsible for a problem that is not brought to my attention.” Minow also insists that anytime someone brings her a problem, they also have to propose a solution to it. Not just any solution, she insists that the solution must cost less than the problem!

Final Thoughts

We all love to be promoted. It’s an acknowledgement of what we’ve been able to accomplish at our job. However, every IT Leader knows that promotions change the relationships that we’ve developed with our colleagues. These changes need to be dealt with in the open in order to allow our teams to move forward. If you can do this successfully, then you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever been promoted to be in charge of people that you used to work with? How did that affect the relationships that you had with those people? Have you ever worked for one of your colleagues who got promoted? Did they take the time to redefine your relationship? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking. Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s starting to look like the economic winter just might be getting ready to thaw. Once this happens, IT Leaders realize that they’re going to have a massive task added to their already overloaded plate – recruitment.

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Posted in promotions | No Comments »

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