By Naked CIO, 15 September 2008 08:00
COMMENT
We all know the IT guy - quick to criticise, slow to act. But what can be done to stop him bringing down the whole department? The Naked CIO has some advice.
There are reasons why IT often has a bad reputation within organisations. I have written increasingly about the responsibility to have a more balanced approach to business and IT within the IT department.
But there is always the IT guy - a generic term that refers to many employees within our businesses. He is most likely a guy (though could just as well be a girl) that has been in the IT department for years. More likely he occupies the same position he did when he started.
He is never motivated to do more than is required yet is always the one person within the department to complain first that he is not paid enough.
Generally he is an obstructionist and a very good one at that. He loves poking holes in innovation, change and ideas but yet never contributes to finding a solution to overcome them.
He loves having the passwords for every level of administration yet becomes very suspicious if someone else has too much access and is quick to point out the potential threat related to it. One must wonder why someone who demands the master key to every system is so overtly suspicious about others that have only a fraction of the access he does.
When asked what he is doing he is very quick to say he is working on a very complex IT problem. He is good enough to know to use technical language that supports this assertion yet there is relatively little evidence this IT guy ever significantly contributes to the development and growth of the IT department.
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He loves being cryptic in front of others, especially when servicing someone from the business. While solving or trying to solve their problem he is exceptionally talented in making the user feel like a complete idiot to the extent that the individual will be reluctant to report a problem in the future.
His initial answer to most requests is 'no' or 'it can't be done'. When either of those fails he is quick to pull the compliance or policy card as a reason that even if it could be done it won't.
Finally, because of his long tenure in the department and his intriguing characteristics, he defines the organisation's perception of IT. He is the poster child of all things wrong within IT yet he is everywhere and in every organisation.
Some of this might be harsh, however, I would bet you know this IT guy or someone remarkably like him. He is after all the old guard of IT.
While we all know him we can no longer ignore this person as a fixture of our department. We need to work to correct his behaviour. Ideally we can do this through communicating the need for new IT ideology to these individuals - and if this is not successful then through more drastic actions including termination.
Let us redefine the IT guy and rid ourselves of this negative legacy of poor performance and elitist blathering. There is no longer a place in any organisation for him.
Appeasement or complicity in not trying to change his behaviour makes us all IT guys.
What do you think? Do you know an IT guy? How do you work with or manage him? Post a comment below to share your experiences.
Comments
There are 8 comments. Join the discussion
1. Bob George
The question is... Why? How has the management allowed this to happen?
One answer is often ignorance identified by many that business's refuse to encompass IT as a value and asset of the business thereby alienating the 'IT guy', only letting him/her out when others with no real understanding of IT think it's time to get IT involved. Perhaps he or she has been treated in the same way a company would treat the electrician or plumber? This comparison is highly dangerous as IT does more than just facilitate, it creates new business opportunities by changing the way in which business does business.
Involve your IT department in management decisions at a conceptual stage rather than at the end, this way the 'IT guy' (or at least his or her management) has a responsibility and part ownership of any project, communication is established a plan is agreed whereby monitoring is allowed, then and only then can you assess whether ‘termination’ is an option as you will actually know what he or she is or isn’t doing!
The trick is; ensure that your IT manager is business literate with a good understanding if IT or a techie that has moved into management by a qualified route rather than a techie that has been put in charge just by default. I think you will find plenty of the latter which is why the 'IT guy' is still around.
2. anonymous
Yes, the IT Guy, where would incompetant IT management be without the disposable scapegoat.
Poor performance of junior IT staff is often the fault of their line manangers not motivating or developing them enough so they can blossom within the business.
Afterall, there are no useless Project Managers or Heads of IT are there. Esp. in the government where warnings from the shopfloor that the taxpayers shiney new over blown and over promised ridiculously expensive IT project is going to trainwreck are ignored as being negative from players who are labelled as being obstructive to change.
3. Simon
The first two comments are pretty spot on.
But to be honest, looking back I can recognise a lot of "the IT guy" in my past - but it's not as negative as the article points out, it tends to be a response to crap management. The is a big difference between "it can't be done<period>" and "it can't be done in the timescale allowed/with the resources allocated/witht eh skills available/etc" - one problem is that management often have stopped listening by the end of "it can't be done" and don't (or won't) hear the reasons.
The other cause of "it can't be done" or the more simple "no" is the desire to manage workload. When management refuse pointblank to control workload, it's left to the guy(s) doing the work to manage it themselves. At my last job, I tended to put the latest "clever ideas" 'on the spike' for a while and see what happened. In the majority of cases, nothing more was said of them as people changed their minds and cam eup with a different "bright idea du jour".
4. anonymous
How about the uninformed colleague or boss? Everyone knows one, although he’s often not called a polite generic term (at least, not to his face), but he is very opinionated and he’s quick to criticise too, convinced he knows your job better than you do – so much so that he feels he can tell everyone you’re doing a bad job, that it’s not so hard, that if he was doing it then it would be done by now. What about the IT guys (or girls) who work hard and try their best but are underfunded and unappreciated? Are we ALL idiots? Why don’t we get fired?
If someone asks me what I’m doing, they’re not really interested – they normally mean something like “when will you stop whatever you’re doing and do my job”, never mind what it is or why I’m doing it.
I think that people often ask “why” because they don’t feel confident in you and they’re trying to trip you up. Have you ever taken your car to a garage and tried to ask the mechanic to justify his bill? How about a plumber, or electrician? I don’t know about you, but every time I write a cheque to pay my taxes I wonder if my accountant and Gordon Brown are in cahoots because it always seems like I’m paying too much.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t people out there who are bad at their jobs, whose main skill is procrastination and power games but just because you don’t understand something does not mean that it is wrong or broken (it doesn’t mean that it’s not, either).
So what are you going to do? Reading your article suggests you’ve read a few technology articles and tried to challenge “the IT guy”, but that’s just insulting the intelligence of all but the dumbest so even if he’s one of the good guys it’s hardly surprising that he retaliates with some technical (and cryptic) details. How would you feel if I tried to trick you into saying that being an editor/journalist was child’s play? After all, it’s only making up stories and such, surely? I mean, what else do you need to be able to do other than read and write? I don’t know about you but I learned how to do that in primary school.
That would be insulting if I actually meant it. If we worked in the same company and I voiced that opinion, I’d be alienating you and our relationship would break down further.
Your conclusion is that “we” must stand up together and stop being nice to this miscreant, stop being complicit in his performance by allowing him to fail you. Because your conclusion is that he is wrong, an idiot, and you know his job better than him. Well, congratulations. If only the human race had someone with your vision centuries years ago then computers would never crash, the sun would always shine, and there would be peace in the world.
5. Radical Meldrew
Dear Mr Naked, Granted the majority of IT guys are from the same mould, but it’s their enforced environment that dictates and moulds their attitude. Why else are they all the same? I was the in-house techie for an insurance company and was kept confined in the freezing cold, extremely noisy head office computer room until required. The CEO however had a palatial office on the top floor and only contacted me when he had promised positive action on some project or other. A typical CEO one-way exchange: “I have supreme confidence in your abilities so I’m sure the newly agreed deadlines won’t slip, now off you go because you’ve got an awful lot to do”. The only concession he made was not to say “Oh and shut the door on your way out please”. He didn’t need to, he had a secretary who did that for him.
He later outsourced the whole IT infrastructure and a London colleague and I were made redundant and replaced by no less than 5 contractors from 2 different companies. So maybe there is a typical CEO guy?
6. Helen
Bovine scatology is the phrase that comes to mind over this. Being the IT 'guy' is probably one of the most directly stressed in an organisation. Everyone believes they have the only need there is. Everyone. And no management usually in sight. Developing 'an attitude' is the only form of defence and goes with a job that gets plenty of howls for help and virtually no gratitude once a problem is solved. Thank you is too simple and too rare.
7. Drew Stephenson
Hmm, bit of a tricky one here and i think the first two commenters have picked up the bulk of the problem; to whit: you have people with no IT background managing IT people (and not understanding what the challenge is) and IT people with no management skills trying to do management-only roles.
This latter is frequently the case because after a while management seems to be the only way to go to get any career advancement.
The side effect of the former (non-IT managers) is that The IT Guy (let's call him TIG) is frequently the first person who will put any realistic parameters around a proposal. So Marketing come up with an idea, run it past Sales (who like it) and then past TIG's boss who, with his limited knowledge of the systems and tools, says "no problem, we should be able to get that in by august".
A project is kicked off and at the start-up meeting someone finally asks TIG and he says something like "does this apply to all our products?" or "is this retrospective?"
Marketing and Sales nod their heads enthusiastically and poor TIG has to say "well, given that we have 200 products and they're all covered by regulations" or "we're looking at 25 years of cumulative changes here" and come up with his best guess.
Needless to say this is waaaaaay past August.
But apparently this is because TIG is "negative", or at least, that what it says on his end of year review...
8. MadCabbage
I agree with the naked CIO - there are too many of these pople around - especially where I work!
I used to work in the private sector, where IT was always seen as an enabler for the business - where someone like the IT Guy would be severed - now I work in the Public sector - and I find where all went too!
I have never come across such a wealth of ignorance & conservatism in 20 years of work in the private sector. IT is known here as "where to go if you want problems".
IT should offer solutions for anything the business wants to do (for good or ill) it should not drive the business!