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19th November - It is getting harder to reconcile working conditions with the excellent pay I get. Perhaps that's because so many awkward things have happened recently. While I was in Cambodia, my PC was deemed a security risk and taken away for reprogramming. After a week back with nothing to work with, I'd meditated on so many yoga sutras at my desk that I could have built my own lightsaber, and gotten bored. I decided to go on a quest for my missing computer. To cut a long story short, it was lost, it was found, and it was returned to me minus its personality, but keeping its file archive on a hard disk the network nazis overlooked. Ha ha. Some bits you lose, some bits you keep. That sort of flawed paranoia, the culture of cringe, and being obstructed by difficult people, has made it really hard to sit it out for the fortnight.
I vented my spleen in the paper below, and should be better by Thurs(pay)day.
“Business must drive IT.” Those words stick in my craw. Every time I see it printed in trade magazines – usually next to a picture of some grinning, white-collared, model dynamic executive – I am reminded how marginalised IT has become.
In the mid-to-late 90s IT could do no wrong. Huge budgets were grudgingly signed across for ‘R&D’ – if for no other reason than to keep up with competitors and collaborators. No one understood where the money was going. The technology then still confuses people now. Everyone hoped that pouring money into IT or ‘e’ projects would gain them the competitive edge. For IT, this was the ultimate validation. The geek had inherited the earth.
After the dot-com crash the tables turned. Business seized the opportunity to rein in the eggheads and yoke them, once more, to the corporate vision. Now, it seems trendy to continue punishing IT for past excesses. IT is singled out. No other department is so constantly admonished. You don’t hear: “The Business must drive HR” or “The Business must drive Finance”. No other department needs to provide ‘business reasons’ for all requests, no matter how trivial. And no other department is so frequently threatened with outsourcing.
Business’ concept of ‘driving’ no longer involves giving simple, clear goals, but paranoid over-scrutiny. In many businesses, where IT is also expected to innovate, this is hypocritical. Innovation involves risk, and cannot take place where the philosophy is risk-elimination rather than risk-management. Business has turned from the passenger calmly giving directions, to the agonised relative with one hand on the handbrake. They forget that they are in the same car, and that IT wishes just as much to reach their destination safely.
If business wants to eliminate any risk of repeating past mistakes, then it is proper to drive IT like cattle, dumb and docile. It is prudent to increase restrictions and scrutiny. Then Business will certainly drive IT; out the door.
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