While cost/benefit analysis may make textbook sense as a principle guiding decision-making, it is woefully inadequate in explaining the way modern organizations operate. Increasingly, the IT decisions made by managers are influenced by non-technical factors in an environment where managers at all levels are struggling to effectively leverage PCs and other equipment that allow market leaders to make information a strategic asset. Information technology is the top issue on senior management's agenda. And most senior managers have become believers: It's impossible to be successful if your IT infrastructure is in ruins.

Meanwhile, engineers and programmers frequently appear oblivious to the strategic issues that keep senior management awake at night. After all, they're busy enough trying to find the best way to push those bits down the wire a little faster. To borrow from popular psychology, we might say that senior management is from Mars while the IT organization is from Venus. It's time for IT managers, and network managers in particular, to recognize that success is not always the by-product of being right. Information management has become the most politicized issue of the modern organization, and to be successful themselves, the techies need to get in the game.

Politics Isn't Always a Dirty Word Mention the word politics to a typical network engineer or systems administrator and you'll evoke the same response you'd get if you dragged your fingernails across a blackboard. While that view of the world is understandable, it's founded on a biased perspective on politics' role, broadly defined, within organizations.

Senators, governors and mayors are paid to make decisions about allocating resources--dividing up the public pie, so to speak. Sometimes, issues lend themselves well to decisions based on thoughtful analysis, and this fosters rational decisions that any well-informed person could support. More often than not, however, decision-makers base their choices on incomplete information and the desire to serve multiple interests. Occasionally, they serve their own interests--a strategy most of us would regard as lacking in principle. Other times, it's not crystal clear which interests are being served because the cause-and-effect relationship between decision and outcome is complex.

The allocation of resources within an organization is its politics. At any given moment, we can take a snapshot of how resources are distributed and identify a power structure that both drives, and benefits from, that distribution. But the power structure in organizations is often fluid, influenced both by market variables and internal processes. Increasingly, information is an asset that threatens the status quo power structure. Information can transform the organization, leaving in its wake a group of once-powerful managers who resisted adoption of modern technologies.