The Assertive Senior Management Team With big money on the IT table, it should come as no surprise that the senior management team, maybe even the chief executive, has taken a keen interest in all this IT wizardry. The middle-class knowledge elite are implementing LANs to interconnect their home PCs, and television commercials brainwash us into believing that the Internet and e-commerce will revolutionize our economy. The scary part is that it's probably true. The odds are high, and getting higher every day, that at least one or two of the managers on the executive team have become technology junkies, installing the latest Windows NT service pack and reading The Wall Street Journal while waiting for setup to run its course.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing for IT managers? Well, it's good to the extent that you may feel less pressure to dumb-down a technical explanation of why some new or exotic technology isn't ready for prime time. The IT vocabulary that managers used to leave at the office when they presented to senior management is becoming a more accessible element of our lexicon. And it may help you get enough of a budget boost to keep your best people without the need to resort to Y2K fear-mongering. But it spells trouble because it increases the likelihood of conflict over strategic IT directions.

Now, you have senior management interested in IT. You also have technical staff who advocate differing directions, partly because they're self-confident, partly because their increasingly specialized IT skills can make them indispensable or redundant--depending on which road you take. And of course, you have all the department and division managers, often with their own technical experts (the ones who install their NT service packs for them), busily optimizing internal systems to meet their own distributed needs. And they aren't overly concerned that this procedure doesn't follow organizational standards.

The IT Manager Merry-Go-Round It isn't easy for IT managers to survive in such an ambiguous environment, particularly when technology companies are making a nasty habit of meeting delivery targets with shoddy hardware and software, or worse yet, not meeting them at all. Even if a tenuous organizational consensus can be assembled, will the underlying technology work as advertised? Based on my experience, I'd say it probably won't, at least not within the time frame originally envisioned.

Good IT managers burn out quickly in these circumstances, but with today's shortage of people who have both technology and management skills, the good news is that the free-agent market is booming. The organizational politics associated with reconciling intra- or inter-team conflicts can be debilitating to the best of them. And when senior management intervenes to demonstrate leadership, it's often in the form of technology strategies that may be long on practical business skills but short on technical common sense. Forced migrations to NT are perhaps the decade's freshest examples.

But so what if senior management drives out the best and brightest among the IT elite by setting bad direction and policy? Such a situation is custom-made for an outsourcing deal, usually the kind that's slanted toward the outsourcer, who must author a reasonable balance sheet while maintaining overhead much higher than that of an in-house organization.

Is There Any Hope? Some days, I wonder if there is a way out of this mess. It's easy to lose hope. But then I observe the positive transformations that so many organizations have made through smart IT adoptions. These implementations may not have been efficiently managed, and some problems may have to be worked out, but IT's forward momentum is apparent for several reasons.

First, organizations able to find and retain good management have become more efficient or have dramatically enhanced their market position through the strategic adoption of technology. More often than not, this is the result of a visionary who refuses to succumb to failure. Good economic times have enabled many organizations to pay high salaries, often above market, and money is a talent magnet. The trend in this regard grows as the financial allure of a career in IT has begun counteracting the perception that it's a field for geeks with pocket protectors.

Second, the legacy operation is often so abysmal that even the most basic technology upgrades can have a significant favorable impact. Imagine a return to typewritten manuscripts, clackety old cash registers, ATM-less shopping plazas, and no Internet. In this respect, the investments in IT have clearly paid off, even when they are not necessarily leading-edge.

Perhaps most important, there is evidence that the IT field is maturing, and that traditional battle lines are eroding. Mainframe and client/server experts are now meeting and engaging in constructive dialogue, each one fairly knowledgeable of the other's responsibilities and the appeal of their favored systems. Battles about the best network protocol or processor design are now assuming a more pragmatic bent. Relinquishing past hostilities, many experienced IT staff increasingly welcome the views of consultants, recognizing that the view of an outside expert can often lead to common ground, albeit at a fairly high price. And as senior management gains a greater comfort level in dealing with information-oriented issues, a more realistic view of the costs and benefits will emerge.

Send your comments on this column to Dave Molta at dmolta@nwc.com.