IT

IT – One of the benefits of working with many buyers and sellers of services is seeing the many different cultures of functions.

Some are hierarchical and some are horizontal.

Some are open and collegial, and some secretive and political.

One person didn’t make them, and one person can’t fix them.

But if you are stuck in a place with a disconnect between the top and the middle / bottom, here’s some news about what the people on the ground think when you make a sourcing or modernization decision

What the Average IT Employee Thinks

this article is a great summary of what your team may be too afraid to tell you. Some choice extracts:

• Much (but not all) of the American technology industry is being led by assholes. And those assholes are needlessly destroying the very industry that made them rich.

• The services industry is following the same bad collective management plan: It is more important to book business at any price than it is to deliver what they promise.

• You can’t fix a problem by throwing more bodies at it. Continuity and team cohesiveness is important, and with each layoff and offshoring, these are destroyed, making services worthless.

• When you treat and pay people poorly you lose their ambition and desire to excel, you lose the performance of your work force. Many workers in  services are no longer providing any value to the business – not because they are bad workers, but because they are being treated poorly.

• Underneath it all is the faulty (and recent) theory of shareholder value maximization where management has incentives to drive up short-term stock prices, but find it easier to do so through outright fraud or more subtle erosion of the brand and team built up by their predecessors in the name of cost cutting.