IT's Complicated - Note From The President - May 2014

I spent the month of May in meetings with a multitude of different types of companies and their respective owners and executives. I was called in to discuss technology management and the results the executives have been getting. I must have spent 60 hours minimum in very engaging, one-on-one conversations about the expectations they had versus the actual results that were being delivered.

As I reflected on the meetings I’d been involved in, a common theme began to develop. Almost every executive I spoke with assumed technology management was basically easy, and even believed that one individual could “do all of IT” and a couple of other jobs as well. I’ve had this conversation very often over my career, but the theme was just too overwhelming this month.

Why do people think this way? They don’t manage this way in other departments.

How could one person (or a part-time person) understand, support, and manage all of the following:

• Line of Business applications, like accounting, EMR, and ERP
• Web sites and integration to Line of Business applications
• Remote employee access and remote offices
• To Cloud or not to Cloud? And where?
• Tablets, smartphones, laptops, ultrabooks, desktops, etc.
• Data centers
• Security
• Integration between applications
• Reporting and business intelligence

Just to name a few…

One of the executives I spoke with really dug into one of our conversations. He likened the issue to doctors and their areas of specialty. He said, “You wouldn’t have an orthopedic surgeon do heart surgery, would you?”

Then the issue of maintenance and management came up. “You wouldn’t wait for the airplane engines to fail before you put a maintenance program together, would you?”

The point is that Information Technology is very complicated. It has many disciplines that one individual, or even a small team, just can’t be proficient in.

Thank goodness that having these conversations with business owners and executives is what I enjoy doing the most. It's super fun helping and sharing with people!