IT and communication
December 16th, 2003
Today in the paper, in an article about IT cost reduction:
Bovendien -- en dit is echt niet onbelangrijk -- informatici zijn relatief weerloze slachtoffers. Ook andere departementen zoals marketing kosten veel geld waar geen duidelijke inkomsten tegenover staan, maar de marketingdirecteur slaagt er meestal veel beter in om zijn budget bij de bedrijfstop te verdedigen. Want de marketingdirecteur slaat de juiste zakelijke toon aan om aan te tonen waarom elke euro die naar zijn departement gaat, extra klanten en dus extra inkomsten genereert voor het bedrijf. IT managers, daarentegen. spreken niet de juiste taal.Or in English: both IT and marketing departements burn a lot of money in every company for pretty obscure reasons, but marketing managers will succeed better in defending their budget than their IT counterparts. Hence, cost reduction will occur more in the IT department.
This just illustrates my belief: it is not what you can, but how you sell it, that will earn you a living. Alas, IT people are not very skillled in this area. And moreover: they often don't see the need to sell what they're doing. The most obvious example of this is what they teach IT people in college: "First, program what has most risk. Input and output modules are less risky, so do them last." Later, this results in people demonstrating perfectly working programs to users with command-line interfaces, while saying "we will get you a decent GUI later on." I have done some experiments the other way around: brush up your GUI, leave a few holes in functionality, and demonstrate thàt to your users, while saying "yeah, you can't print anything yet, and saving your data is also not yet possible, but we will get to that later on." Guess which strategy delivers the most content users...
Anyway, looks like I'm rambling here. The point is: IT people are generally pretty weak in social (and thus commercial) skills. This is a greater threat to them than they are aware of. Don't forget to exercise these skills. If you meet a sales man at the coffee machine, try to talk to him for once, instead of looking at him like he's a piece of crud (while he's giving you the same look). You didn't get good at assembler by watching Winnie The Pooh videos, did you?
April 21st, 2008 at 10:17 PM I am not IT, I am Finance but I can relate to what you say, Tom. (After all, finance is right behind IT when it comes to cutting costs). A little warning, though. I have worked with IT-people with excellent sales skills. I have seen a number a programs that looked promising, only the printing and saving was missing (to stay with your example). Some months later, we still can't print nor save. And oh yeah, the program does work fine but only if there is only user at a time (kinda utopic on an ERP-system). After several of these experiences, you see through the sales pitch and start wondering if you can actually nominate people for headcount reduction. The trick is: underpromise and overdeliver!
April 21st, 2008 at 10:17 PM Tim, of course you're right. I'm not advertising to be a "be all show and no content" guy (although I have to admit I get frustrated when I see people pulling this of -- probably only on the short term, but then they usually move out of my vision). But I'm warning for the other way around: don't be a "all content and no show" guy either. This is hard for me (as a scientific purist) to admit, and what I still am learning: "no show" won't get you anywhere either. I have been raised with the ideal "if you do your job well, you'll get appreciated for that". I am now learning "people have to know what you're doing before you can get appreciated". Equilibrium is key. Where did we hear that before? (BTW -- finally somebody I know IRL for years, that actually understands something I rant about here. My brother already complained that he "didn't get that Java stuff". Thanks! :-) )
April 21st, 2008 at 10:17 PM Communicating with Customers and Managers What started me on this was reading Tom's thoughts on why IT budgets get cut. He summarizes an article that states that us tech folk are not so good at communicating our value to the company. My experiuence and reading lead me to agree. This poor co