Great piece from eyetoIT, The Danger of Illusory IT Excellence, which sums up so much of what is wrong with breathless media coverage entwined with “hard-charging” corporate America. Is it really a badge of honour to have a futon in your office?
Remember when Enron was winning awards and plaudits from every investment advisor out there. It was receiving plaudits for corporate governance at the time! Well we all have the t-shirt about what happened next…
So back to eyetoIT. The author is great at getting the story behind the story, following up and looking at facts rather than opinions. The blog begins thusly:
I remember rolling my eyes in August, reading a piece from CIO Insight (“Overstock.com: Feeling the Need for Speed“) on how Overstock.com’s CIO Shawn Schwegman was running the rootin’est-tootin’est IT shop around. The reason was that it seemed like something out of a time capsule to the late ’90’s world of Internet time – in all the bad ways – big egos and an apparent dismisiveness of most of what we know about managing business-critical, enterprise-grade development and implementation.
First there was the Schwegman’s chest-pounding about implementing a Teradata system faster than Teradata thought possible. How did he do it? Working harder, not necessarily smarter, seems to be Schwegman’s way:
Even better, comes actionable advice:
How are you, as an executive manager, evaluating the quality of your CIO or its IT function? I have many times had conversations with people who equate hard work (as evidenced, unfortunately, by long hours) as a critical factor (“He’s committed,” “He works so hard”). My response is invariably the same: the “A for effort” doesn’t apply in business – is he doing what he is supposed to be doing and doing it well? These are independent questions.
If you, as an executive, don’t have the knowledge to fully assess this, you need someone on your board, or as an outside consultant, who can be honest with you. I recently joined a board for this just reason – neither CEO nor any board member at the time felt fully competent to assess the quality of their CTO and the development function in light of recent comments by a dissident shareholder. The CEO was pretty confident in the hiring process that brought this individual to the organization, but understandably wanted further validation of the individual. (Because he well knew that there was a non-zero chance that the company had been snowed during the hiring process.)
One question though – who is the author of eyetoIT? Can’t see a bio link on the site? When talking about governance its always good to see transparency.
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