Does IT make you productive?

Ok, I'll admit it.  I think our expectations of IT have fallen so far, so drastically that any solution we receive from our IT teams which actually improves productivity seems surprising.  I think that's the way to evaluate the responses from our survey, which indicate that most people responding don't see IT as a challenge to productivity. 

I say this as an IT centric guy, a former consultant myself now working as a sales and marketing executive for an IT consulting firm.  I have been in the bowels of the beast, and I think I can say fairly definitively that very few people receive the information they need from the systems they have.  There are several reasons for that result.  Surprisingly, few of them are the fault of the IT organization.

The first reason that business folks don't get what they need from IT is because they aren't sure what they want.  Have you ever sat in a requirements definition meeting between business people and IT people?  Trying to pin down business people on exactly what data they want and how they'll use it is virtually impossible. While it is difficult to envision how a process should work if all the data and personnel could work together in harmony, I am still quite taken by how poorly most managers understand and conceptualize the information they need to make decisions.  In this regard IT fails to make people more productive because they can't define the right solution.

Second, many of the packaged applications that have been the mainstay of computing for the last decade have been great at transactional processing.  We've freed up thousands of people from hand writing purchase orders and made data processing much more simple.  These systems are great at everyday transaction processing, but fairly poor at providing information to help people make decisions.  The reporting and business intelligence modules for these systems were afterthoughts rather than the basis for the system.  So now what we are left with is a wedding cake approach with transactional systems on top of databases and reporting systems and business intelligence on top of the transactional systems.  The more removed we are from the base data, the harder to understand what's truly happening.  In this case IT adequately solved the problems in the past, but the managers are now demanding new solutions to the problem they had all along.

Third, most business people treat IT as if it were a mystery and don't try to understand how technology works.   I think that this is because traditionally IT was treated as a holy art that only the sanctified few could truly understand.  Back in the day when all computing was done in the big refrigerated rooms with very large computers, average people just could not understand the inner workings of the IT team.  Technology has moved out of the back office and refrigerated rooms, but many managers don't try to learn more about technology and how it can help them.  What reinforces this problem is that IT people still hold mass in Latin - or, more to the point, tend to talk in three and four letter acronyms and argue about the benefits of Java or .NET.  Unfortunately many IT people have never held jobs on the functional side, so they don't understand the confusion they cause their functional peers in these discussions.  In this case, functional managers don't learn more about IT so they don't understand the costs or contradictions for what they ask for, and IT doesn't help by speaking in the native language rather than in the language of business.

I've seen the arguments about IT generating more productivity from the American worker and to an extent I believe it.  I think we did get quite a bit of productivity from IT from the 70s to the mid 90s, but I think we've hit a real lull in productivity from IT in the business world because all the transactional level IT has been deployed.  What's needed is the IT to help us understand all the data we generate, and to interact and collaborate more effectively.  This takes IT from a transactional level to a much more strategic level. Once these systems begin to be deployed, I think we'll see another bump in productivity based on information technology.  What that will take is a more educated business manager who understands the possibilities and limitations of information technology and treats IT as a partner in solving problems, and an IT organization that learns to understand business challenges and speaks in that language.

Comments

[Gar]

Coming from an IT person who has been on both sides of the table. What is happening more and more often is that software and networks are made to look overeasy. Then when a user goes out on a limb and makes a change that does global changes they look at IT as a bunch of works that think they walk on water. They don't think that (mostly), they just want things to work. They live in fear of the user making changes that they will have to fix and then fix again, all the while the IT department workers are idiots because they can't fix the problem.
That being said, too many IT departments do limit what they produce to keep a client or to be overly safe. If the users would think outside the box and ask for the sky and you had a proud IT department life would be easier. Good luck! But I'm hopeful.