Social Networking and IT - Exploitation

Exploitation is usually a "bad" word, with connotations and meanings that cause people to shy away from using it. However, in the highly competitive arena of Information Technology, exploitation can be a really good word. To exploit new technologies and opportunities for the success of your customers and your business is what the leading edge of IT is all about. Social networking already exists within your organization. Social networking exists in hallway conversations and interoffice phone calls and the massive volume of internal emails that every organization experiences. Some of these mechanisms can be mined to gather information about how your organization is actually working and to support restructuring and reorganization efforts that deliver improved processes and communication.

Available to every corporation is data about who sends email to whom. Many companies do not have the existing logging capabilities of their email systems turned on, but if they did, a timestamped record can be gathered of all internal email transactions. Major mail systems like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes readily support this. Most companies also have data sources that associate people with their email addresses and with other company data such as what department they belong to and perhaps what projects they are working on. A simple SQL database can be created that joins this data together and removes the individual identity data (to protect privacy) leaving a timestamped record of communications between departments.

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Change for Change Sake

Today, I was reminded of a particularly wasteful trend in Information Technology. Every business person who genuinely cares about the profitability and success of the company they work for  should  do everything they can to reverse or eliminate this trend entirely. I am referring to the abhorrent trend of IT "management by familiarity." Over the time I have been observing a particular company, they have had no fewer than 3 IT managers come and go. Each has run the IT group for at least a couple years, up to much longer reigns. Each IT manager, in their own way, was knowledgeable and reasonably competent at their job.

Yet each, upon assuming the role, did the following things:

• Each initially spent significant time speaking to peers within the company about their IT needs and concerns.
• Each spent little time, if any, understanding the history of the current IT environment from any of the existing staff familiar with it.
• Each then "divided" the existing infrastructure up into basically two buckets - technologies and vendors they were  familiar with, and those they weren't.
• Each then, utilizing the criticisms heard from their user communities and operating typically in an initial "grace period" where more budget and staffing were afforded the "new guy," initiated projects to "fix" relatively minor problems by replacing unfamiliar solutions with familiar solutions. This was often driven by peer pressure to show swift action combined with a self-driven desire to deliver "quick hits."

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Communication is Beautiful

Communication, like Beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Our modern society enables a range of mechanisms for communication between people that has never before been seen in human history. We have all the traditional mechanisms, from face to face conversations, to written letters/memos, to signs/posters/etc. on everything from billboards to bulletin boards. In the last century, we have added a host of electronic mechanisms. We have phones and audio (radio, recordings, etc.) and video (television, video tapes, video disks, and so on). Most recently, we added everything that the Internet and the digital revolution has developed. We have email, texting, Facebook updates (not to mention countless other social networks), Tweets, and on and on.

All of this presents a challenge for executives, managers, professionals, or any person who needs to regularly communicate with a wide range of people in forums ranging from individual exchanges to mass delivery of a message. People are people and as such typically have preferences for how they communicate to others and how they receive communications. Urgent emails to someone who by their nature prefers to make and receive phone calls may go unread until well after what ever matter was "urgent" has long past. Disemination of online video training materials may have little impact upon an audience that learns better through interactive face-to-face classroom-style training.

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More for Less is often More of Less

When ever there is an economic downturn, whether globally or in a single specific business, there is increased pressure to achieve greater value from one's IT organization. This is not only expected, but necessary and desirable. Every business today is, in part or whole, an information business. Successful application of IT is at a minimum instrumental in maintaining a competitive position in one's market, and at best a game changer that can catapult business to new levels of profitability.

However, as is far too often the case, all of us in and around the IT profession have our horror stories of companies that placed ever increasing and unrealistic targets on their IT organization in pursuit of getting more for less. Such situations often lead to IT staff working ever longer hours, with constantly increasing workloads, shrinking budgets, and ever shorter deadlines. Whether for fear of losing their jobs in a poor economy, company loyalty, or a host of other reasons, IT staff often shoulder such situations for a period of time, but then attrition grows and staff turn-over increases. IT skills are not interchangeable commodity items. The CICSO certified network engineer already in your organization has specific knowledge of your network, your people, your business, and your organization that another, newly-hired, CISCO certified network engineer will take time and expense learning to the same level as the one who just left.

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