As a business grows there is often a rebellion in IT departments.  On the one hand, IT technicians become overworked.  What I call IT cowboys enjoy the opportunity to wander the network arbitrarily fixing problems and playing the “lone wolf” on the network.  As the business grows though more and more “lone wolves” wander the network they begin stepping all over each other’s work.  In other words without understanding the changes or discoveries another lone wolf … err… technician has made, there is a risk.  The risk is that the change will break the fix of another technician made earlier. 

In a previous posting I discussed how IT people need to be Team players.  In another I discussed the supporting operational roles to the Incident and Problem management roles.  In this article I’d like to discuss a problem I recently ran into on a client site.  As an IT Consultant, I run into these problems all the time.  The simplest solution is to re-organize the department.

Two common symptoms of poor IT business behavior:  

No Root Cause analysis -

Without a problem management team, the Incident team will end up troubleshooting and fixing problems over and over again.  If the company pays $10 to resolve a ticket, each time the incident reoccurs the company pays another $10 for the ticket resolution.  It’s not unusual for tickets to re-occur hundreds of times in a year’s period.  This increases the cost of incident support per problem from $10 to $10 times the hundreds of times the problem goes through the incident process again and again.

Symptom: runaway costs fixing the same problem over and over again.

No Change Management -

A common problem I see is a technician coming in to fix a problem.  After the technician leaves, the customer finds a new problem or even worse an old problem has come back.  The incident team is called and a new ticket is open for each error.  Each technician continues to work on the same problems over and over again.

Symptom: runaway cost fixing the same problem over and over again.  This becomes compounded because while technicians fix one problem, they are breaking an old fix or creating new problems.  Incident problems on the network begin to snowball.

The most important thing to understand is that accountability.  As in any business department there must be a way to track and verify problems.  Managers are taught to first assign tasks, then second follow-up on those tasks.  This follow-up maintains the integrity of the business system.  Too often IT is seen as black magic.  Therefore the second management task does not occur.  Without follow-up IT experts setup their own priorities.

For example making the CPA and the controller the same person is asking for trouble.  Who follows up on the CPA if the CPA is the controller?  The same is true for when making the Incident manager and the problem manager the same person.  Making them the same person reduces accountability of the owner of the two roles.  By building in accountability, technical problems are reduced in the IT department in the same way financial errors and bankruptcy is reduced when a controller role is added to the accounting department.

This accountability is something the old “Lone Wolf” type of technician never had to deal with.  Yet as the business grows, this type of behavior actually damages the real value of the organization.  As a Seattle IT Consultant I work with IT departments and business owners to reorganize departments to avoid these types of conflicts between technicians. 

I was reading a blog recently called Channels com but never seem to go by Mitch Lieberman.  I’m not sure if I took the same message as the writer meant me to take, but if you are like me, it’s frustrating as a Seattle IT consultant to have business experts just drop everything in my lap.  The “Everything” I am talking about business decisions.  Because a technical system is involved, managers assume that all decisions should be made by technical people.  How do you support a department, such as a Marketing department that is still trying to follow the same marketing tactics of a business selling product 100 years ago?

In my research I found it interesting that traditional marketing principles going back 100 years.  Marketers were trying to figure out how to market lots and lots of beer.  The problem was, that without a national presence selling a locally brewed beer was difficult.  In learning how to distribute the message, to the millions and millions of potential customers around the country Budweiser was able to become one of the first national marketers of a local product. Their strategy was to send out the message to millions of people in any way possible.  The system required sharing that marketing message with potential customers, but with an even larger majority of people who were uninterested in the product.  The result of course was very successful and most Americans drink American loggers.

The problem is that when things change, nobody wants to try anything new.  With information technology it’s possible to change the whole way we look at marketing.  Even 100 years ago, the 80/20 rule was known and an interesting idea.  Yet nobody knew what to do with it.  Nor did anyone have the manpower to make it cost effective.  Look at any 100 year old company and there is no way to identify who are the top 20% of customers that buy 80% of any organizations products or services.  We have the technology.  Yet companies like Campbell’s and Budweiser distribute their message to everyone within earshot.  The message is so dominant that it is impossible for smaller companies with other options to get their message out.  It is ironic to me that in the information age, it seems that this blanket method of marketing seems to be the only way anyone seems to know how to market. 

A lot has happened in the last 100 years, so why do we still have marketers that think like tactical sales people ignoring the top 20% of their customer base.  A company like Campbell’s could identify every customer who loved their soups.  In the process Campbell’s Soups could market coupons, advertisements, samples and other materials to their biggest evangelists.  These evangelists (the top 1% of buyers) would naturally sell products out of a strong almost compulsive product loyalty.  Yet instead they prefer to ignore the new ways of marketing and stick with the old.  I can’t help but wonder if sticking with the old isn’t similar to sticking with horse drawn carriages when the automobile came out.

Mitch Lieberman is right in my opinion when he writes in his blog that Marketing and customer service need to be integrated.  I think that it goes back to the sales culture.  It’s much more glamorous to be hunters looking for new customers and ignore the farmers who build the long term relationships with our present customers.  Traditionally hunters are the top dogs in the sales groups.  Marketers seem to be ex-sales people who couldn’t hack it in the sales world.  So it makes sense that Marketers would build strategies around strong “Hunting” sales forces. 

I think though that putting tactical sales people into a strategic marketing role is a mistake.  When I studied marketing in college I was impressed by the end to end customer relationship planning described in my marketing classes.  We know that economically it’s much less expensive to develop relationships with our present customers, and then sell more stuff to present customers through a customer centric approach to marketing.  Now a hundred years ago it’s possible to automatically manage 1000’s of marketing campaigns that are customized to individual customers.  In doing so, we build a customer loyalty that brings customers back even if our prices are higher.

Instead we see marketing departments focused on contact management tactical sales approaches, rather than strategic customer centric marketing roles.  In marketing models, we can show that if you spend a dollar on finding new customers you are doing well to break even.  Whereas when farming present customers each marketing dollar spent on the top 20% of clients comes back as $7 for the company.  Marketers that focus primarily on finding customers miss out on $6 dollars of company income by spending that money on non-customers. 

As a business consultant specializing in business technology I am struck by the difficulty.  When a marketer drops the decision in my lap, I need to make a decision.  Should I build a customer centric marketing program with CRM, Cloud and SEO and online marketing strategies?  Or do I build a technical version of something they were doing 100 years ago?  Of course building a technical platform your marketing director doesn’t have a vision for, becomes the conflict.  So do I allow the marketing director to hold the direction of the company hostage to a 100 year old legacy strategy… or do I take the company hostage and drag the company into the next century.  It’s a dilemma every modern network architect runs into eventually.

I spoke with another client.  He was a small client who was considering going back to night school to study technology.  He described how difficult life is being held hostage by his IT consulting company.  I’m hearing this more and more often as I talk about cloud network architecture.  Our clients are feeling like hostages to their technology and to their IT consultants.  I think the modern network architect needs to understand how to build systems that enable not trap the business owner.

Imagine a client that is so frustrated with the situation that he gives up talking to his IT support company and goes back to get a school to free himself.  I’ve begun asking questions of business owners, “Do you feel like a hostage to your IT department or IT contractors.”

The facial emotions quickly go blank.  Almost as if they are thinking, “… But you are the enemy… can I trust you with the truth?”

I explain why I’m asking the question.  After hearing that many business owners feel the same way a sense of relief seems to overtake the owner.

Then they admit that yes they do and then I get an earful about the problem

Having worked with IT experts for many years I know that most IT Experts are doing the best they can for their clients.  The problem isn’t that they aren’t trying to do a good job.  I think the problem is ignorance about the needs of the customer.  I think there is also ignorance about some of the basic roles within technology.  Most IT Support experts focus on Incident support and little focus on Problem management or root cause analysis.  So it’s no wonder that problem keep re-occurring over and over again.  This is probably also why most on-premise networks are managed without a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for availability.  A professionally run IT Consulting Company understands the conflict cause by the technical power of the technologist and the effect they have on the bottom line.

I think this is one of the biggest advantages of the cloud.  The cloud will move on-premise networks out of the office building and into a professionally run network operating center (NOC).  The NOC will have incident and every other IT Operations role.  Once in the “Cloud” the owner will get the same type of reporting and feedback that he/she gets from the other departments.  The political power that the technician has over the business and the business owner will be lost.  With cloud architecture the modern network architect will be releasing the business owner from being a hostage to IT.

In my conversations with clients this week something came out.  That something was one of those unmentionable subjects that many business owners are uncomfortable talking about.  There are three forms of political power in any business.  I’ll call them authoritative, charismatic and technical.  Technical power can be held by the accounting department or manufacturing or any department.  Every owner I meet agrees that the technical department is a poor wielder of their political power.  Often that political power gets in the way of doing good business.  I’m sorry to say that often the modern network architect is guilty, along with the IT department, IT Support teams and even IT Consultants of misusing that power.  Leaving many business owners feeling like IT Hostages 

70% of IT failure is actually caused by human error

Nobody becomes good at Technology without making errors.  The best developers, project managers, support technicians and technology experts in general make lots and lots of errors throughout their career.  So it’s no real surprise that a lot of the software, server and other types of technical errors happen.  Yet how often do we blame a problem on the hardware or the software instead of the technical team where the blame really belongs?  I am always surprised at how a worried technical expert will try to cover up why a technical failure.  Often there was nothing that the expert could have done.  It’s almost like technical experts have no understanding of how business really works. 

We really aren’t fooling our business counterparts when we try to cover up the failure.  As you read this example ask yourself if the business owner is really fooled.  

• Business owner:  Why is this failing?
• Technologist:  I think it’s a hardware failure…
• Business owner:  If we replace the hardware will that fix it?
• Technologist: I think it will
• Business owner:  If the problem is the hardware, then I want it replaced.  Will that work?
• Technologist: I think so…
• Business owner: Yes or no… will it fix it?
• Technologist: Yes it will 

Now move forward 6 months.  The hardware is replaced and the failure is still occurring.  The business owner comes back.

• Business owner: So why after replacing the hardware is it not working?
• Technologist:  It’s working much better…
• Business owner:  I agree, but the systems are still failing, I wanted it fixed?
• Technologist:  I think the problem is that there is more demand on the system.
• Business owner:  …and…???
• Technologist:  The new growth is taxing the system.
• Business owner:  Why didn’t you account for that?
• Technologist:  You should have mentioned that growth would be an issue.
• Business owner:  If the business hadn’t grown, would these failures be re-occurring?
• Technologist:  You asked me to fix a problem that was occurring 6 months ago.  Now I believe we have a new problem.  If we had factored in business growth 6 months ago, we may not be having this problem now.

This cycle can go on and on with the technologist trying slip away from accountability.  In the first scenario, the technologist had no idea what was wrong.  Nor did the technologist know how to handle the problem.  So the technologist made up something.  The owner knows that what he/she is being told doesn’t make sense.  The technologist keeps digging a deeper and deeper hole.  Often what ends up happening is that finally the technology falls over.  Then either someone like me is called in to fix the problem or the business fails. 

The technology architect needs to build business technology systems with accountability.  The modern network is now built with systems that measure, track and report the problems on the network.  How often though do the reports for these systems make it too the business owner in a language the owner can understand?  It’s obvious when the network fails that something is wrong.  It’s important for the modern network architect to build in the check and balance systems into the network and share responsibility for managing those systems with the owner and management team.