James Garwell – A home for some of my thoughts.

We’ve all heard those words as we walk into the Helpdesk. Chances are we’ve uttered them on more than one occasion too.

Often, they are well founded. Sometimes they are just some flippancy to lighten the mood and ease the load.

Always though, they are divisive.

For an IT team to be engaged, we must understand that people call us because they need help. They have a problem. We are the people they believe can help us.

Next time you hear these words, or are tempted to speak or even think them yourself, take a step back. Use it as a springboard to better understand how that person came to do or say something that we consider daft. Take the time to understand the issue, and help deliver a long term solution. It may be explanation. It may be a configuration weakness allowing users to break things that should be unbreakable.

Use it to improve, and in doing so you will increase engagement with the people who consume your service. Being better engaged means they will ask more sensible questions, and you will deliver more sensible answers.

It’s a path to all round improvement and increased happiness.

A great many organisations are talking about the need to ‘Ride the Digital Wave’, or ‘Tweet on Twitter’, or ‘Like on Facebook’, or ‘Link on LinkedIn’, or ‘Have an App’.

I know this from speaking to, and networking with, a great many CIOs and people in IT Leadership positions across a large number of business sectors. I also know this as I look around at the online efforts of companies I research as I evaluate new roles.

There is an increasing trend amongst businesses in all sectors to start to feel uneasy about their absence from many of the digital platforms that so many of the population interact with so glibly and so frequently.

Sometimes the unease starts with a brave soul lamenting the fact that competitor x has an app during a board meeting one day.

This translates to an instruction to IT: ‘make us an app’. (NOW!)

This is the kind of interaction we can all remember in IT. It’s the way we used to work. It’s the “I met a chap at the Chamber of Commerce meeting and he has one of these ALREADY” kind of request.

But we need to pause.

We don’t want to go the way of many IT Projects over the years.

We don’t want to start something just to appear similar to our peers.

We probably already have a ‘News’ page on our website, that rarely gets updated, and gives the impression that there is nothing happening thats worthy of mention or note.

And that is the crux of the problem.

A Digital Agenda is not something that sits in the domain of a silo’d IT department. Its not something that IT can successfully deliver in isolation.

IT can provide the communication tools; the soapbox to stand on, the lights on the shopfront, the bells and whistles to help get your voice heard. But IT cannot be the sole voice. IT cannot speak with words that match the company brand, and speak with the company voice, embody the company view and promote the company’s products.

A Digital Agenda is far broader than the name suggests. In fact it is much more about the non-digital than it is about digital. It is about the company deciding what is important. What it hopes to gain in the future. Whom should be spoken to. What those people should be told. How often, and in what level of detail. Should there be elements of interaction? Does our company have a product or products that can be made more valuable by adding the capability to interact remotely?

Only when these types of questions have been answered can we actually start to look at Digital. The tools are simply that. Tools we can develop and deploy to help a company achieve its goals.

If our company wants to post on LinkedIn, it needs to provide resource to do so. There has to be sufficient resource to post during busy times, holidays, sickness etc. It can’t often be down to one person. Our company needs to also decide on how to tone it’s posts. What sort of voice will we speak with? How do we ensure consistency? How do we make sure our grammar is good and our spelling impeccable?

A great many IT problems are caused by deciding on a solution first, without looking at the problem.

To an idiot with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The best success stories come from evaluating the need in the first instance, and answering that need after.

If BoatyMcBoatface has taught us anything, it is that rushing into ‘Online’ or ‘Digital’ without measured forethought often fails to deliver to expectations.

So; do we need an App? Maybe. But if we create one, it must add real value.

A recurring topic of conversation is the skills shortage in IT. It’s such a talking point that all kinds of organisations have talked about it – it’s probably been at least a discussion in your office, if not an agenda item in strategic discussions.

So what are most of us doing to address it?

Actually, generally, worse than nothing. Many companies bemoan the increasing cost of recruiting people with specific skills and experience, as their use of x technology increases, so does everybody else’s. So the costs go up. We pay more because there is a shortage of supply. We talk about the risks of finding people to run, maintain, develop and improve our platforms; yet we do nothing to address the supply shortage.

If the skills were some kind of widget, we’d be rushing to capitalise by manufacturing or importing these widgets so we could sell them to everybody else. To continue the analogy (weak as it is!); none of want brand new widgets. We want (and need) widgets that have been ‘run in’. We want our widgets to be second or third hand at least.

Abandoning the analogy, and talking in real terms, we don’t want people with newly minted certifications. We want people who understand how to deploy those skills in a practical, commercial, environment. We need people who know that an idea that looks technically sound is actually a waste of time, because people won’t use it, or won’t find it helpful in real terms.

A simple example is password security. We all know that longer, regularly changed, passwords beat complex ones nearly every time. You can teach that in a couple of minutes. But if somebody with a certificate from a 2min course came into your business and enforced 128char passwords changed every 7days… You get the idea!

The real answer comes back right around to one of the most often overlooked recruitment lessons.

Hire for personality and capability. Train for skills.

One of the skills we often try to buy is knowledge and experience. But the reality is that experience isn’t a skill, it’s exposure to things that allow an individual to develop and improve responses. An ability to better predict future outcomes is a positive result of experience.

So, we let people make mistakes at another company, and when they’ve learned from them we’ll snatch them up? Surely they won’t make as many mistakes when they come to us then?

Wrong. We don’t all need to get hit by a bus to know that it’s a bad idea. We get that knowledge from lots of places, but ultimately it’s about education. We learn through lots of routes and sources that we should keep away from buses.

So if we are recruiting people from another company, the quality of that person will depend hugely upon how good that company is at teaching people. If they are great at teaching, it could be a great hire. If they are lousy, the hire may not have benefitted much from the 2yrs experience there (and it could be the reason the candidate is on the market!)

Hopefully the answer is obvious now; Hire great people, train them well. Help them learn and develop. Expose them to new things as often as possible.
You’ll find you have people who don’t want to leave, and a queue of bright applicants any time you need to hire somebody. News travels fast, and companies that genuinely are ‘Great places to work’ have reputations preceding them.
I’ve avoided adding the cliched quote until now, particularly as I couldn’t find an original source to attribute it to. Hopefully I’ve added a little colour to this;

Q. What if we train them and they leave?

A. What if we don’t and they stay?

Increasingly I hear CIOs talking about the need to have greater diversity within their leadership teams. Often this need appears to be driven at a macro level by corporate strategy. Namely the requirement to have more diverse teams leading businesses to success.

First and foremost, I agree wholeheartedly with the principle. Diversity is fundamental to uncovering different ways to progress a business, different ways to approach opportunities, and different ways to succeed where our contemporaries fail. My disagreement comes with the idea that we can magic up a diverse leadership team from thin air.

Focussing on IT (its what I know – you may work in other business areas and see parallel issues though!) we can look at the people we have the greatest number of, the most junior ranks in IT.

When I look around IT organisations, I tend to see a white British male dominated environment. Why could that be? Perhaps as hiring managers we tend to recruit people who will ‘fit in’ with our existing teams, people we think it will be easy to integrate, and thenceforth manage as a common unit.

With this approach at the easiest point of entry to a career in IT, why are we then surprised that the cream of each department happens to be male?

If we tend to recruit people for whom English is their first language, why are we surprised that the leaders we select from this pool also tend to have English as their first language?

When we recruit, it is simpler to recruit ‘another Joe’, or ‘another Adam’ – thinking that we want to emulate our brightest stars of today. If our aim is to be the strongest possible team, supporting the strongest possible business, we need to have the broadest mix of capability and experience. Instead of recruiting ‘another Somebody’, how about we look to strengthen our teams by recruiting somebody who is different to the rest of our team? We can train skills, but we can’t train background diversity, diversity of experience, diversity of priorities or viewpoints.

We need to look to the future we want, and start building that future within our organisations at grass-root level.

Only when we had truly diverse teams, will we have the ability to deliver truly diverse leadership.

Giving a candidate extra credit solely because they are female, and therefore underrepresented is a mistake. Giving a candidate extra credit because they are different to the rest of our team is the right approach.

Always remember the key rule – “Its easy to teach people new skills, it is not easy to teach people to change their background, experience nor personality.”