AB3A's Journal: The much maligned practice of IT

I have a long history of very caustic commentary on the ineptness of our IT division. We seem to have a problem hiring and retaining good employees. So you can imagine my relief a few years ago when the entire IT maangement was put to pasture with an early buy-out offer to retire.

I thought that now they have a chance to get better. Sadly, things got worse.
The new managers they found were impressively dilbertian.

There are good people in our IT division. They have learned to keep a low profile. Anyone who advertises their talents gets flooded with all sorts of ridiculous work.

In our company, as in many companies, the IT division is a sort of fun-house reflection of how the rest of the company is doing. And in this case, it isn't just the IT managers who are hopeless, it's the customers. Yes, we have people who want to go data mining through the company archives so that they can do their jobs.

Instead of data mining, why not collect that data as it is created in the first place? This is routine stuff: customer records, pipeline sizes and locations, valve locations, and so forth. These are folks who simply can not wrap their minds around what is really going on in the field. Instead, they go minining through data they do not understand, for purposes that they read about in some trade rag. And then they sit and wonder why IT can't pull a rabbit out of a hat and make things happen the way the magazine article said.

Gosh, these folks wouldn't know a rabbit from a weasel, skunk, or armadillo. IT could pull just about anything from the hat, and they'd be no wiser.

It's just plain sad. Too many do not know the data flows in thier groups. All this out of the box thinking has left them with no idea of what the box was, what it has in it, or where to find it. Douglas Rushkoff had our company pegged.

And in the midst of all this, we still can't hire people with any common sense. Our IT leaders have secured our desktops so much that we can't even change the wallpaper, or (as I like to do) use no wallpaper. We're all stuck on the same wallpaper. Wasn't this supposed to be the era of personal computing?

So what does our executive management do? Instead of getting down and dirty with the details to find out what's happening, they fire the entire IT staff and told them that they could re-apply for their jobs. Of course, these managers do not know what this technology is, let along how it works. So they're using a recruiting firm to help them write new job descriptions, and do the interviews.

I couldn't make this up. And in the middle of all this, they think they've done something good. Hmm. Anyone who is still around after all this is likely to be so demoralized that they'll be useless even if they do know their jobs well. And our division manager goes around asking dumb questions such as whether the "wireless" licensed T3 Microwave radio has enough volts to support Power over Ethernet over a link.

I don't envy those folks in IT. They're getting it from all sides. If I were in their shoes I might be just shy of homicidal right now...