April 09, 2001, 1:19 PM — YOU MANAGE I.T. PEOPLE but, can you manage people with IT? That's what several recently developed software tools purport to do. Managers using these products allegedly can optimize personnel assignments and availability, ensure that employees are meeting performance goals and make better business decisions. Skeptics will reply that management and employee motivation shouldn't be machined, lest people become "the tools of their tools," in the words of Henry David Thoreau. It's absolutely true that software cannot substitute for face-to-face interaction, but in a market where computing power is cheap and human capital is dear, using IT to optimize your workforce is only sensible.
Besides, automating business practices is what IT is all about. Yet CIOs are often reluctant to practice what they preach, says Chuck Tatham, vice president of marketing for Changepoint, a Richmond Hill, Canada, company that makes business process automation software for corporate IT departments and IT services companies. "IT departments are like the shoemaker's children. They've done a good job of automating others, but not always their own operations," he says.
Juana Clark, director of applications management at Baltimore Gas and Electric, bought Changepoint software to help manage her IT operation. In the initial rollout this past June, she implemented time and expense reporting and project management functions. In January, part two of the rollout involved converting work requests and internal billing processes to Changepoint's system, which integrates all of the standard IT service delivery functions. What sold Clark on Changepoint was its design specifically for IT departments. In addition, a Web-based intranet portal makes it easy for her and the entire IT group to get an at-a-glance read on what everyone is working on. "I need visibility into everything my people are doing, even if they're not doing it for me," says Clark. "What projects are they working on? Where are they spending time?" Changepoint has been well received at Baltimore Gas and Electric, she says -- not only by her but also by her staff. By accessing and reporting in the familiar icon-based interface, IT workers at the utility say they feel more aware of what's going on and more connected to organizational goals.
Binding employee activity with organizational goals is the purpose of another management app developed by Performaworks. Founded in 1997 in Raleigh, N.C., by a team of industrial psychologists, management executives and software developers, Performaworks offers a suite of Web-based performance management tools that quantify the alignment of employee activities with managerial directives. Performaworks software first prompts executives to write down organizational goals -- a valuable exercise in itself -- and then communiccates these throughout the hierarchy. Employees at all levels enter into the system their individual plans for meeting the goals. Performaworks CEO Jim Perry, who uses the product to manage his own company, explains its usefulness this way: "Performaworks gives executives and line managers preemptive intelligence around their human assets so that they can evaluate at any frequency -- daily, weekly, monthly -- where they stand relative to company strategy. And they can move proactively to correct their course, rather than finding out six or nine months down the line that they've veered off."
