Who will be to blame when the ax falls?

by David Foote

April 9, 2001 —

There's been a hushed conversation going on in the upper echelons of corporate America about the problem with "mature IT workers."

Not all of them, though. The focus has been on obstinate long-timers who have been causing a certain amount of grief for their bosses in recent years as IT organizations have undergone radical change. Likewise targeted for extinction have been older IT workers who -- at least in some executives' minds -- aren't providing value to match their fat salaries as companies become increasingly obsessed with return on investment and value management.

It's a complicated situation that has been allowed to simmer without resolution for years. Meanwhile, the hit lists have grown longer. With the prospect of layoffs now looming large for many employers, the pot is about to boil over. It'll be a blood bath all right, but not exactly in the way you're thinking.

A recent survey of 600 Fortune 1,000 companies by Metricnet concluded that a disturbing 85% of IT organizations are unprepared to meet the challenge of being value-creating, value-producing components of their companies. That is, IT is still being managed as a cost instead of as an investment, long development times and inflexibility are common, distributed computing is growing with uncontrolled complexity and there's little or no attention paid to strategic expansion. These IT shops are stuck in the mud, spinning their wheels.

The fact is that many of the executives who are about to pull the trigger on some hapless IT workers have been doing an atrocious job preparing their companies for today's rough-and-tumble conditions. At a time when they should have been aggressively rebuilding their companies' cultures and strengthening organizational resiliency, their uninspired leadership has left their IT organizations demoralized, spiritless and poorly managed.

Dumping veteran workers for subpar performance or for failing to adapt to change speaks volumes about the companies' abject failure to teach their best employees how to continue to be good at their jobs. In contrast, successful companies invest liberally in their talent and help them grow for years.

Top IT executives will end up taking the blame for protecting "marked" employees for too long (maybe a fair charge in some cases). But make no mistake about where the accountability for this perversity rests: smack-dab at the top, with the company leadership.

In the months ahead, there will be emotional upheaval as IT warriors who fought hard in the past but were never properly equipped for the Information Age wars are bid adieu. The pessimism and general malaise that permeates many IT shops in large companies will continue.

As our economic downturn deepens, you will hear a lot about scaling back infrastructure, decommissioning systems, reducing systems capacity, disconnecting equipment, postponing upgrades and other measures intended to cut costs.

You'll hear far less about developing enterprise project management discipline, management and leadership development programs, IT investment portfolio models and other forward-thinking IT value management initiatives intended to make IT so tightly integrated with the business that there's no distinguishable difference between IT operations and business operations and between business strategy and technology strategy.

Here's hoping that as they swing their mighty axes, some of these executioners end up impaling themselves.

Computerworld