I was reading an article by Jeff Ello on IT Culture, and it resonated enough to make me want to write a summary from the other side of the fence.
If you’re reading on the porcelain throne, this may take a while, so stretch your legs.
What is IT?
I define IT as a catalyst that enhances business processes to achieve goals more efficiently. Like moving from horses to cars, it’s easy to take this for granted. I can call my friend in another country in seconds, rather than waiting a few months for a letter to come in. IT makes the recording, manipulation, and transport of data extremely easy. There are some caveats. Designing a website is advertising. Developing a phone app is production work. Pulling financial reports with SQL or VBA is business work. IT enables and maintains the processes to make work easier, but do not “own” the processes themselves. They also should not support the processes unless there is a project (a measurable task with a definitive start and end) to improve them.
Executives see savings in budget line items and value in a bill of services. IT Culture is focused on maximizing efficiency and sees savings in the things no one has to do anymore and value in the things no one could do before. I do not blink an eye standing up a new MFT solution so that the professional services team no longer has to manually download, sort and rename 2,000,000 files a day.
Traits of an IT Guy
Those in IT are at heart, creative and logical. You cannot succeed without being able to order every thought while also possessing the ability to think outside the box. This also is why IT Culture bleeds into hobbies such as music, crafts, and video games. We want to do skilled work and have record of achievements, whether it’s a table, certifications, videogame points or a code repository.
Our worth is what we’re able to do, and it’s not something that most understand. If I tell someone, “I maintain cloud infrastructure and automate processes to save money,” most of them will ask “Are you the reason my cousin can’t get a job?”. I actually got a job by showing my future manager by showing how I automated a text-based game with a custom GUI. This included LUA, JavaScript, HTML, triggers, etc. While HR may just hear buzzwords, the manager had a major need for automation. Managed File Transfer, batch workload processing, ticketing, and DevOps pipelines existed but had room to improve. I was able to leverage my skills to make a lot of work in the company do itself, saving time and money.
The Pitfall
Oftentimes, IT is treated like customer service because users call with a problem and get a solution. This eventually boils metrics into CSAT, incident count, time to completion, etc. How many CIOs are emailed when the internet goes down compared to when a process has been done inefficiently, causing millions of dollars in revenue lost? Plugging the modem back in receives more visibility than maintaining infrastructure.
To keep peace in the company, IT is forced to divert to unrelated work and half-baked projects. Managing something invisible just makes executives question why we have jobs. This prevents us from saving the company money and time. So, what makes IT tick?
IT Culture and Stereotypes
IT Culture has a reputation for being counter-productive to business objectives. We’re arrogant, stubborn, antisocial, etc. Generally, the more technical debt an organization has, the more IT tends to reflect the stereotypes as a coping mechanism for the state of the business. However, in most environments, IT doesn’t collapse on itself despite hits to morale. In short, bad business practices can evoke negative behaviors in IT without severely impacting daily operations.
IT Attitude
Like doctors, we project confidently to build trust. You wouldn’t want a doctor saying, “that bump on your leg may or may not be fatal, but probably not”. Instead, we provide a confident answer with a dash of cynicism for the inevitable break. We don’t want to gloat, just save time, money, credibility, and effort. There are so many factors in anything it’s hard to be 100% sure. I actually pissed off a relative because they asked, “Will my download continue if I take my Nintendo Switch off the dock?” That depends on if there’s an ethernet connection to the dock, if the Wireless settings are configured, airplane mode is not turned on, etc. People want yes/no answers that in reality have hundreds of possibilities, so we present the two or three best options as the only options.
Where we’re tangled into anything with magnetic sand, our changes can easily cripple users, departments, or the entire company. The credibility of an individual builds respect, an in turn good teams, which reinforces the initial credibility. We need credibility to win over the non-technical audience to let us do work the right way.
Antisocial Behavior
I would argue that IT Culture does emphasize social skills, as seen commonly in online communities focused on career development. If you have formal education it will touch on oral presentation, technical communication, white papers, and management practices. Most successful IT professionals I’ve met are social and funny once you’ve gained their respect. The journey in IT often starts at the hell desk, where everything is broken, you don’t know anything, but it’s your job to fix it. You’ll sink or swim based on your customer service skills and ability to communicate, whether it’s to users or asking your seniors for help. Cutting your teeth on the helpdesk is the filter between a technology enthusiast and an IT career.
However, a lot of staff does not operate on the same wavelength as IT. Many interactions can be perceived as a lack of respect on both ends. Generally, when a user deals with IT, they should keep in mind:
- IT wants to help me as much as I want to help myself.
- IT is not my personal tech adviser, nor is my work computer my personal computer.
- If something is broken, something has changed, and IT has to determine what.
- I should keep an open mind since I know more about the issue than IT.
- IT people have their own business objectives, lives and interests outside of technology.
How Businesses influence Stereotypes
In IT Culture, every decision is a technical decision. Business is limited by technical, and technical is limited by business. This requires creativity to implement solutions to empower business. Without it, you will waste millions of dollars.
I worked at a company that acquired several other companies and doubled its size in a little over a year. When migrating from datacenter to cloud, the VMs were set to the maximum SKU to ensure compatibility and right sized about a year later. The test environments alone cost over $50,000 per day to run and had machines running 24/7. This is wasteful, and in the pre-chargeback accounting days would make IT seem like an enormous cost center. (Side note: Chargeback and ITSM are Godsends for getting on the CFO’s good side!)
Defining IT’s Mission
Most IT jobs are not in the fields of tech, meaning that they were an existing business that is using technology to increase productivity and revenue. At a low level, IT maintains and improves frameworks to complete tasks, teaching the business how to perform the tasks more efficiently.
A web server automates advertising, sales, information and entertainment which would all be done by other people or processes. Now we have frameworks to improve the frameworks, where a commit to a repo automatically updates a web-app. This improves a process of web development, which improves the processes initially improved, which eliminates a lot of toil. We have to keep constantly informed with changes in the landscape and communicate them to everyone that needs to hear.
Technical Ability and Computer Literacy
After understanding IT’s mission and attitude, you might be able to empathize with why IT Culture cuts out the fat. Non-technical resources are seen as a burden and ignored from conversation. On a per-person basis, this may not be a huge deal, but when businesses leaders aren’t technically literate, don’t understand the environment, or have moving goalposts, morale can be hit hard.
Computer illiteracy is not considered an excuse in current year. Computers have existed for decades, if you’re expected to know how to change a tire on your car you should also know how to power cycle a computer. Users should generally be able to troubleshoot their systems, and management should generally know what the systems do on the scale that their subordinates manage.
The danger lies in that executives depend on advice from the top heads in IT, but don’t know when they’re getting bad information. When initiated as IT professionals, we’re implanted with a military grade BS detector. In some environments, it’s difficult to draw attention to problems when our alarms go off. Instead, we’ll make band-aids to keep things together as they slowly fall apart.
Complaining
IT Culture is very sensitive to logic, and we tend to be critical spirits. When processes become absurd, if we are not heard, we become jaded. I worked at a company where IT was responsible for calling a client and notifying them when their building lost power (in a locale where outages are multiple times daily), and another where IT was on the hook for managing a nursing home’s analog appliances without insight into what the systems were or any monitoring (they were emergency buttons that, if down, made it illegal to board a resident). This eventually escalated, to where we would receive 10-20 tickets a day that made no sense, had maximum urgency, and delayed simple and urgent incidents from being resolved, causing a domino trail of chaos.
Complaining is a trait that offices do not like and can be portrayed as victimhood. Since we’re always focused on improvement, we complain to each other constantly about what can be done better. It’s very hard to turn the complaininator off unless we don’t care. If IT brings you an illogical event, and you dismiss it, you become less respected by IT, and eventually will stop being complained to. This might seem like a good thing but means IT no longer recognizes your authority or input as a decision maker.
Goal Setting and Burnout
IT Culture tends to be libertarian but are not anti-bureaucracy. We will happily check lists, create runbooks, and set up workflows to complete tasks in an orderly fashion. This is useful because we have little supervision to make major changes, since few people understand the scope of our work. As long as goals are result oriented and help processes, IT will be engaged, and open to suggestion. Inconsistencies, micro-management, and extra work will destroy morale.
When morale is down, it actually doesn’t cause IT to turn belly-up. On the outside, as long as things are running, business doesn’t care. Internally, IT will shun management and other business units to maintain uptime. They may focus efforts on projects or make large decisions without supervisors and attempt to operate with the least negative impact. This tends to maintain IT’s credibility in the business despite the detachment from management.
Any of us would rather have made a good decision than have the glory from making one. What makes us seek credit is the danger of a non-productive member receiving undue praise or a productive one seeing unfair blame. It’s insulting and could open windows for a slacker that we feel belong to us. If your IT department appear to be credit-hogs, that is a sign that something is not working.
Respect in IT Culture
Technically motivated, the eternal mission is to make things work despite company efforts. People who are wrong make extra work in remediations. Extra work means more late hours and stress. Bottom-up respect is the most important factor of determining the success of an IT team and is usually ignored by management.
In our world, respect is currency. Word of mouth is highly valued, and the uninitiated are eye-rolled. We have a list of the “good contacts” in any group of people that we’ll constantly ask for. They will always have an answer, or know someone that does, and don’t waste time. This can be a vendor, HR personnel, etc. Often, the positive connections we make can last a career.
Gaining Respect of IT
Gaining the respect of IT is simply how easy one is to work with, and the efficiency of work done. After realizing this, I considered the people I shut out as “time wasters” and the few I buddy up with. We’re as good as the sum of our peers and cannot afford to waste time. Most of us will put up boundaries and set expectations to prevent scope creep. Everyone has a relative that wants us to fix their laptop because it won’t connect to the internet. After we turn airplane mode off, we magically “own” the issue once things become ‘slow’ a few weeks later.
I’ve worked with some strong personalities and come to love the jerks. The guy in the Star Wars hoodie hasn’t said ‘thank you’ in 6 years but is employed for a reason. This type knows the ‘ask’, the sacrifice in terms of cost/speed/quality, and how to convince anyone p the chain. Generally, they aren’t even rude, just results-driven.
Respect also ties into outsourcing. There is nothing wrong with hiring a service provider to manage backups, patch systems, or have overnight availability. However, if trying to outsource your IT department for cost or efficiency, the department will become jaded because their work will soon be half-done by outsiders while their budgets are slashed.
The Contractor Loop
Informally, there’s a cycle where a company decides they are spending too much on IT professionals. They hire an MSP at an affordable monthly rate. This works okay for a while, but eventually turns bad they’re only break-fixing as incidents arise. After some time, the MSP’s quality of service may decline or significantly more expensive. An internal IT team is hired to fix the dumpster fire that is the infrastructure, which can take years. Depending on the mess, a new round of outsourcing may be needed. The solution is to fix processes and keep communication open, rather than razing everything and starting fresh every few years.
Building Healthy, Happy, Valuable IT Culture
Take an interest in IT Culture.
We work our butts off for the people we respect. Beyond entry level careers, most of us are simultaneously on-call and working overtime.
In the hiring process, all IT resources should be technical. This sounds simple, but you wouldn’t hire a Chief of Medicine that wasn’t a practicing doctor. Peer review works in IT, since we can immediately clock BS and interview resources based on technical needs.
Focus on technical and leadership skills. IT will independently get the most work possible done whereas other departments may try to weasel out. While structure is necessary, IT will self-organize and disrupt inefficient processes to get work done.
IT Management
In a manager, IT professionals solely want a technical sounding board and compass. We’ve all got a friend that is a few power levels above us. Being understanding of what we do on a low level can encourage us to tap our resources for you.
In performance reviews, it’s hard to quantify how someone is doing. Is it uptime, incident count, or projects implemented? Generally, focus on process improvement and watch the social behavior of the IT department to see how they’re doing.
Make sure management is always learning about technology. This is a field where you can become obsolete in six months. Being behind the times will lose respect with IT.
Executives should have multiple lines into the IT team. If there is dissonance between members, something might be worth investigating. IT should attend non-technical business meetings to bluntly point out issues and call bluff. We’re trained to accomplish work of all kinds and can’t stand it when others avoid it. Ensure that this is planned in advance and lines up with the professional’s calendar. Surprise meetings with no agenda will solidify the “That should have been an e-mail!” mentality.
I fell asleep. TL; DR?
An honest interest and a culture of mutual respect between departments will catalyze processes. It may be one of the best decisions one can make.