Tom Breur
9 December 2017
Yesterday, my laptop had to go in for repair in the office, and
they gave me a loaner. Next thing, they find an unexpected hardware defect, the
issue turns out to be more severe than foreseen, and before I knew it the whole
system had to be rebuilt from scratch. It wound up taking a whole day. And even
after I got it back, I spent almost another
day getting some “special” software products (not tied to my network
account) to work.
Over the past few decades, IT and software development have
evolved from a backroom activity to a core function with strategic importance.
As the world turns ever more digital, software and IT have slowly but gradually
drifted towards the heart of many organizations. Nowadays, for many jobs, you
are incredibly hamstrung without “normal” access to systems and software.
When people are hampered in their work because IT systems
are less than optimal, i.e. not as efficient as they could be, that waste is
largely “hidden”: there is no observable benchmark of “optimum productivity”
against which you can hold a yardstick. In fact, people mostly get used to
things being the way they are, because, errrr, they have always been that way.
As a predominant Mac user, it never ceases to amaze me that
“just” shutting down a system can take 5 minutes, and then another 2-3 to
launch it again. I did a conservative estimate of just those losses, and
figured that must “cost” some $5K/year. However, because that money isn’t
actually spent, it is merely a
nuisance, and invisibly “lost” to missed productivity.
I absolutely love my IT department, they are great!
Responsive, helpful, friendly pro-active, just everything you’d hope for. They
are also understaffed. If it were up to them, they would love to learn more
about some niche applications so that they could do an even better job
supporting all of us. But the reason why that doesn’t happen, the root cause
for not “investing” more in IT, is that they are a Cost Center.
Sure, they know how to create a business case to show how
faster service leads to higher productivity, and what that is worth. In fact, I
would argue they are as good at this as anybody
in the business. They do it all the time. My guess is that half of those
efforts never make the cut because they get “lost” in the discussion, just like
my waiting time gets “lost” in the balanced sheet. Somewhere.
The 21st century workforce is composed for the
most part of knowledge
workers (a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959),
so anything that contributes to productivity leads to net gains in business
outcomes – the Profit Center. This new reality is
hardly reflected in traditional accounting models, and in my mind, this
reflects unfavorably on many operations. I would argue that if you know that “time is money”, you put
your money where your mouth is…
IT is considered mostly a cost center because managers have typically learnt the hard way that IT folks promise you everything, take your money and then give you, well, a little less than what you thought you bargained for.
ReplyDelete(And IT folks always find themselves forced to first promise everything because if they don't do that, they're out of any bid in the first round and soon after they're simply out of business.)
That too is part of "things being the way they are". And a reason why managers find it hard to see IT spendings as an investment : past experience has invariably shown that the return on the investment is disappointing.