Management to IT: "We don’t like you either"

I recently read a summary of an article from wsj.com under the Cubical Culture section that struck a chord with me: “Management to IT: We don’t like you either.” As evidenced by the title, the inherent conflict between IT and management is never ending; however, many people feel it’s getting to be an old story. Management today at many companies expect more out of IT organizations than in previous years. It is no longer acceptable to request an 18- to 24-month project life cycle and not show a return on investment quickly. This article suggests that if IT continues to do these types of things, they will render themselves useless and out of a job. In addition, the article points out that the old days of “we can build it better than any product on the market” is long gone.

For publishers I have seen a shift over the past 5 years related to this build-vs-buy mindset. If your IT organization is still touting that they can do it better, cheaper, faster by building a critical system (e.g., CMS) from scratch… run, run away as fast as you can. Given the wealth of tool sets available and the openness of many products on the market, why would an organization ever take the build-it-from-scratch approach?

I’m not biased when I make these statements. I’ve seen a renewed interest by publishers to license a product and show a return on investment quickly. This has been our mantra since day one with RSuite CMS. Our goal was to make a highly configurable CMS that can manage any content and be operational in a short period of time (under 12 weeks) to meet core requirements. Yes, there will be some organizations that require 12-month projects to migrate from one system to the next, but overall the trend has been implementing a new system, even for larger projects, in a much shorter time frame. The only way IT will be able to handle this shortened timeline is to license a software product that meets 70% of their core requirements pretty much out of the box such as  RSuite CMS.

Caution - sales and marketing pitch to follow

If you’d like to see how easy we can setup and configure RSuite CMS, please join us at our upcoming User Conference in October. Our theme on day one is “CMS in a Day” as we go from beginning to end and complete an installation and run a demonstration of the software.

End of sales and marketing pitch

I can certainly understand why IT organizations at publishers want to build their own CMS. First, it’s fun to build software. Second, it gives more of a feeling of accomplishment than integrating third-party software. Finally, a programmer can have a job for life just making endless changes to the software (ok, that was a cheap shot).

Management today needs to understand that IT does have value and IT needs to understand that management has the right to ask questions. Reducing the stress between these organizations is critical to publishers making the right technology choices and implementing new systems on time and within budget.

Comments

[Lisa W. Bos]

As the representative of "IT" in our business, I feel obligated to remind readers that Barry is our "Management". Barry, next time you want to "ask questions" I'm going to remind you that building software is "fun". ;)

[Jamison MacLachlan]

What works best about the "build" model is that since it's usually driven more from internal issues of process and current technology limitations (and not necessarily bottom line first)it is much more likely that both IT and Management would solicit feedback and input from the end users...the people in the trenches working in the process and creating the products (and the ones who probably brought attention to current shortcomings in the first place). This is a key element that I think is often overlooked int he "buy" model. Both IT and Management (especially) have to understand very early on how these systems would impact process and, therefore, product. The best way to do this is, again, get input from the people creating the products. Both groups are usually too far removed from the day-to-day process to have the right understanding of the issues.

While ROI is always important, Management should not be blinded by the promise of a plug-and-play solution and, more importantly, what a system has done for OTHER businesses. They should fully understand their OWN products, processes, and problems first.