Posting Will Be Light

I'm busy at work this week and I'm closing on a house, so there's a lot going on. I'll be back next week. (Of course, if I were Instapundit, I could have guest bloggers ... but ... )

The Great Paul Strassman

Paul Strassman is one of the seminal thinkers on the topic of the economics of IT. The headline link is to his own web site. If you have an interest in this area then you should become acquainted with Mr. Strassman.

The Problem of Personality

I have been working in IT for almost 30 years now and years ago I noticed something that I still can't wrap my puny brain around: Why do most executives display similar personality behaviors?

Let me start by saying that most executives I have worked with have been very able businessmen. (And let me also say that I have worked with many female managers but only male executives. I didn't cause it, it's just the way it has been. If you know of a lady executive (VP or higher) in an industrial company, feel free to add a comment on whether or not my observation holds for women as well.)

Let's call my prototypical executive the Proto-E. In my years I've seen every personality type the human race has to offer at all levels of the business; introverts, extroverts, shy, gregarious, smart, not-so-smart, easy-going, stubborn, you name it. When I get to Proto-Es though the behaviors tend to coalesce around a certain type.

Proto-Es usually have calm personalities. They speak deliberately. They do not often make jokes. They do not often respond to jokes made in their presence. They are almost always pleasant. (In fact, I have seen them behave very pleasantly even when delivering scathing criticisms.)

And they are almost always forceful and direct.

I can only remember one Proto-E I would call indecisive but that was only when he was out of his comfort zone. By training and experience he was an engineer and when speaking of engineering, he was knowledgeable and decisive. When pulled into Accounting or IT or general operations he was much less so. In general, though, he was a good executive because he had a good staff in the areas in which he was weak and this was probably by design.

Another behavior I've noticed is that Proto-Es rarely talk about themselves. Most of us will talk about ourselves until we've bored our companions to tears. The sound of our own voices is sweet, sweet, music to our ears. Proto-Es though; well, it's not so. If I ask a Proto-E how his wife and kids are doing then I'll get a polite response, "fine, thanks". And that's about it.

Now here's my question. Where is the cause-and-effect here? From time-to-time I've had illusions that I could aspire to executive-hood. I believe I still can but only if I owned my own business. I do not believe that I can as long as I'm employed by someone else in a corporate environment. No board of directors is going to accept my quirks, my dry sense of humor. And I'm in no mood to change them. I like my quirks.

But do Proto-Es become executives because they have Proto-E personalities or do they adapt and adopt Proto-E personalities as they move up the corporate ladder? The only way I could personally know is to know a Proto-E who moved up the food chain from the time he or she was only a gleam in the board of directors eyes. I've never known one that long.

So, having rambled too long on this for the moment, I'll come back to the question later. Why do Proto-Es dominate the executive suite?

The Slow, Painful Demise of Strategic IT - Numero Dos

This posting on CIO is well worth a quick follow-up posting. Christopher Koch makes a substantive argument that CIOs should always report to CEOs and that when they don't, it is a dysfunctional relationship that damages the organization. I've worked both ways and I'm not convinced either way but Koch makes a powerful argument. Read the whole thing.

The Slow, Painful Demise of Strategic IT

Does IT reporting to the CFO or CEO actually make a difference? The iconic Jack Welsh thinks so. The article on the CIO website is a couple of years old but the topic is still valid. Keep reading through the comments to get some interesting aspects to the question.

The Interviews So Far

Next up is an interview with an accomplished senior IT executive and his view of the state of Information Technologies. In the meantime, please take another look at the perspectives of a career counselor and a corporate recruiter.

Investing in the IT Staff - with Gino Macarroni

http://capcom-it.blogspot.com/2009/03/investing-in-information-technologies_07.html

So You Think You Know What a Recruiter Thinks? - with Diane Plymale

http://capcom-it.blogspot.com/2009/04/so-you-think-you-know-what-recruiters.html

The Problem of Personality - Watch This Space

Here's something that's bothered me for years - decades even. In almost every corporate organization I've worked in, the senior executives seem to have all of their natural-born personalities smushed out of them in the climb up the ladder. I've been pondering this lately and I'll have some thoughts on that soon. If you're breathless in anticipation you may want to check back in a day or two.

I'll Have Another Round

Here's a great segment from CNBC with Mario Gabelli. I find him easy to like and I flatter myself to think that we share a similar sense of humor. If you're at all interested in finance and investing you should check it out. I would buy his drinks all night just to hear him opine.

The Charge Back Myth

Here is one my all time favorite misapplications of time for an IT department - charge backs.I've worked in a larger than 100 person IT staff that used a charge back mechanism to apportion cost. What was the result? User departments dickered over each megabyte of disk space and CPU MIP (meaningless indicator of processing speed).

Did this method actually contribute anything to the growth and profitability of the company? Not that I could tell. Instead, the users rationed their own use of IT and self-constrained themselves into treating IT as a public utility and not a business partner.

Or let me ask it this way, is Human Resources a partner in the business? Every executive I've ever met said absolutely, yes. Human Resources is how you recruit and retain the best and brightest. Yet, show me one HR department that uses a departmental charge back method to pay for itself. I've never even heard it discussed, much less implemented.

When companies use charge back methods for IT then the arguments are over funny money. No actual cash will be involved but department managers will argue with great passion as if real money was leaving their checking accounts.

Now, treating IT as a profit center is something I'd consider - even though that has it's own problem. At least with the profit center model, IT itself sets a going rate for its services. With the profit center model, though, IT must be compelled to compete with outside services and earn its profit.

Either way, the author's idea is one of the oldest and, in my mind, least productive IT governance methods out there.

Tell me what you like

Sometimes I wonder about the purpose of a blog. Is it a simple exercise in narcissism where a person (me in this case) bloviates on topics great and small? Maybe its a tool to serve a greater social purpose of communication. This would be a societal version of Adam Smith's invisible hand. (If you're not familiar with Adam and the invisible hand, then please look it up in Wikipedia. It will be well worth your time and may change your outlook on life.)

But my question is what do you want to see here? My essential topic is capital investment and information technologies in the corporate world. I also admit that I often wander into current finance and economics topics.

I ask that you keep topics suggestions to these general areas but I'd like to know what you find interesting. It would be easy for me to be a lone voice in the wilderness but I will serve you better if we have not a monologue but a discussion.

Let me know what you think with your comments.

So you think you know what recruiters think?

Diane Plymale is an experienced marketer working for Convergence LLC and she has some interesting things to say about Information Technologies, careers, and how recruiters work. Take a peak at my recent interview with Diane and then check out the Convergence web site at www.conv.com. (Come on, I know you want to look.)

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Q. Diane, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be a corporate recruiter?

A. I’m not actually a recruiter. I’m more in the corporate business development and our recruiters work for me. My former career was in medical administration in Florida and I helped put together group practices. I did everything in medical management from A to Z including human resources.

I came into this role after I attended a job fair. I hadn’t really thought of working for staffing companies but out of curiosity I stopped by one at the fair and I learned that in addition to recruiters they needed help with marketing and management. They asked me to join them in a business development role. This company worked in placements for everything but IT.

I was there almost two years and through them I networked with the branch manager here at Convergenz in Kansas City and also I met two of the company owners. They recruited me to come work at Convergence which works in primarily Information Technologies and technology related positions. Other areas like accounting and marketing comprise approximately about 20 percent of the business.

Q. How did you come to specialize in placements for information technologies professionals?

A. I was married to someone who worked for a major communications company for a lot of years and that (marriage) gave me a ten thousand foot view of information technologies. This was the basis for my exposure to IT and in my current role I’ve become more and more specialized.

Q. What are the differences between IT professionals and those in other trades like accounting or engineering? By this I mean differences in attitude, behaviors, communication skills, and their approaches into business?

A. I would say I group engineering and IT together; they’re similar types of people. In each of these fields, their attitudes and behaviors are highly individual. For the most part in IT and engineering (I’m not as well versed in accounting) we look for a very specialized skill sets and each individual makes up a different cog of the entire machine.

The personalities are different than in other professions. An engineer or computer person is in a much less collaborative position than a situation like marketing where you have to work in groups and teams. In a typical situation, when you are a Java developer, someone else has already figured out the game plan, the developer creates what needs to be done to fit that outline or end goal, and then the next person in the sequence carries out the next step and so on. It’s a much a more segmented environment than in other areas which are more collaborative.

By this I don’t mean that engineers and IT people don’t collaborate – they do – but they have an almost union-like attitude that Guy A does this and Guy B does that. This view mainly applies to large IT organizations. As IT organizations grow, they demand a broader and much more specialized talent pool. Also, the way technology is birthed, developed, and is completed demands stages & different skill sets & abilities for each stage; for example the lifecycle of development i.e. planning, analysis, design, implementation, etc.

A smaller company with a small IT group is much less specialized. A mid-sized or smaller company requires a different skill set than a large company. If you’re working in a company of 20 people, you have to be happy to do the filing and take out the trash. The basic IT skills would be similar but a job description from a smaller company will have a more varied set of requirements, not just one specialized technical skill set but a more varied range of skill sets.

Q. Would you say that ITers have a better or worse understanding of business than professionals in other areas?

A. I think for the most part they have a worse overall understanding than perhaps someone in marketing or business development. The IT person may have a better understanding of the technical aspects of a business from working with things like computer systems that hold a general ledger but they, in general, have a poorer understanding of what is “driving” the overall business in general. Unless, it is a technology driven type company, which in that case, the IT people are the drivers behind the business.

The last thing that some business people think of is the details behind the business. For example, how when you implement an electronic medical record system, how are records going to be stored, who manages that data, speed of retrieval, etc? The IT department understands that but also, a lot of times, has to convince the CFO to give them the dollars on their side of the house.

Q. Rate the nerd factor of the following careers from least to most nerdy: information technologies, accounting, engineering, sales,

A. Least nerdy will be sales, then engineering, then accounting, and information technologies will be the most nerdy.

(Editor: One of my favorite comments was from an accountant who told me that she likes computer people because they make accountants look sexy.)

Q. You work with a lot of executives who are recruiting mid and senior-level managers. Is there any consistent thing you see from engagement to engagement? Or to ask it another way, do you see any consistent traits in candidates that executives are always seeking?

A. For the most part, executives are looking for recruits who have an understanding of business and where a business (their business) should be going and/or is going. They want more of an overall view as opposed to a narrow, microscopic view and this is especially true in mid-sized and smaller companies. In larger companies, the IT professional needs to have at least an overall sense of how a business works & what drives business.

Q. I’ve met executives who treat recruiting as slots to be filled and I’ve worked with those who treat each opening as an opportunity to invest in the future of the organization by doing what it takes to find the best possible person for a position. In your opinion, which type is more common, the slot-filler or the gardener?

A. I don’t know if I’ve just been lucky but for the most part it has been very important for the individuals I’ve worked with to get the right person and definitely are not out to just find a body to fill a slot. For instance, I’m dealing with a major railroad and they are so, so concerned with people fitting into the company culture. I’ve seen that across the board in small, large, and medium sized organization. Generally I support IT managers and directors and this is the way a large majority feel.

Q. Do you enjoy managing recruiting?

I love this entire profession of managing, recruiting, and placement. Sometimes it makes you pull your hair out because you’re dealing with people. However, it’s also very satisfying because you are critical to placing key people who can make a huge, positive impact in their businesses.

Q. Why?

A. In addition to what I just said it’s that it’s always different - technology is always changing. Whatever skill sets our candidates need now, will change in a few years. It’s always different.

Q. How quickly can you disqualify an inferior candidate?

A. Pre-Hire: I can disqualify a candidate in seconds who doesn’t meet the top line requirements. There are always requirements a client has to have and if the candidate doesn’t have them, we can mark him or her off the list quickly.

Post-Hire: Once in a while you don’t discover there is an issue until they’ve actually been working for a while. Some candidates interview well but turn out not to have the skills or don’t fit the culture. When we place someone like that you don’t know it until after he or she gets on the job and a month later we start getting phone calls.

Q. Is it difficult to work with some candidates?

A. No, not very often. Actually the most common sticking point is money. The candidate will tell us that everything is fine but after getting an interview and/or an offer, he or she will come back and ask for more money. Some are difficult to work with on simple things like filling out paperwork – getting background info for us, going to get their drug screens completed, etc. Then some have odd quirks but that’s just part of the business you come to expect.

We can’t walk in every candidate and introduce them to the manager but the pre-interview advice the recruiters give to most candidates is to behave professionally, wear a suit, etc. Once we had a guy show up in a suit from the 1970s. After that we clarified that we mean a suit you’ve purchased in the last five years.

Q. Who is harder to work with, an arrogant candidate or a shy candidate?

A. They’re pretty much even – there are different challenges with each. Arrogant candidates are confident but they can talk themselves out of a job. A shy candidate would be fine in a developer role by him or herself but for a position that interfaces with the customer then we probably wouldn’t even submit them for a position like that. It just depends on the situation.

Some hiring companies won’t even look at a shy person; communication skills come up all the time. We have a senior position with a major railroad and they’ve been looking for “right” person for over a year. We sent them three candidates and we had one guy in the final interview who looked good but the client told us that he wasn’t arrogant enough to do the job. They want someone who can ramrod through a plan. “I need a czar to come into this position.”

In another situation, we had one guythat did the first two of three interviews well. On the third interview he didn’t wear a suit and walked in like he already had the whole thing in the bag. But that wasn’t the case and he lost an offer that he almost certainly had because of his arrogance.

Q. You’ve been doing this for a few years, I think long enough to have seen some trends develop. Have you seen any changes in the attitudes and approaches of executives who are trying to fill a position?

A. A lot of the trends that people know universally are around dress codes – it’s more relaxed for some positions like a developer. In the prior days you would have dressed for every type of position. You definitely had to be careful about hair, tattoos, and those kinds of things. Nowadays it’s more about the position and the person than what the person looks like.

Executives are more concerned about culture now and they’re definitely starting to get it. Yet a lot of them still don’t get it. They don’t understand what new generation is like and their “quirks” and how to accommodate these things to make them work better and be more productive. There are a lot of attitude changes yet to come but managers are starting to catch on.

Managers also need to consider not just the generational change but also the changes in technology and industry trends. Most skills sets for a lot of positions a great deal between companies but technology roles like developers do change. The managers also need to take into account that they can’t be arrogant about a search and they can’t just walk out and find the perfect person.

Even in a recession that’s true. It’s still a tough job to find the right person. Entry- level positions are easier to fill but for mid-level and higher positions it is still difficult to find the right fit for a position.

Q. Now let’s look at it from the other side. Have you noticed any trends in the attitudes and approaches of candidates?

Q. I get shocked every day. You hear every single day about how bad the economy is but when you call people who have not had jobs for months and offer them a year-long contracting position, they will not even listen to the offer. That type of attitude is wrong. The contract-to-hire position is the way you’re going to get into a lot of companies. I think it’s a lack of knowledge and education about the staffing/consulting industry on the part of the candidates and hey don’t understand this is another very viable way of finding the right type of job or at the very least an entry point into a really great company, especially in times like this.

Today this may be the only option. A few years ago there were tons of jobs - send in a resume and you’ll get in - but now there’s a fifty-fifty chance that you’ll have work for a contracting company to end up with a permanent position.

I’m working on a panel for The Central Exchange (a professional organization for women and career management at www.centralexchange.org) and they invited me to be part of a forum to speak about this trend. I’m telling them that this is not like working for Kelly’s Temps or that kind of thing. This is a complete other area of the business community. You need to go to contracting companies and get your name in with every single one of them.

All of these contracting companies have organizations for which they recruit and you (as a candidate) need to spread out into these organizations. I think people don’t understand that. People who have been in one position for 20 years are simply not aware of this.

Q. Would improving her or his knowledge of business improve an IT professional’s chance of success?

A. Absolutely. Let me give you an example. People who come out of an organization like (a major communications company) know everything there is to know about telecommunications but they have no clue about other businesses in their community or have kept track of the “current” trends of businesses and industries. Whatever the position you’re seeking, you need to understand the entire business, how it’s positioned, and where it’s going. If you do this in IT you’re better able to sell yourself because you have a better understanding of how IT contributes to a business.

Q. How would you recommend an IT professional go about gaining business experience outside of IT?

A. First of all, be aware of market trends. For instance, right now energy businesses are a big deal and that’s a trend. My advice is to try to keep up on those kinds of things and stay on top of what’s going on.

A lot of IT professionals get embedded and aren’t aware, in a “big picture” kind of way, of where things are going. You get a certain position where you’re useful but then a major system change goes in place and suddenly the only reason you’re there is to manage a legacy system. This system eventually won’t be there and you just missed the boat. You always need to look at the next career upgrade, particularly in the technology areas.

Now certain people shine more than others. A company where a woman I know works, have already begun to identify “key” people in the organization and is working to fast-track them to replace the baby boomers. A company should have a solid program to move its people who are excelling within the organization along its food chain. If that’s not there then it generally takes a new set of leadership to wake up the others to this need.

Q. Do you think executives treat your candidates as investments or expenses?

A. With accountants they tend to focus on salary and compensation. Other areas tend to focus on candidates as investments and try harder to hire the right people. If it’s a technology driven company, they’ll pay what they must. But a hospital, for instance, that’s just not where this philosophy exists. Manufacturing is another area where you see the focus on cost and not on investment.

Q. How can executives become better recruiters?

A. When you need legal help you hire a lawyer. When you need financial help you hire an accountant. You need to use recruiting and contracting companies for providing top talent. Make a relationship with a recruiting/staffing company you can trust and set up metrics to grade them to make sure they’re doing the job for you. Then the executive doesn’t need to worry about how to get the right person, that’s the recruiter’s job.

Q. How can professionals become better candidates?

A. Use everything you can to gain an edge. Yesterday, I was visiting Payless and a manager wanted to help his son – the son was talking about interviewing – so the manager sought my advice for his son. This is one way his son will get an edge.

One very basic thing is to understand even in our changing times, with changing attitudes about appearance, is that neatness still counts. With two equivalent candidates the better dressed/groomed person will get the job because of the impression he or she makes. The new generation doesn’t think that this matters but it does. Little things like that can make the difference.

For professionals, my advice is to work on the diversity of your background and avoid getting pigeonholed into one skill set. You might consider volunteer work to get a better understanding your community or maybe do technology work with charity organizations. Do something other than your day-to-day job. Even though a company will hire for a specific job they also will be looking for exposure to other areas that show that a candidate has a diverse skill set.

Q. Diane, thank you for your time and your advice.

A. You’re welcome and thank you.

Diane Plymale can be reached in the Convergence Kansas City office at 913.338.1800 or through www.conv.com.