What's Next : Talking to the Tech Department

They're not just nerds -- they're your nerds. Help them help you.

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What's Next

Business owners tend to either love or hate their information-technology departments, but they generally don't know why. And if they think that they have good reasons, either way, they might easily be wrong. The truth is that entrepreneurs typically don't know how to even think about IT, much less whether their IT department is helping their business. That makes it very difficult for most companies to manage IT, with the result that there aren't very many good IT departments. But it doesn't have to be that way. If we understand the way IT people actually think and then the way they ought to think, it's possible to save money and at the same time make IT really pull its weight.

That process is a little easier than it used to be, thanks to the current recession, which has cost 400,000 IT jobs to date and made the hiring picture go from absolutely insane to merely competitive. During the Internet bubble we hired anyone who knew certain IT buzzwords. Now we can at least require that someone be able to put those buzzwords into a coherent sentence.

Coherence is not a joke here, since many IT departments are staffed by people who weren't born in the United States. IT staffs are filled with Chinese, East Indians, Koreans, Russians, and the occasional guy from Memphis, all with varying English-language skills. A friend of mine who used to run an Internet company in suburban Washington, D.C., recalls interviewing an IT candidate who kept using the word access in his interview. "I couldn't tell whether he was talking about Microsoft Access [a software product] or the Dulles Access Road," she says. "My IT director, who was also at the interview, said he thought the guy was talking about using Microsoft Access on the Dulles Access Road, but he wasn't completely sure about that."

The candidate got the job.

So the first rule of having a good IT department is that you have to be able to communicate with that department. That doesn't mean avoiding foreign-born help. It means making sure that someone in the department speaks fluent English and can act as a liaison.

Communication is so important because IT people aren't like you and me. They tend to be nerdy and headstrong and often reluctant to communicate at all, much less well. They can appear to be busy and focused, yet the path they're following may or may not be the one you think you have set them on. If they don't agree with you -- and often they won't -- they'll just do it their way without saying anything.

That doesn't make sense, but then IT isn't really a profession, and most of the people in it landed there recently. Maybe they were computer users who knew a little more or cared a little more, and so they strayed into IT. Maybe they actually have engineering credentials, but what they really are is people who play around with computers all day. And whatever their backgrounds are, sitting at your help desk was not what they expected to be doing with their lives.

The way to get around communication problems is to put the focus on your business rather than on who's right. Make sure everyone understands what your business is and how IT is expected to help make that business successful. That's almost never done, probably because owners and managers themselves often don't know the proper role of IT in their enterprise.

What IT services does your company need in order to operate? Don't answer that question with any IT products or names. If you started to say "I need laptops for all my employees," then you missed the point. What do your employees need to do their jobs well?

They need information, which is why we call it information technology.

IT is an overhead expense just like phone service or electricity. And like those basic tools, IT is a business enabler -- or is supposed to be. IT manages the information that's needed to operate a business. Your IT director might think his or her job is to provide reliable E-mail service, when actually it's to provide communication services that make your business more efficient. But if that isn't said aloud often and isn't repeated at all levels of the IT organization, the IT people simply won't come up with it on their own.

Most companies increase their market share through lower prices and good service. Keeping your service levels up and aggressively cutting costs is the key. That's where IT can provide the greatest value to a company. No computer application in existence can improve your service level and cut costs. This is a manual process done by you and your employees. Basic (usually uninteresting) business applications provide the data. The data allow you to find cost-saving opportunities and provide a means to measure your progress. Improving a business is a continuous process, something done constantly year after year. IT's job is to provide the data in a useful format and make the data readily accessible to anyone with initiative. You think that's obvious? It isn't to your IT department, which tends to see itself as helping users (or fighting with them) rather than helping the enterprise.

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