IT professionals naturally, as most of us would, gain a great feeling of satisfaction when they swoop in to save the day. The real question I ask of the IT team during an audit is, “Why did the problem develop to begin with?” I’d rather there never be a problem and, when you see your IT professionals, it is to talk strategically about your IT systems rather than to solve another emergency.

Some of the IT professionals at the companies who’s executives bring me in to audit their systems say, “Thank you Mike. You taught us to drain the swamp so we could stop killing alligators. Once the swamp was drained, most of the alligators left.”

Some of the biggest encouragement you executives can provide your in-house and IT professionals are to focus on the following areas:

• Strategic—IT professionals who are too bogged down in tactics fail to discuss important decisions with executives. A perfect example is whether or not the company wants to use full disk encryption on some or all of your computers. Too often the first the executives ever hear of full disk encryption is when they learn it is not installed and they are about to have to mail a letter to all the clients since a laptop was lost or stolen.
• Automation—Servers can, when configured properly, do a lot of the work automatically that your IT professionals may be wasting time doing manually.
• Central Management—IT professionals can configure the network so they can use one quick tool on one computer to take care of every computer in your organization—without having to visit every computer. The money savings and increased security can be staggering.
• Metrics—IT can provide you with useful information such as most common help desk requests so you can reduce the causes, statistics on what web sites your employees visit most often so you can control bandwidth, and can sometimes bring information from two different programs together using business intelligence tools to give you important metrics related to your sales, processes, or even client demographics.

These are all a much better use of time and money than for your IT professionals to be fixing the same old problems they keep fixing every week.

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The executives explained they refer to their IT professional as “Poof” because, every time they tell him something that needs to be done, “poof” he is gone off to fix the problem. About 2 weeks after I performed an IT review at their organization, he had indeed implemented a huge number of the recommended improvements. Excellent – and much faster than many of the organizations I audit.

I asked the IT professional if he minded the nickname, and he said he liked it “because it kind of fits.” Nicknames are pretty common in many areas – especially the military.

If you want to, post a comment to this blog entry with any endearing nicknames you use to identify your IT professionals and why they earned it.  And, since many IT professionals read this blog as well, feel free to post nicknames you feel you have earned – as long as they are endearing.  This is your chance to be recognized!

The post Do you have endearing nicknames for your IT professionals? appeared first on Foster Institute.

CEO’s, CFO’s, Owners and other executives are always asking me that question. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some simple formula like, “you need one IT professional for every 50 users in your company?” The fact is that the formula is more complicated.

In many cases, IT departments are overworked and overstaffed. How could that be?  The way some organizations are configured, the IT department is so busy putting out fires they do not have time to devote to getting to the root causes of the problems to begin with.

One possible cause for this “only treat the symptoms” tactic is that the IT professional inherited a network that was a huge mess and has not had the ability to fix the problem.

In addition, for reasons we will address next time, IT professionals are often encouraged to just “put out the fires.”

If your department is not using the enterprise strategies and tools required, you may well be overstaffed. Before you can cut back on your IT staffing though, you will first need to have your IT professionals reorganize your network and their procedures to be more efficient. Some IT professionals do not even know where to begin. If they do have an idea where to begin, they may feel they are running as fast as they can just to keep up and there is no time to devote to solving the problem.

The good news for you is that you probably already own most of the tools and equipment you need to buy – it just needs to be used properly. That means you will save money. The good news for your IT professional is that, once the network is redesigned to be self sufficient, they can prove their value by taking on more of a strategic role in helping your company for the future.

The post How many IT professionals should you have? appeared first on Foster Institute.

Many CEOs believe their IT staff is intimidated by them. In reality, it’s simply that the IT professionals don’t know how to sell an executive on what needs to get done. Think of the typical IT professional as the antithesis of your star salesperson. Your star salesperson knows the art of persuasion and how to make something important and meaningful to the listener.

Conversely, your typical IT professional can’t always put into words why the new technology the company needs is important, even though it is very important. Rather than focus on the bottom line benefit the new technology will give the company, the IT professional drones on about its cool features. And what do you do as the CEO? Most likely, your eyes glaze over and your mind drifts to some other topic.

So what’s a CEO to do? Here are some suggestions to help you develop the relationship with your IT team and get them on the same page as you.

* Send your IT professionals to some communication training. I do a three-hour presentation about what the IT professionals wish the executives knew, and what the executives wish the IT professionals knew. It’s a real eye-opener for both IT professionals and the executives they work with. You can get more information at www.fosterinstitute.com. There is also an expanded workshop for IT professionals that shows them project management skills as well as many other skills at www.supertechevent.com.

* When you’re talking with your IT professional and she drones on about the features of a new item, ask her point blank, “What is the ultimate benefit of this technology for the company?” Get your IT professionals in the habit of thinking in this manner. Remind your IT staff not to try to impress you with big words and acronyms but instead focus on the bottom line result.

* Send your IT professionals to project management training of some kind. Often IT professionals have little formal project management training.

* Provide your IT professionals with some authority, but not too much. If the IT professional needs to tell someone, “I will fix your printer in a little while because the network server is about to crash,” then the IT professional needs the authority to make that decision without being reprimanded later.

* Hold the IT professionals responsible for their actions and provide measurements so that they can see how effective they are at their jobs. Some companies choose to measure down-time, help desk requests, or other values that are easy to track.

* When hiring your next IT professional, seriously consider the person’s people skills as well as technical aptitude. If his people skills are lacking, he won’t change until he reaches a hurt level in his life that is so bad that he decides to change.

As the CEO, it’s your job to initiate open dialogue with everyone on your team, including your IT team. If you don’t, you’ll end up in a situation where your IT professionals will believe they can’t come to you with issues that affect the company, and you’ll never know where your company’s weaknesses are until it’s too late.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

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