RSSIs “Not my job” just another excuse?
It's funny how often you find yourself reading two otherwise unrelated articles exhibiting diametrically opposing points of view in short succession on the Internet these days. This morning, for me, it was Jay Rollins' "Hey IT workers; Enough with the excuses" followed almost immediately by Rob England's "Why does IT have to do the business's job?"
Neither article is talking about the other, and they are leveled at different issues in the organization (Rollins focuses on failings among IT staff to get the job done by making excuses [although the excuses are hardly unique to IT staff for the most part] and England on business leadership's failure to acknowledge the strides that IT departments have made to accommodate their failings and to take back responsibility for basic functions that have been dumped on IT) but philosophically, they are pages out of two very different books. Rollins exhorts IT to suck it up, look past the immediate difficulties, and get the job done nonetheless; England asks why it is IT should have to go the extra mile to overcome those issues, when it shouldn't be their problem in the first place.
I find myself siding more with Rollins on the matter for two reasons, one philosophical, and one practical.
Philosophically, if you are looking for excuses, you'll always find them. Explanations are useful in that they provide information on which basis things can move forward, excuses not so much. In that England's point is to provide an explanation as to why there is so much disfunction between IT and other departments, and examples of ways that IT has attempted to cope with that, it's useful; in that it also is to attempt to divest IT of the responsibility for continuing to cope with and overcome the situation, not so much. Whether it was the fault of the IT department or other departments, or both together, matters little. If the CIO is interested in the health of his department and her company, then they should continue to try to fix it by whatever means they have available.
Practically, it turns out that there is also a certain power that comes with responsibility, and from doing other people's jobs. IT staff have long known that there is security of a sort in developing and holding esoteric, vital skills and information. Particularly as CIOs struggle with relevance in the technology solutions department, it may be no bad thing that their departments have been developing skills and expertise that belong more appropriately in the "business" realm. Alignment, after all, isn't really the future; integration is, and if the realization that England hopes to provoke ever really settles in the sphere of corporate management (I have my doubts) then an IT organization that has developed expertise in areas other than technology has a fighting chance of survival, and the CIO may continue to claim relevance. Anyone who has sat back saying, "Not my job" is likely to be without one.
