Working in IT has shown me how useless the "business" is

Neon_Lights

I know this may seem fairly harsh but in general what I see today is that IT systems and their maintenance are running the business (back office environment). A lot of what I see from business functions is fairly superficial, and just slowing down development by kicking back, and solutioning inefficiently which causes severe pain down the line.

I've become very cynical of the intellect of some business people and question what value they possess. I'm not saying all are bad but they do to me seem very replaceable. A lot do not seem to grasp systems concepts or are poor at solving problems. They also seem from my experience to become lazier and lazier. Everywhere I worked the business is just a talking shop with acronyms and obtuse ideas.

What are your views on this? Do you feel the same way?

Avatar MIA

Neon_Lights wrote: »

solutioning inefficiently

Dilbert, is that you?

Non IT people don't need to know about IT, that's your job. What do you know about production, Marketing, Finance or HR.

jon1981

Neon_Lights wrote: »

A lot of what I see from business functions is fairly superficial, and just slowing down development by kicking back, and solutioning inefficiently which causes severe pain down the line.

What are your views on this? Do you feel the same way?

Which functions? Please elaborate? Don't even get me started on this phrase "solutioning inefficiently"

Neon_Lights wrote: »

I've become very cynical of the intellect of some business people and question what value they possess. I'm not saying all are bad but they do to me seem very replaceable.

Why kind of people are you referring to?

Let's not fool ourselves here, unless the sole IP of company sits in your head, NOBODY IS IRREPLACEABLE!

Neon_Lights wrote: »

Everywhere I worked the business is just a talking shop with acronyms and obtuse ideas.

Oh because IT and Software development has none of that

Canadel

Neon_Lights wrote: »

I've become very cynical of the intellect of some business people and question what value they possess?

Who ever said business people automatically possessed any kind of intellect? Many are hardworking, intelligent, determined, innovative, brash, competitive and so on. None of that means they possess a highly developed intellect. Neither does it mean that many don't.

aphex™

Having worked in a multinational producing the balance sheet for 2 European countries for a listed company I would echo the sentiments of the OP.

I have even applied the phrase 'unable to solve any problems' to my coworkers.
They seem to be unable to see how a system might work in order to play around with it in order to get around obstacles or software issues they run into on a daily basis. Things like a connector to a database in excel not working and you have to fiddle with it a bit to get it to start.

Another person was having problems with his network connection and sat there for hours doing nothing until I pointed out to him he could just connect to the VPN and bypass whatever temporary problem he was having. This was during the busy month end period where he would have to produce several key reports to a specific timetable.

Another thing I found is that if you drill down into people's work, it's all wrong. You take a close look at any report or excel file they produced you'll find numerous errors.

lostboy75

I would consider myself fairly good with tech and IT in general. If I am in work and something goes wrong, unless I am 100% certain I can fix it, I leave it alone and get tech support. Most of the time they will do what I was thinking would work.
I am not sitting back because I am lazy, but knowing that if I f it up, I could cause a lot more damage or down time to me or worse still the whole company.
It's common sense really, don't risk messing up something out side your paygrade. The consequences can be much bigger than yourself.

Avatar MIA

aphex™ wrote: »

Having worked in a multinational producing the balance sheet for 2 European countries for a listed company I would echo the sentiments of the OP.

Back at the start of my career I worked on the Balance sheet for several BUs (effectively countries) within EMEA for a large listed technology company. It was practically book-keeping work. Granted you had to work with a lot of systems that relied on other people, but if it wasn't working properly one month (i.e. caused a delay) it got fixed within the next month.

And IT people wouldn't generally be known to be best at the auld communication, which doesn't help. Hence we get treated to phrases like 'solutioning inefficiently'.

Diemos

lostboy75 wrote: »

I would consider myself fairly good with tech and IT in general. If I am in work and something goes wrong, unless I am 100% certain I can fix it, I leave it alone and get tech support. Most of the time they will do what I was thinking would work.
I am not sitting back because I am lazy, but knowing that if I f it up, I could cause a lot more damage or down time to me or worse still the whole company.
It's common sense really, don't risk messing up something out side your paygrade. The consequences can be much bigger than yourself.

I don't think that was what the OP was referring to the day to day tech issues.
I think they mean bigger issues, what are we doing? Why are we doing it and how can we best utilise the IT department to enable us to achieve KPI's? (see what I did there).


In my experience, there are able and useless people in every department (including I.T.). It is incredibly frustrating when a business person does not know what they want (or how to communicate) and tries to point the blame at IT when a project goes wrong.


The best advice I can give the OP is try to put yourself in the business shoes, think, why are they asking me for a change or new product? In the same way as a lot of business people are not techie, a lot of techie lack in business skills and this can lead to conflict.
If you understand where they want to go (even if you think it's the wrong direction) you may be able to offer a better solution than the one they are asking for.

Communication is key.

thomas anderson.

I've worked in IT for a number of years now and I have lost all faith in humanity . I really don't understand how some people put their 👖 on in the morning

Earthhorse

The best business people are a fleeting site in any organisation. Usually, they are founders who start and grow a company and then stand aside or move on after the hard work's been done. At this point the business people are replaced by industry people; people who understand insurance or healthcare or retail and who become known as "the business".

These people are not there to make insightful or gutsy decisions as you may think but simply to keep things running and milk the cash cow. Despite their lack of business nous the company continues to succeed because there's a high cost involved in unseating an incumbent. So they think they are good at business even though they have no meaningful track record in it.

Are IT people any better?

I doubt it. But because "the business" view IT as a function rather than a strategic tool they never get a chance to prove how bad they can be. I say this as someone with a Commerce degree who worked for a few years in business before self training as a programmer.

90% of the problems with IT systems are as a result of lack of engagement from "the business". The two things I have noticed people are especially bad at in work are prioritising and long term thinking. This is the antithesis of what good IT thinking is about. But if the business were suddenly to engage I imagine similar weaknesses would be found in many IT people over the course of time.

Kensington

I think you're viewing this from the wrong angle, an us-vs-them and you're on the IT department side.

The role of an IT department is value generation - how can IT effectively deliver what the business needs to achieve their goals. Unless the business is in the line of IT itself, then the IT department is not in itself "the business" and does not have any direct role or part in steering the direction of the business.

This is where a good IT manager or CTO/CIO comes in, someone who can sit down and translate what the business needs to achieve into a technically and commercially sound solution that they can then deliver upon and demonstrate to the business how they are delivering value generation as a result.

Unfortunately that bridge is missing in many organisations meaning the business doesn't have the technical resources delivered and available to do what it wants to do efficiently and blames IT for hampering it's needs. As a result the business sees IT as nothing more than an endless cost pool that doesn't deliver anything of value and so are reluctant to assign any money towards it to deliver on any of these needed projects. This just repeats in a vicious circle...

omahaid

What do you mean by IT? I've worked in software development for years and years in a number of multinationals, they all produced good quality products. I am proud to have contributed to these products.

seamus

Kensington makes a good point.

What one sees a lot in non-technical people is a failure to visualise any problem as something which can be fixed or to examine their processes for ways of making them better.

From the point of view of a technical person it looks like these people are just stupid or lazy, or jobsworths or whatever.

In real terms, they just don't possess the technical knowledge to enable them to fix the problem or refine the process. So you end up with massively inefficient and sometimes bonkers solutions to problems and processes that are unnecessarily labour intensive.

In reality that's a failure of the IT department to make it known that this is what they are there for - they're not just tech support, they're there to add value to the business by making things continuously better and faster.

Case in point, I was asked once to look at someone's machine because Excel constantly crashed on them every time they had to create a monthly report. Instead I wrote a small GUI application which reduced the time it took to manually prepare this report from two days a month, down to 62 seconds. They had never considered a technical solution to the overall process because the IT department sold itself as tech support and project resources for the business.

GekkePrutser

Funny, my job is to solve exactly that problem. I used to be a developer (building custom CTI solutions for call centres at a solution provider) and now I work on the business side in house for a large multinational. CTI is a technology that makes call centres more intelligent (e.g. recognising the calling customer so the agents do not have to ask questions the system already knows, like who they are and often what they are calling about if it's a repeat call).

In my opinion (and luckily my boss's) it works really well because I can speak both languages and know what is possible and can renegotiate projects to something that works for the business and is still technically simple.

When I was a developer I was actively discouraged to suggest simpler alternatives to my clients because the complexity meant more hours for the company I worked for, and they didn't want to deal with the hassle of changing agreements. Also, they tended to set things in stone between sales and client before getting a technical person involved, which was a nightmare for me because our sales people had no idea what was possible. Often a big hassle could have been solved with a simple suggestion 'What if we just...'.

So I really like the role and this company. When you work together between business and technical, any problem can be resolved.

By the way the business side people I work with are quite smart. They just think differently. Often they have great ideas if the challenges and opportunities on the IT side are presented to them properly in a way they can understand. And talking is their job. When involved correctly they will make IT rollouts smoother by getting everyone aligned in time so they don't feel overwhelmed. Of course they have funny acronyms, but so do we in IT.

Conversely the IT side often fails to understand the reluctance in business to carry out things that don't add any value or generate money. Like big systems upgrades. Often it really helps to proactively look at the features of a new system that is meant to be implemented for technical reasons (e.g. like an old system going out of support) and seeing if there is anything in there that can provide new value. The business side can be quite open to change if they are only shown the value to them. Sometimes there are constraints that seem illogical but are important to the company as a whole.

Also IT people can be quite boneheaded too, especially people working for an outsource company tend to just do what they're told and only worry about getting their current trouble ticket closed or warranting their hours on the time sheet. Not really their fault as it's the outsource companies that drive them to this by focusing on their day to day bottom line too much, rather than working with their clients proactively. When I worked for this outsource company I had to explain every hour of every week, I was actually told off for calling into a customer on my way to work to help them out with an urgent problem. God forbid I should have a sense of responsibility and rapport with the customer :rolleyes:

As a result often this dialogue is not present and the result is misunderstanding, annoyance and financial wastage on both sides. But the cause is really misunderstanding and a lack of open minded collaboration, not stupidity.

GekkePrutser

Avatar MIA wrote: »

Dilbert, is that you?

Non IT people don't need to know about IT, that's your job. What do you know about production, Marketing, Finance or HR.

It's not really that black and white though.

Production, marketing, finance, HR should all know a bit about IT, or at least some people in their organisations should. After all for most of them it is their main tool they use all day. And IT should know a bit about all of them, after all they're only a means to the business ends.

The whole cause of these problems is the fencing off between departments and not wanting to get involved at all. 50 years ago it worked like that. These days we don't have that luxury anymore. In any business change is happening on a daily basis and affects everyone.

You can't just hand off your problems to the IT department and expect a solution that perfectly meets your needs if you don't work with them. And vice versa.

Avatar MIA

GekkePrutser wrote: »

It's not really that black and white though.

Production, marketing, finance, HR should all know a bit about IT, or at least some people in their organisations should. After all for most of them it is their main tool they use all day. And IT should know a bit about all of them, after all they're only a means to the business ends.

The whole cause of these problems is the fencing off between departments and not wanting to get involved at all. 50 years ago it worked like that. These days we don't have that luxury anymore. In any business change is happening on a daily basis and affects everyone.

You can't just hand off your problems to the IT department and expect a solution that perfectly meets your needs if you don't work with them. And vice versa.

My response to the less than responsive OP was somewhat flippant.

It depends on the company. Some companies will have strategic use of their IT department. For others it's of less strategic value often where the FC manages the IT support function. Then you have companies that can use IT as a competitive advantage, which should have a CIO at board level.