Joel Spolsky just posted three parts (1,2,3) of a speech he gave at Yale in which he warns students to avoid corporate IT:

Now, at a product company, for example, if you’re a software developer working on a software product or even an online product like Google or Facebook, the better you make the product, the better it sells. The key point about in-house development is that once it’s “good enough,” you stop.

Spolsky is 100% right about corporate IT organizations - they are crappy places to work. You don’t get to work on fun projects, you’re disconnected from the business, you’re stuck making things quickly rather than high-quality, and everyone on the business-line hates you, to the point where they keep farming out your job to consultants like Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM.

But the reason IT is miserable is it’s own fault - in house IT is, for the most part, a monopoly, and it’s going to be just as miserable as working at any other monopoly. You don’t have to worry about what your internal customer needs, because they can’t go someplace else (you don’t run competing IT shops). You don’t have to run efficiently because there aren’t market pressures. For every complaint from someone in IT that their creative freedom is restricted, there’s a complaint on the business side for the problems that crop up when developers decide they want to play - for instance every business application needs to have it’s own authentication, with it’s own look and feel, and it’s own user database. Kerberos was invented how long ago? If you’re developing a product and you make your users sign-in a different way to use different areas of your product, creative destruction will take care of you pretty quickly, but when you’re in the monopoly that is corporate IT, the users don’t have anywhere else to go.

And what of the consultants that IT hates so much, who can charge $300 an hour to have a 22 year-old with an English degree and a crash course in .Net write applications for you? They do something corporate IT isn’t very good at - they spend most of their time figuring out what the biggest problem is, and then they develop an application that solves it. In the meantime, corporate IT has an amorphous idea of what the business is and starts developing applications that they think might be relevant. That’s how monopolies work - they push products onto the market as they develop them, without regards to customer needs. Customers, who don’t have a choice, take what they can get.

There are other structural forces that make corporate IT miserable. For instance, maintenance and new development usually come out of separate budgets, so developers have little incentive to make an efficient product that is cost effective to maintain - that’s somebody else’s problem. Because once a project ends they either have to find a new one or move into maintaining the code they wrote, they actually have a perverse incentive to write bad code that’s difficult to maintain, modify, and interact with. The best way to build job security is to invent a role nobody else can do. If you’re looking for anecdotal evidence, just look at the way the owners of legacy applications fight any attempt to modernize.

If you’re developing a product, any new feature you add provides value to the customer, that’s why it’s valued. Great companies value IT (and other support functions like HR) because they drive value to the bottom line. In fact, great companies are usually built on great people and great technology. When done right, IT contributes straight to the bottom line, and IT professionals are valuable parts of the business team.

In the end, the problems with corporate IT are based around the same issue - there is no accountability to the customer. That’s the root of line-managers’ complaints about IT and it drives into most of the problems programmers feel when working in corporate IT. Solve it, and all of a sudden IT becomes a great place to work, and a valued part of the team.

Categories: Business and Economics, Customer Engagement, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Managing, Technology
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My American Express card has chronic trouble with its magnetic stripe, especially at Walgreens stores. The other day, while making a purchase at a busy Walgreens, my card was having the same trouble. I expected the cashier to ask if I had a different card, or cash, or to manually enter the number on the card. Instead, she took a plastic bag, wrapped it around the card, and slid it through the machine. The card ran right through. I told the clerk it was a pretty cool trick, and she replied that a customer taught it to them.

The plastic bag around the credit card is a great trick, but Walgreens didn’t think of it. It’s not in their employee handbook, and it likely won’t come up at a staff meeting. Nobody at the Walgreens I went to is going to tell it to people at other stores, and Walgreens corporate isn’t going to submit a flier about it. It’s likely that nobody at a manager meeting is going to bring it up, and nobody will tell it to a district manager to spread to other stores. It’s just a trick that the clerks in this store know. Except that the clerks didn’t think of it themselves - they found it from a customer. And customers are the people who will spread it, because despite all the hype around knowledge-management and information sharing, in industries with separated business units with high customer touch points (i.e. retail, hospitality), your customers are still your best communication tool.

Whenever my American Express card won’t scan again, I’m not going to reach for another card. I’m going to ask for a plastic bag, and I’m going to teach a new store the same trick. Customers share information for you all the time. Store managers get suggestions about what another store is doing well, or something they’ve tried somewhere. Customers create a network outside your organization that you have no control over, that you never see, and that you interact with at random times. But by proactively communicating with your customers, you don’t just engage them, you create a human network that continuously improves your business.

Categories: Business and Economics, Customer Engagement, Social Software, Users as Partners
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A Missouri Farmer has carved the St. Louis Cardinals logo into his corn field:

You can even see it on Google Maps by calling it up yourself - go south on Hwy 61 from Troy. Call me when your customers, employees or Red Sox fans (Hi Deb!) do a tribute to your brand that is visible from space

You can’t buy marketing like that, but if your customers are engaged, they’ll give it to you for free. Of course, it’s probably only a matter of time before the Cardinals or MLB sues away their only visible-from-space billboard.

Categories: Business and Economics, Customer Engagement, Marketing
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After an experience at a restaurant, the Evil HR Lady says:

We don’t train our managers correctly. We don’t teach them what they, as the manager, should fix and what their employees should fix. Managers are scared to let employees have any power–for fear they’ll make the wrong decision. If your employees are poor decision makers, you should not have hired them in the first place. Hire good employees and let them do their work.

Customers want the person they’re dealing with to be able to fix their problems, not have to pawn it off on someone else. If your employees need to get management approval to improve customer experience, they’re wasting everyone’s time. Better to hire talented people, focus them on the customer, and trust them to make the right choices. Let managers manage, and trust the employees who handle your most precious asset, your customers, to make the right decisions, because if you don’t, your customers will leave for a company that does.

Categories: Business and Economics, Careers, Customer Engagement, Employee Engagement, Governance, Managing, Marketing
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