The IT Dilemma – A Serious Lack of Vision
When I fall into the discussion of IT's lack of vision, I always ask the same question of my opponent, "Who runs the Army?" Yes, it takes a moment for him or her to recover from my apparent lack of conversational focus but I have a good reason for asking. The answer is "The stars and the stripes." In other words, the generals and the enlisted ranks. The generals are the ones who plan the attacks, who figure out where to move troops, who manage supply lines, and who have the grand vision for victory over the enemy. The stripes are the ones who carry out that vision. The stripes are the ones in the trenches. They are the ones who take the hills. They are the ones who engage the enemy.
In IT, the generals are the CxOs, and the stripes are the network engineers, the security staff, the hardware support teams, the programmers, the testers, and the system administrators. The officers are middle management – the paper shufflers, the rule quoters, the bean counters, and the people who keep us in line as we fulfill our leader's visions.
The problem is that there's a huge gap between the stars and the stripes in IT. In the Army, the stars understand the need for well-trained, dedicated, loyal troops – soldiers who'll carry out orders without question and without hesitation. In IT, however, the stars see stripes as overhead, as cost units, as resources, and as people who can be replaced with cheaper versions from far away lands. We, as stripes, see them as profit-seeking, evil overlords whose only goals are to pander to shareholders and take home multimillion dollar bonuses as rewards for their "inspired" visions.
The dilemma is that neither the stripes nor the stars feel any loyalty to each other. IT isn't like the Army. Instead of fighting a common enemy or protecting common ground, we're bent on depleting our own ranks of our most valuable resources: morale, loyalty, longevity, and excellence. There's so much
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