The 7 deadly sins of IT management (3)

According to Krigsman, to overcome inherent greed, you must build incentives for success into the agreement. Consider, for example, an early completion bonus, combined with stiff penalties for projects that run late or over budget.

A side effect of greed is an unwillingness to spend what is needed to get the job done, especially with smaller organizations, says Craig Vickers, a partner at IT Now, a managed IT services provider for small and medium-size businesses.

"One client needed to set up a call center for 50 or 60 people," Vickers says. "We recommended a bonded T1 line for the phones, but they balked at the cost. When we came back a few months later, we opened up the telecom closet and found six DSL modems mounted to the wall. They'd created six different networks, and now they couldn't figure out why their printers wouldn't print. We had to rip them out and throw them away."

This often ends up costing companies more in the long run, he adds.

"A lot of companies think they're saving money, but in the end, they waste more on stuff they throw away instead of buying the things they needed in the first place," he says. "It's all because of greed."

IT sin No. 4: Slothful approaches to IT
IT professionals work hard -- that's a given. But all too often, they're unwilling to step outside their comfort zones or go the extra mile. Despite their hard work, IT managers often commit the sin of sloth by not doing the right things for the business.

"IT people have a fundamental belief that they're not doing anything wrong," says Tony Fisher, CEO of data-quality specialists DataFlux. "That's because they lack an understanding of the business at large. You end up with an environment where the IT manager sits in his office naive and happy, thinking he's doing all the right things, reading all the right journals, and executing everything according to specs that have everything to do with technology but little to do with the business."

For example, Fisher says this year's mortgage debt crisis might not have been so severe if the IT organizations in lending institutions had paid more attention to data quality and accuracy.

"A lot of the data collected from mortgage buyers was incorrect," says Fisher. "There are easy technical ways to validate this information and incorporate it into the system, but it was never done. They just took the information provided at face value. The mortgages were wrapped up in financial packages and sold to mutual funds and banks, but without any attempt to validate whether they were good financial purchases. Whether this was the fault of the business or IT is hard to say. But it's a problem technology could have solved."

The ways sloth can hurt IT departments is almost endless -- from lazy oversight of outsourcing arrangements to lackadaisical compliance auditing, inadequate data security, or bare-bones network monitoring.

"One very large broadband provider in the Northeast had implemented a very expensive network monitoring system they knew wasn't working right but did nothing about it," notes SolarWinds' Stephens. "Then one day, they had an outage affecting over a million people. They had no idea what was happening until their customers started calling them. If they'd implemented even a basic working NMS [network monitoring system], they'd have treated their customers a lot better."

Given the current economic conditions, now is an especially good time to be proactive and busy, says Dave Taylor, co-founder of Sparxent, an IT management solutions vendor.

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The 7 deadly sins of IT management (2)

IT sin No. 2: Information gluttony
Not as expensive as lust but more common is the sin of hoarding information. Too often, this unwillingness to share one's expertise is mistakenly believed to be the path to job security.

"I worked with one IT manager who really didn't like to hand out information about the network infrastructure," says Josh Stephens, head geek at SolarWinds, a network management software provider. "He was fine with letting other people handle servers and periphery switches, but he controlled the core of the network and didn't want anyone else to know how it worked. He liked being the go-to guy for this."

One weekend, when the manager was out of the country, the company had an outage. Nobody could bring the system back up because they didn't know how it was set up, says Stephens.

"They had to start from scratch and rebuild the core of the network. It took a day and a half when it probably should have taken an hour," Stephens says. "These people think they look smarter by knowing things nobody else knows. In my experience, you look smarter by sharing information and teaching the people around you."

Besides hoarding information, another common form of IT gluttony is the hoarding of projects, says Marcelo Schnettler, vice president of a small consulting firm in Jersey City, N.J. Some IT managers just can't say no -- which can prove disastrous over the long haul.

"Senior management either takes on these projects because they want the attention and funding that comes with trying to get all of these projects done, or they're psychologically unable to turn it down," Schnettler says.

The result: IT departments end up running at emergency maximum levels for every project, then are unable to handle a real emergency because no one's available to attend to it.

"I personally left an IT department that ran on crisis mode for three years," Schnettler says. "Everyone worked 60- to 80-hour weeks, weekends, and God forbid if you tried to take a vacation. As far as I know, it is still running that way today."

IT sin No. 3: Avarice as an action item
When an IT project fails, more often than not, it is due to a lethal combination of arrogance and greed, says Michael Krigsman, CEO of Asuret, a consultancy that specializes in reducing IT project failures.

The problem, says Krigsman, is what he calls "the devil's triangle": naive or arrogant customers who craft hopelessly unrealistic RFPs (requests for proposals); system integrators and consultants who promise to deliver what they know is impossible; and technology providers caught in the middle.

"Even when the integrators go into a project with good faith, they face a conundrum," says Krigsman. "Do they tell the customer that the RFP is doomed to fail and lose the opportunity to win that business? Or do they do what the customer asks and run the risk of failing?"

Failing causes more hassles for integrators, notes Krigsman, but it almost always means more money in their pockets as they rack up hourly surcharges fixing fundamental flaws. "That's where the greed kicks in," he says. Meanwhile, tech providers, loath to alienate the integrators that provide them with cash-paying customers, take a hands-off approach.

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