Information Technology Experts
January 26, 2009
With the proliferation of clueless management, information technology carpet baggers have had a willing if uninformed clientele. I know. You want to tell me that your clients are well informed and understand your expertise. You may even have a core competency. But when you get to be my age, you learn you don’t much at all. What you do know is changing quickly. With each passing day, my knowledge loses currency and I become dumber. Not surprisingly I have, like the turtles that once lived in Beargrass Creek, become cautious, slow moving, and conservative.
What happens when clueless clients encounter carpet baggers? I will get to that in a moment. I want to make sure you know what a carpet bagger is. According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, a carpet bagger is “a Northerner in the South after the American Civil War usually seeking private gain under the reconstruction governments.” When I use the term, I put a spin on the connotation; namely, “a nonresident or new resident who seeks private gain from an area often by meddling in its business or politics.” I also spell the word with a space between carpet and bagger to remind myself that these were cheap briefcases in the 19th century.
Image source: http://i175.photobucket.com/albums/w127/CAITIpix/carpetbagger.jpg
Consultants who are carpet baggers may not recognize that their firm and its employees are practicing this type of work. Today 20 year olds don’t want to hear from an intellectual turtle in Kentucky that their analysis of a situation might be uninformed. Better to terminate the deal. I fired a client in Manchester, England. My radar lit up, and I jumped off that reed boat.
I read the Bloomberg story here with the chilling headline “Price Waterhouse Auditors Arrested in Satyam Inquiry.” The story does a very good job of explaining how two Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ professionals were arrested for “conspiracy and co- participation”. We have an allegedly crooked information technology consulting firm and allegedly crooked financial consultants. What’s that mean for customers of these two outfits? Here are my thoughts:
- Complex technology requires that an organization’s senior management understand the business problem, the technology that will be used to resolve the problem, and the risks involved. A failure to assume this responsibility makes it easy for trophy-generation consultants and nice guys like Mr. Madoff to practice their allegedly dark arts.
- As complexity of software and systems increases, the likelihood of improper behavior seems to me to go up. Look at the dust ups over content management and enterprise search systems that don’t manage content and can’t locate information. A specific example is the US government’s decision in one matter to terminate two companies’ contracts. I am not sure what subsequent legal hula hooping took place.
- Some vendors’ willingness to allow marketing to be science fiction and technology a work in progress seems to be spreading. Clueless clients or lazy procurement teams just want to be told that a system will do the job. Whether that system can or will do the job is of little concern. Turnover and other uncertainties often mean that there will be no consequences for flops.
I have been around too long to think that any change will take place to inject the clueless managers with knowledge. Hopefully the present financial crisis will allow the those with knowledge and a desire to behave in a responsible manner to make some gains. In the meantime, it’s probably a good idea to recalibrate your use of Satyam’s services and PricewaterhouseCooper’s advice.
Stephen Arnold, January 26, 2009
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2 Responses to “Information Technology Experts”
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Right. Now that technology is growing so much, businesses need to rely on IT services more and more. Whether they want to or not, they are going to need to accept the advice or these IT professionals. They just need to make sure they have qualified people for the job.
That’s an interesting point. Business owners should trust the IT expert to do there job right, they are the ones qualified in IT services. Small business owners can outsource an IT person to there office space and this expert will have already dealt with many other businesses so they should know what you need and what they are doing.