discardia

As I have mentioned in the past, things are weird at my company. Not only are there four different cultures (soon to be five or six), but every office has it’s own way of doing things.

Let me rephrase that. Each office has their own set of unique expectations. Then we got purchased. By a whole another entity with a unique set of expectations.

And now, Information Systems is in the middle of the quagmire so to speak. Each of us managers deal with the stress in different ways. One of my colleagues doesn’t seem to notice… he has chosen to bury his head in code (even if the end product won’t fit all the business units). My other colleague is stressed (rightly so, as he handles the majority of the users), and is trying everything to find a sane way out of the quagmire of conflicting expectations. Then there is our boss, a happy-go-lucky kind of chap who enjoys flying by the seat of his pants because that is just “how he rolls, dog.”

Then there is me. For the most part, seeing a world of chaos around me and choosing to ignore it until the shit implodes. I guess I have kind of accepted my boss’s point of view in that sense. Flip the bird to tomorrow and worry about the brightest fire today. Basically maintaining the course until an iceberg approaches.

Which is great. Because you can spend the majority of your time surfing the net and working on pet projects when the little monkey wrench maintenance shit isn’t giving you a headache.

But then again, it is a horrible undesirable road to walk down. The kind of road you look at and say to yourself, “Holy shit, the lions, the tigers, and the bears have all collectively hung themselves from the enchanted trees due to the fear of this forsaken and forgotten path of hell.”

Because the outcome will either go one of two ways. One, you will be in the same place as today, flying by the seat of your pants, and somehow making it work. Or Two, you are working at a meat packing plant because you lost your job due to poor planning.

So I do my part planning. It has kind of turned into a pet project. I have these plans, see, and they will probably amount to nothing, but it is better to have planned and failed then not to have planned at all and still failed. The wrench in my works is the fact that my Boss sees planning as manager level activity and not necessarily an activity that warrants his involvement and strategy of the IS group as a whole. (Big mistake in my opinion… you will understand in a moment.)

I think he sees it that way. But then again…. I am not too sure about my Boss. Sometimes he is brilliant. Other times I shake my head in wonderment.

And he says I talk down to him. (Which may happen, but that is only because I am shaking my head in wonderment. He is almost two people at times. Jekyll and Hyde. Both are nice people, but one is missing a few hotfixes for his application, if you get my drift.)

The one nice thing about my job is the amount of perspectives on how things should be done. And that is only because it makes for great viewing. Like a sitcom almost… and I get to be the bad guy. There are people that come to work, do the job, and head home. Not a word about anything else. Then there are the people that think their users are “customers” (as in they are always right (wrong)) and go way out of their way to get the job done and try to make tomorrow even rosier. Then there are the people that are only focused on their small part of world and not concerned about anything outside of it. Then there are the people who think this is their chance to try every IS management approach under the sun in order to solve “the problem”.

(”The problem” is just whatever fire is burning bright at that time. So in essence, it really isn’t a problem. Just an annoyance. But the way they talk, you would think the world is freaking ending. The complexity is an outcome of their own way of doing things. But I digress.)

I loved our recent budget cycle talks… the perspective thing totally got adjusted. Our company Controller (CFO, whatever) came into one of our meetings to talk about the IS budgeting and recovery process. My boss, and my colleague (the one trying to figure his way out the quagmire), had these two completely different approaches and sets of expectations for how the budget shit should roll. Our Controller comes in and shook the snowglobe a little bit and by the time he left, the perspectives had shifted. Like 8.2 on the richter scale shifted.

So you have these four completely different approaches to planning. My boss’s way (the freestyle approach), my colleague #1 (find the path out of the quagmire), my colleague #2 (buried in the code), and my relatively yin/yang approach.

And the result of our different approaches?

They don’t really matter right now. Because the company is reorganizing offices into business units.

Yeah, no shit.

Icing on the proverbial cake. Because we had this plan you see. The one common driving force for our group. Based right off of the company strategic plan. A good plan. A plan with outcomes and shit. It wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t even great, but it was something. And now that something is gone. There would be people at my work that would argue with that… that things are only changing in the org chart, the plan won’t be different. And that is complete and utter shit.

The company is giving license to the business units to do things “their way”. A free ticket to make money as they see fit. And Information Systems in caught in the middle because we are underfunded, overstretched, and historically poorly managed and invested, and we will be asked to make it all “work”.

So my opinion of the path forward?

Complete abandonment I think. Perceptions, especially our perceptions, are fucking off. We have to realize we are a commodity, no matter how much we want to sugarcoat it, and Information Systems is only going to provide strategic advantage if it is managed properly. Considering we could be outsourced and no one would notice, tells me that any strategic advantage is currently non-existent.

And now we don’t have a plan… because it doesn’t fit the new way.

So we wait. And our four different methods of handling it all are in some sort of unspoken conflict, and soon we will have other opinions, other approaches. And I guarantee we are going to flounder about like some wretched beached whale because everyone thinks their way is the better way and no one at the top is going to step in and lay down the law.

Someone in our company needs to grow some freaking balls about how to globally manage IT. I am hoping my boss has it in him. But like I said, sometimes I wonder. I am a bit afraid that he won’t. I am afraid that he thinks it is up to people that don’t know shit about IT to make informed decisions. In reality, what we need is a visionary to say this is how it is, this is how it is going to be, and have management behind him to have the authority to say it.

Because until that happens, we are just here to make sure that crap doesn’t break. Policies, project management, and standardization be damned. Management says that we are an engineering company not an IT company, and that is their excuse. We are a support function.

Which is true… we are just a support function. Just like your heart is only a support function for your brain.

Managing the health of your support function will go a long way in making the company healthier.

Egad, I wish the company would wake up.