Picture credit: smile it's Shan

One of my favourite debating points at the moment is the question of how we can effectively transmit the perceived wisdom and hard-won practical experience from generation to generation of IT managers and directors.

This conundrum has taxed me for some time because I still can’t see any substantive evidence of a general willingness to build on the understanding of those who have gone before us – at least in the business critical realms of IT management and organisational development.

It’s almost as if we enjoy playing out the role of the headstrong, self-willed, eternal teenager, who won’t listen to advice and who doesn’t want to grow up. Ever.

Harsh words, perhaps, but very often the behaviour is a simple consequence of not knowing where to find a readily available fount of relevant IT management wisdom.

For sure, it is easy enough to find technical reference material by the bucket load. But it’s very hard to find a simple, practical guide to common IT management problems – and even harder to find such a guide that is widely recognised by practitioners as the standard reference.

Whereas, when Lawyers and Doctors are faced with a problem beyond their personal knowledge and experience, they have rapid recourse to whole libraries of precedent and advice, all properly indexed and neatly cross-referenced. Which is one of the basic reasons why those more mature and august professional bodies are usually better positioned to command and sustain a much higher level of personal and corporate credibility than those of us wallowing around in the mire of IT management.

So let’s all agree now that we want to stop making life harder for ourselves than it should be.

Let’s start sharing our experience within a properly structured framework.

That must be the best way for us to pass on those sparkling pearls of wisdom and to break the endless, costly cycle of always finding things out for ourselves the hard way.

Surely it’s long overdue for the multifarious IT membership associations and professional bodies to start working together, to really create a systematic and sustainable professional approach to managing technology.

Of course, this might require some people to move beyond their well-established comfort zones, of competition and isolationism, into that apparently dangerous minefield of co-operation, collaboration and consolidation.

We certainly have a lot of catching up to do if we are ever to realise our own professional aspirations, i.e. of IT genuinely being regarded as a profession rather than merely an extended cottage industry.

This catching up exercise will not be easy and will take some time to bear fruit. In the meantime, the cost of neglect will continue to hamper our professional development.

Isn’t it high time that we got ourselves better organised and properly equipped, with a real body of professional knowledge, to manage technology and technicians more effectively?

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Clay mashed together a couple of popular songs (“What the world needs now” and “Abraham Martin and John”) and a Marines’ marching chant with news bulletin excerpts (Kennedy assassinations and Martin Luther King’s “mountain top” speech); weaving together a poignant piece of pop history.

Truly an innovative mashup. Clay was way ahead of his time.*

Despite being a One Hit Wonder on a substantial, international scale, Tom Clay subsequently had to rely on unemployment benefit and intermittent jobs – a cautionary message for all present-day mashup creators, hoping to achieve fortune and fame through web popularity.

*for sure other songs, such as Simon and Garfunkel’s “Silent night/ 7 O’ Clock News,” had brought together music and spoken words but not to the same extent, or intent, of the Tom Clay masterpiece.

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Picture credit: lars hammar

But even those who believe that they are striding purposefully towards a goal, using a travelator to accelerate their progress, may find that they are actually on a treadmill – albeit with a much longer band. Travelators may save time and energy but don’t generate power.

Getting to a destination quickly isn’t much good unless you have something purposeful to do when you arrive.

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Picture credit: Tom Brogan

We don’t, however, spend so much time thinking about real team-building – i.e. creating new teams, from scratch. Which is a pity. Of course such opportunities don’t present quite as often, because most organizations usually have well-established teams.

Nevertheless, new teams and departments are sometimes created, either by mergers and acquisitions activity, or by our old friend: “corporate re-organization;” that’s when we usually get the chance to design a new team, even if some of the members are simply being shuffled about.

One of the big problems with such team-building is that it usually has to be done quickly, we may not be allowed the luxury of deliberating the pros and cons of our team design.

Which is perhaps why we have to re-organize so often, to correct hasty design faults.

How could this be different?

Well, off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of ways: firstly by making more time for team design when we actually do have to build; secondly by occasionally thinking, speculatively, about how we would re-design our current team, if we had to do so now – try it, the exercise is always thought-provoking.

But every new team has to start somewhere so here is the killer question: which role is first on your new team-sheet and why?

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