An outsourcing article on VentureBlog got me thinking. The point that the author is making is based around reinvention:

Question: Since 1995, two million American manufacturing jobs vanished. How many manufacturing jobs did China add during the same period?

Answer: None. China lost sixteen million manufacturing jobs since 1995, a higher percentage of their manufacturing workforce than the US.

Sounds interesting. We should all flexible, adaptable, forward thinking, skill-building, constant-learning individuals who are always looking to the horizon. Not only should we be pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, we should be doing it on a regular basis.

Now, compare this to the dour assessment from the New Statesman:

Personnel managers, he finds, look not for people who are committed to and proficient at specific skills but for those who have the “potential” to cope with change. The upward career mobility so familiar to previous generations has been replaced by downward mobility.

By their late forties, people often work at lower skill levels than employees who joined more recently. And because such a high premium is put on flexibility and seizing the new, “you are constantly . . . walking away from your own commitments”.

This surely explains why everything is done so badly. You don’t try to improve your performance and do your present job well; you get ready for the next big change. It may also explain why the government seems always to be struggling to improve the population’s skill levels.

Souns a bit grim, doesn’t it? There are two sides to every coin, and it seems that our ruthlessly efficient focus on productivity improvement and global reach might have some downside.

My Take

Flexibility is important, and we need it in a rapidly changing environment. Make no doubt about it, things are moving faster and faster.  However, taking on the motto of semper gumby isn’t necessarily going to make things work.

1. The need for flexibility is often brought on by indecisiveness, negligence or incompetence, and not opportunity.  When used for the right reasons, flexibility is key.  When used for the wrong reasons it is just an excuse for additional stress.
2. Experience has a tangible value in the workplace, and the savings brought by every hour of work not done. To paraphrase a French philosopher, “A project plan is not done when every hour of work is added together, it is done when every unecessary hour of work is removed.”
3. Age matters!  It is much easier to be flexible when you are young and relatively unencumbered.  At the same time, it is easy to feel a sense of entitlement as you get older and have more to deal with.

Overall, the most useful people will be those with the right combination of drive, wisdom, experience, and flexibility to fit the situation.  A solid organization will recognize this and in itself be flexible to the needs of their employees and ultimately to the bottom line.

An interersting finding in IT World relating the people who commit sabotage in the workplace and their work behaviors. The article details that …

The research suggests that potential troublemakers should be easy to spot. Nearly all the cases of cybercrime investigated were carried out by people who were “disgruntled, paranoid, generally show up late, argue with colleagues, and generally perform poorly.”

From an organizational point of view, this seems pretty obvious. People who aren’t happy and aren’t performing are the most likely to act out. This isn’t an IT specific thing, I would guess you see the same behavior in people who work in finance and embezzle company funds.

The article goes on …

According to security management vendor Calum Macleod of Cyber-Ark, most organizations are leaving themselves exposed by “not paying due care and attention to the people who are charged with looking after their systems and applications.” Even outsourcing cannot resolve the problem fully, he said.

This sounds like a wise thing. Organizational problems are the responsibility of the organization, and the responsibility isn’t just to punish or to root out bad seeds. The responsibility is to make a culture where this sort of thing is unlikely to happen, then to monitor for any possibilities that may arise.

While it is individuals that perform these acts, they don’t happen in a vacuum and often there are components of the behavior that can be prevented cheaply, quickly, and easily. Don’t discount your people by ‘profiling’ out suspects and thinking that will solve your problems.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

– Albert Einstein

Steve Tuck from Datanomic has an post about data quality on dq:view, where he discusses (and tries to dismantle) the use of a government produced master data file for mailing addresses in the UK. While the posting is very specific to a single application, it speaks to a situation that drives a lot of data management issues.

He writes:

Authorative sources of data are indeed useful - just don’t count on them to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I believe that one of the biggest problems that we have in dealing with data is the false belief that for every organization and situation, there is a single view of information that can satisfy everyone’s needs. Now, this isn’t a technology problem and it isn’t a data problem, it’s an organizational problem.

The Myth of the Single View

In any organization, we end up with different groups with different needs, normally based around:

• Speed
• Reliability
• Accuracy
• Cost

Each group has specific needs based on their own situation. For example, when looking at customer data, the people in HQ might not care if every customer account has the most up-to-date address available, but the people in the warehouse certainly do. At the same time, the people in the warehouse don’t care about how much it costs to , while the people in HQ are much more focused on the bottom line.

Get these folks together in a room and you will have a terrific argument about what the organization needs and and how it is going to be done (BTW, there is a related post to this on the wonderful Creating Passionate Users).

While this sounds like a problem for human resources or general management, this phenomenon is usually expressed as a function of IT, because that is where the rubber hits the road. Since IT is often a shared resource and has a vested interest in interoperability, the issues of culture and organization come out as a function of architecture development.

An Honest Assessment

The honest truth is that there isn’t a single view of the business, its data, or its processes, that is going to meet the needs of the entire organization. A lot of vendors and consultants for CRM and MDM solutions are going to try to tell you otherwise, realize that they are selling something as they do this. The answer is that this is a complicated world, and things aren’t getting any easier.

If your IT is going to represent the entire organization, you must embrace complexity and understand the fact that there are going to be a cacophony of voices and a host of diverse world views that all exist simultaneously and are all using and competing for the same resources.

There is an interview with Robert Reich in this month’s issue of CIO Insight, titled “The Economics of People” . I am a fan of Mr. Reich, from his days back in the US Labor Department, and his thoughtful commentaries on APM’s Marketplace.

A highlight …

Today, there seem to dual anxieties in the IT workforce. IT workers fear the loss of their jobs, while IT executives fear they will not be able to find the people they need in the future. Which is the bigger problem?

The bigger challenge will be for IT executives to find the people they need. I don’t see any reason to fear the loss of good IT jobs in the U.S. Every time the business cycle turns down I hear the same worries, and I’ve heard those worries for over 20 years. But every time the business cycle turns up again, IT professionals are once again employed and they get good jobs. The demand is rising faster than the supply; it’s going to be harder and harder to get the quality of IT professional that American business needs.

The inteview has a lot of food for thought about living and working in IT in the age of outsourcing. If you haven’t already started to started to develop the skills you are going to need for your next job, read the article and then re-evaluate your position.