CIO Insight has published an interesting interview with Ralph Szygenda (please don’t ask me to pronounce it), the Chief Information Officer of General Motors.

One of his major points is that his team works as IT Brokers, not as technologists. I think that the term broker is right on for the knowledge worker, especially in today’s environment.  My personal experience has been in corporate IT for the last 10 years or so, and I have seen a marked shift in how things work within the business world.  At one time, the thought was to hire as many technical people as possible, throw twinkies and computers at them, and start reaping the benefits.  Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out …

Working with data on a large scale is inherently a people problem, as data is only a representation of the organization that owns it.  Within the realm of the data warehouse and information architecture, it is clear that the people who deliver the most value (and hence will be most successful) are not necessarily the most technical.  Szygenda talks about “insourcing” several thousand employees, because they provided a direct benefit to the operation of the business. Not because they had great skills or worked with the coolest technology, because they helped the organization run better.

The role of IT (and of the Data Warehouse) isn’t going away, it is becoming more focused on the things that pay the bills.  The ability to grok C code, write clever shell scripts, or build elegant CSS files are all important, but important within the context of the business that they are in.  Technology (and technologists) come and go, but a useful person is valuable over the long term. 

Incidentally, one of the reasons I love working in ETL and Data Warehousing is the people.  IMHO, the people in data warehousing are normally generalists and they often drift into the field by accident.  When you sit down and talk with them and you ask them about their background, you will hear something like, “After I moved back from Botswana I went back to college and got a job doing X.  To do my job better I started playing around with spreadsheets, which led to ….”  These type of people are the perfect brokers, because they are able to make things happen by creating, stealing, gluing together, and rearranging parts until the problem is solved.  I think this is one reason that the data warehousing is seen as mission critical, while other parts of IT are increasingly outsourced.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 12:01 pm and is filed under In the News, People, Practices, Relationships, Understanding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.