Installing new information technologies at some companies can be a cloak- and-dagger affair-something done on the sly, hidden from the boys in the information systems department.
One job recently undertaken for a telecommunications company was like that, said Tim Millar, president of Palatine-based AIS International, a software integrator.
Although his people really were upgrading the telecommunications company`s personal-computer network, their billings described the work as basic maintenance rather than a new project.
”We had to make sure all the costs were split up so as not to raise any flags,” he said. ”This isn`t unusual for us these days.”
Millar`s clients didn`t want to invoke the ire of their company`s information technology people, the ones who tend their shop`s mainframe computer systems and control all information stored there.
But the line managers do want the slick new technology providing powerful tools to people whose technology skills are secondary to their job.
Information systems people traditionally have overseen mainframe or mini- computer systems that run customized software. The personal computers, often linked in networks, and workstation-based client-server systems that are now common in offices represent a decentralized computing style that is foreign to the culture shared by many information systems people.
Instead of waiting weeks for new software to be written, managers are now accustomed to buying software off the shelf. And new technology pushes decentralization relentlessly.
Proliferating hardware and software-upgraded almost weekly as new products that are more powerful, easier to use and less expensive reach the market-have become so attractive and accessible to managers that they no longer defer to their central information systems staff on technology questions.
The changing world of information technology is similar to what has happened over the years to clinical medicine.
People once went meekly to their family doctors, who diagnosed their ills, prescribed a therapy and provided it-no questions asked. Today, a physician`s diagnosis likely will be greeted by a patient holding two magazine articles on new therapies, who leaves the doctor`s office to get a second opinion.
Likewise, technology professionals, once seen as almost mystical information keepers whose centralized department was known as the ”glass house” in popular jargon, have lost their right to ladle out technology as they see fit-no questions asked.
It is a profound and widespread shift in the modern business landscape, wrought in large part by technological expansion that appears to be accelerating out of any one group`s control.
”This is a very real, very live basketball that`s bouncing all over everyone`s corporate back court,” said Richard Arns, executive director of the Chicago Research and Planning Group, an association of chief information officers from area companies.
Indeed, Arns` group, aided by Kathleen Filbin, president of Educon Consulting in Glencoe, is rolling out a cooperative training program intended to help the group`s 50 members get their staffs up to date on the newest developments in software and hardware.
The effort, thought to be the nation`s largest training consortium, aims to keep members abreast of decentralized technologies so they can make decisions and adapt to the new world.
The alternative to such training may be confusion, indecision and technological gridlock. Many experts say gridlock is a real threat to companies whose information specialists have dug in their heels to defend the old order rather than learn to exploit the new order`s possibilities.
Most information executives tend to stress the positive side to the new order when talking for the record. But in private, some aren`t so positive.
One who has gotten an earful is Steven M. Freeman, central region managing partner for integration services and technology at Chicago-based Andersen Consulting.
Freeman has spoken to more than 30 information executives on this subject in the last year, and he found that about a third seemed committed to adapting to the new order and making it work for their companies.
He calls the new structure an ”adhocracy,” a flatter, decentralized organization with fewer specialists and more teams working together to achieve specific goals. In this environment, the role of technology professionals is to provide an infrastructure for the company to use. It`s rather like supplying electrical power and letting customers decide whether to use the electricity to run a toaster, a television or whatever.
A majority of information executives still reject this view, Freeman found. They believe that if they don`t retain control of information technology, it will lead to chaos and degradation of their databases; they believe they must be information guardians because others in their companies just don`t understand the technology sufficiently to avoid pitfalls.
There may be validity to these fears. But most outside observers agree it is futile to resist the forces of change and makes more sense to adapt to them, addressing their inherent problems.
While changing technology is certainly a driver in creating a new order, what`s really happening is best understood as a cultural change, said Allen A. Kalkstein, information consultant with Ernst & Young in Chicago.
Of course, change can be hard for anyone, Kalkstein said, although he added that adapting to the new order has been energizing for several people he knows.
”People find it challenging and rewarding,” he said. ”They find that the other way of working was boring, slow and wasteful by comparison.”
At the core of this new culture is the simple notion that, when people who understand technology work side by side with people who understand the business, the result will be better for the business than when they work apart.
”It`s always been true, since the computer was first introduced to business, that you get your best results when the technical people work with operations people,” said Gary Curtis, Chicago-based director of worldwide information technology for the Boston Consulting Group. ”But we`ve never actually done that, or at least not very much.”
Traditionally, techies like to hang around with other techies, talking jargon and doling out technology to operations people in a fashion most congenial to the technology-and its keepers.
The people in sales or accounting took what they were given and accepted it because they could barely talk to the techies, let alone question their wisdom.
What has changed, Curtis said, is that putting cheap and powerful computers on the desks of people in marketing, manufacturing and so on has made them more sophisticated and emboldened them.
Once line managers discovered how much computers could help, they led the charge to ”disassemble the glass house” by demanding that technical people work directly for them, not for a central systems department, he said.
”I have a large banking client that three years ago had an informations systems staff of 2,000,” he said. ”Today, that`s down to 800. But throughout the whole company, we estimate the actual number of information systems people totals 3,000. They just aren`t concentrated in one department any more.”
There are a few examples, Curtis said, of businesses that had mainframe computers and decentralized the technology to prosper. A classic is Texas-based Frito-Lay, where years ago business specialists collaborated with information systems people to build a system that tracks sales data daily to make it available to line managers.
”It doesn`t take them three months to learn that a line of barbeque chips isn`t selling in Wisconsin. They`ll find out in a few days and adjust for it. ”This whole system was built on a mainframe. The key was
collaboration, not any special technology.”
In any company, once a line manager achieves a noticeable success by collaborating with technology people, ”it spreads like wildfire,” he added. ”All the line managers want to do it.”
Of course, it may not sit well with a technology person who is plucked from a slot surrounded by techie peers and placed on a team with marketers, engineers and accountants.
”There`s a real question of job satisfaction here that has yet to be addressed,” Curtis said.
There also is fear.
”When they are transferred out of information systems, a lot of people view this as a slow way of being fired,” Freeman of Andersen Consulting said. ”That isn`t at all what`s happening, but that`s how a lot of people see it. They say, `I can`t be with my buddies. I have to learn these new technologies. I think I`ll leave here and go somewhere else.`
”They don`t realize that `somewhere else` is facing the same thing that`s happening where they are.”
In some cases, though, information specialists may see the future more clearly than their bosses.
Ken Brustad, a trainer at LAN-Mind, a Chicago computer training and consulting center, said that in recent months he has seen a definite change in the profile of people who come to his classroom to learn about new technologies.
”We used to get mostly your casual PC user,” Brustad said. ”Now we`re getting mainframe programmers and even managers coming to our classes. This has happened just within the last year.
”These are older people who`ve used mainframes for 20 years or more and never touched a micro. Now they know if they don`t learn micros, they may lose their jobs. I`ve got one man in night school who, I swear, is in his 60s.
”A lot of these people are coming at nights on their own time and paying (for it) themselves.”
When people with advanced knowledge of mainframe computers go back to school to learn about micro machines, it`s because they know that on the job they are expected to understand a wide range of technologies.
Robert Rubin, vice president of information services at Elf Atochem North America in Philadelphia, said his people are spending more and more time talking to colleagues in operations about how to solve problems and much less time writing code, which once was their full-time job. (Elf Atochem is a major chemical manufacturer).
It can be helpful, Rubin said, when operations people know more about technology, because they appreciate more what his department does. But it also can be frustrating.
”The downside is that occasionally you run into someone who thinks he knows all the answers,” he said. ”A good example is when someone asks why it costs so much and takes so long to do something. They`ll say `I can do that on my spreadsheet and it only cost $349.` They forget that the packaged software they bought might have cost $50 million to develop.”
Another problem, he added, is that spreadsheets can have flawed formulas and other shortcomings that simply shouldn`t be allowed in a chen operations people working on a local area network need access to their company`s mainframe databases, said Ray Grenier, a Nashua, N.H., consultant and co-author with George Metes of the book, ”Enterprise Networking: Working Together Apart” (Digitauys say they`ll need to write some access codes and it could take a couple of months.
”The manager says that he`s got this project in his PC right now and has to get his report in by next week. He doesn`t have time for access codes. He`s used to working in real time.
”The information systems people are dedicated to their data and its purity. They don`t map well with people working on the fly.”
In part, at least, decentralization of information technology is related to a general decentralization that many American companies are undertaking to improve competitiveness.
At Xerox Corp., based in Rochester, N.Y., the entire company emphasizes teamwork to accomplish goals. Patricia Wallington, a vice president and chief information officer, said this means her employees skilled in technology use must now learn new ”soft skills`a professional group based in Chicago-said the changing demand for job skills has led the society to establish a pilot program, set to start in Chicago this month. This program will draw on the experience of older chief information officers who will serve as mentors to younger executives or people likely to become executives.
One thing that emerges repeatedly in conversations with chief information officers, who have accepted change and seek to learn from it, is the lessons are everywhere for people seeking them.
Glenn Larson, senior vice president for systems and operations in community banking at First National Bank of Chicago, said his company has had an unusual experience in recent years. It has been acquiring small community banks and seeking to impose a uniform information system so that services offered at every bank are consistent.
At the same time, Larson said, First National keeps finding attractive innovations in place at the banks it is acquiring and seeks to incorporate those into its overall information system. These two trends can pull the corporation in opposite directions.
”The worst situation you can have is highly developed front-end systems and highly developed back-end systems at the same time,” he said. ”We`re headed both ways right now, and we know what we need to do is downsize our mainframe.”
That`s not easily done as the overall system served by mainframes expands, Larson added, but it is the goal.
What First National has learned, he said, is to look closely at the systems developed by smaller banks that are very close to their customers.
”We`ve found through acquisitions some functions and features we didn`t even have before.”
At Chicago-based Kemper Service Co., which provides information services to Kemper companies in finance, insurance and other pursuits, the key lesson is never to become wedded to a single technology.
”We have 14,000 terminals in our mainframe network and 1,400 PCs; we have some parallel processors,” President Frank Diaz said. ”What we`ve found is to look for the technology that best serves the applications our clients want.”
Kemper Service regularly sends its information people into the field to hold ”town meetings” with users to learn their concerns and needs, Diaz said. The company also invites vendors whose products it supports to take their wares directly to users and explain their features. In addition, Kemper Service has a videotape library of instructions for using the myriad products available.
”I myself learned how to use Windows from a video,” Diaz said.
In the last analysis, Diaz has found, the more users know about technology the better for their companies. And for his.
