There is an interesting discussion going on over here sparked originally by a Gartner analyst who reportedly implied that IT managers in the USA lack vision.
While it would not be appropriate for me to comment on this particular incident, the views expressed have mobilised me to get back onto one of my favourite hobby horses – that of industry analysts getting too big for their boots.
We in the analyst profession are in a very privileged position. We get to listen to lots of stories from lots of people in the average working week, and then have time to sit and think about what it all means. We are not in the thick of running an IT department and trying to both deliver a service to the business and keep things moving forward in a positive way against the backdrop of politics, budget constraints and inherited systems that various predecessors have left us as legacy.
Sure, there are some less talented IT managers out there, just as there are some less talented industry analysts. But however good or bad the analyst, they do not have the right to behave as if they are somehow superior to those doing the job of IT delivery for real. Our role is to educate and advise in a practical and useful manner based on the information we have gathered and the analysis we have conducted. It is not to judge and preach from on high.
The trouble is that some analyst firms focus far too much on visions and aspirational ideals in order to drive the next wave of research subscription lines, and forget to build bridges between all of this blue sky theoretical stuff and the real world of IT and business that the rest of us live in.
So perhaps it’s not IT managers that need to get more vision, but some in the analyst community that need to get more real.
And on the subject of bridging the gap between vision and reality, four of us felt so strongly about the need to help people with this that we had to write a book about it :-)
We are no longer accepting comments against this item. We suggest contacting the author directly.
1st May 2007: 'jqp' said:
Dale, you've touched on more than one topic near and dear to my heart. Let's talk about the present and future.
In 1991, Kate Miller of Griffith University in Australia wrote a piece about futures research and educational policy-making. In it, she wrote: "Future refers to tomorrow, and any time yet to come. We can only understand the meaning of the present after due consideration of the past and future. There is no opposite to 'the present'. Past and future create a dialogue to be interpreted and mediated. This dialogue can be used to inform the present."
She continued: "Policy is prospective. It seeks its reward in the future. Policy making uses methodologies which are concerned ultimately with creating particular types of futures. It is therefore unmistakably a futures activity. There is a desperate need for policy makers to realise that, for better or worse, whether intended or not, their actions do contribute to the future and therefore they bear a responsibility in this regard. Many of today's most pressing problems are the long-term results of shortsighted policies or at least policies in which assumptions about the future went unexamined. Futures methodologies are not used to naively predict what will happen in the future but rather to develop our understanding of the possibilities of the future and our understanding of the present. The assumption that futures work is about predicting and forecasting is naive and limited."
In short, Dale, it is important to balance the future with the present, vision with reality, long-term strategy with short-term tactics. Practitioners and visionaries must stop the foolishness [of wasting their time minimizing the work of others] and collaborate to find solutions that will deliver today AND pave the way for tomorrow.
Let us all build that bridge together.
Reply to jqp?
