When being nice doesn’t pay

I’ve said before that the role of IT and even the title of CIO is changing to a support rather than a critical corporate function. I had a chance to speak with a few human resources folks a few weeks ago and an interesting discussion highlighted one factor for the benefit of cloud and the diminishing role of corporate IT. These non-technical line of business folks were looking for a technology solution to help them solve corporate challenges. They understood their roles, and understood the problem they faced. How the underlying technology worked didn’t matter as much as solving the problem. For these folks, cloud-based solutions made it easy to focus on the end result and using outside experts to help with configuration was preferred to internal IT.

One comment was interesting. With on-premise applications, corporate IT took a greater role in the deployment. Sometimes that was good, but there were times when the end user had to be nice, and that limited the final solution. When a consultant complains about a change the answer they receive is usually too bad, if it’s in the contract then get it done. When a colleague (as distant as IT might be) complains (even subtly) the inclination is sometimes to compromise. The report they need from IT might be good, but not great, or worse, they might be more likely to minimize their demands. Does it happen often enough to impact value? Not likely. But the comment was interesting, they can be more demanding when outside consultants are configuring rather than internal IT folks developing. Surveying your own employees on how forceful they are with internal IT might yield interesting results.