Competing in Time

Personal computers and "end-user" software packages have helped cut into the backlogs but created new ones of their own as supply creates demand. A rough rule of thumb is that 50-70 percent of information systems staff is working on maintaining or updating existing systems, 20-40 percent on enhancing them, and only 10 percent on developing new systems. When the tax laws change, or a business unit adds a new customer service, or IBM introduces an improved operating system, existing programs have to be modified. The effort can be huge. When the U.S. Postal Service proposed to change the zip code to nine digits, calculations of the cost to the Fortune 100 firms of changes to their basic processing systems were in the billions of dollars.

The problems of maintenance and backlogs will be with us for along time. Software tools for developing large systems are improving, but productivity is increasing at a far slower rate than demands for new applications. This, though, is a relatively small constraint compared to the fairly sudden shift in the entire skill base required for the integrated technologies. If one knows a person's job title in information systems, one may have no idea what he actually does. Figure 9-1 summarizes the changes from the era of separate applications to the portfolio of technologies and applications for the mid-1980s and the l990s.

For the rest of this chapter, the abbreviations IIT and IS are used. IIT stands for "integrated information technology." IS stands for "information systems," the corporate development function for the main computing applications (the old term was "data processing" or DP, and "information management" is a more recent one). One of the problems in describing what is happening in the field is the lack of standard labels for and descriptions of the broadening range of jobs, skills, and roles it involves.

Figure 9-1 gives a flavor of the range. When we are short of people in the traditional jobs, the problem of building the new human resources base will be horrendous. It is worst in the area of telecommunications, especially in terms of finding individuals who combine virtually contradictory requirements. 

• Strong technical qualifications in digital communications and in the integration of communications and computing: The ink is scarcely dry on the diploma.
  
  
• Strong operational experience: Older and with obsolescent knowledge, but solid understanding of large-scale commercial operations.
  
  
• Proven management skills: Something few technical specialists have the desire or even the instincts to acquire, wanting instead to build systems.
  
  
• Knowledge of the business: Where do technical staff get the lateral development and exposure to build the knowledge? Where do they find the time to keep up in the technical field as well?

Few people combine this mix of skills. They are at a premium in the marketplace and as firms recognize the importance of telecommunications to their business strategy, they are willing to pay whatever is needed to them.

It is not just managers who are scarce. Technical specialists in advanced telecommunications are always hard to find-and to keep-because the field is changing so quickly. Younger staff with Ph.D.s in computer science often lack real understanding of the operational side of telecommunications. The older ones need a sabbatical to update their knowledge base, but they cannot be spared.

The problem is not simply one of the limited supply of bright educated, motivated people, nor of salary. Over time, the market will alleviate if not eliminate that shortage. A far greater problem is that while a firm can go out into the market and bid up the price for first-rate technical talent, organizational experience has to be built not bought. Telecommunications for business strategy involves building the human equivalent of a wine collection. The intellectual crop of 1986 may be the best since 1888. But the wine has to mature for years.

Of course, not every technical professional needs to acquire those skills. But more and more aspects of exploiting the information technologies depend on the hybrids, people who combine strong technical and adequate business and organizational skills or strong business and adequate technical ones. These people have to be grown, not brought from the market. These are the human resources base for the new IIT organization.

They do not have career paths, because their jobs have never existed. They have only career trajectories-and immense career ambiguity. Figure 9-2 shows the problem.

IIT increasingly relies on taking people who are on a technical trajectory and moving them toward a business/organizational one. For example, the "information center" is an IS innovation, designed to help business units build their own development capabilities. They can use end-user software to build their own planning models and spreadsheet reports or design a small-scale management information system. ("End-user" is a vague term that basically means that any one with analytic skills can learn to use the tools: professional training and experience in information systems is not required.)

The skills required to staff and run an information center are very different from those of traditional IS development. Technical experience is far less important than personality. In many ways, the Infocenter is a marketing and consulting arm for IS. It is a service role. The best programmer may be ineffectual in the Infocenter; he or she is a professional with strong standards and focused skills having to support "amateurs" muddling through ad hoc projects, doing quick-and-dirties (QADs).

Managing the information center is as much an organizational as a technical role. What is the career "path"? The job has never existed before. The center's manager has been pulled away from the technical career trajectory and runs the risk of becoming a mediocre technician and no longer being part of the mainstream of IS. At the same time he or she is not a "real" finance or marketing professional, however many systems the information center helps the finance and marketing functions build. In the same way the junior person in finance who has learned Lotus 1-2-3, FOCUS, Multiplan, or any of the other myriad new tools for end-user development, and who now works almost full time on building applications using them, is not a real systems professional, and in fact has only a smattering of technical skills that would not be enough to get a job in IS. He is also no longer moving along the traditional career path in finance.

The situation is extremely ambiguous on both sides. Integrating the information technologies and bridging the culture and knowledge gaps between technical and business people at senior, middle, and junior levels largely depend on maximizing career ambiguity for some of the best talent in the organization. Just a few examples of new roles without clear career directions are of lice technology, telecommunications planning for business innovation, supporting personal computing, defining information needs for customer service, developing products for electronic delivery, financial planning for IIT, training users of personal computers, developing strategic plans for computer integrated manufacturing, and selling such technology-based products as electronic cash management and dealer order entry systems.

In some large firms, senior management's response to the problem of ambiguity is to tell the people concerned about the issue: "Don't worry-you are the ones who will be running the firm 10 years from now." They do worry and they need an environment where what is promised is not a punishment, but a privilege. Systematic lateral assignments from business groups into IS for periods of six months to two years must become an institutionalized part of the way the firm grows its human resource.

This is happening in a very few companies, except ad hoc. A frequent pattern is that the junior analyst who builds planning models for the marketing department is initially seen as Superperson and quickly becomes indispensable-and unpromotable - and eventually moves on to another firm to do the same job. The junior analysts who stayed within the traditional career frameworks move up the traditional ladder.

The hybrids are the new blood of the organization of the 1990s.For them to grow, they must have management attention, if only because in a time of ambiguity people will watch what management does, not what it says. There are many formal and informal ways senior and middle-level executives can help: 

• Selecting the best junior staff for the lateral development that builds hybrid skills
  
  
• Redefining the management "fast track" to require experience in taking full and direct responsibility for some aspect of IIT
  
  
• Helping break down the physical and psychological isolation of the IS organization by insisting that staff be temporarily assigned to work in business units
  
  
• Providing first-rate instead of expendable supervisors to provide user involvement on development projects

 
All these are relatively simple contributions they can make.

ORGANIZING THE INTEGRATED INFORMATION FUNCTION

The roles needed for managing the integrated technologies are changing and so too must the organization that has responsibility for them. In most firms, that consists of central information systems function plus divisional IS units, and a corporate telecommunications group, and any number of fragmented units that handle some aspect of voice and data operations. The function of the telecommunications group largely depends on the stage the company is in, in the shift from a technical utility to a coordinated business resource.

The specific mandate, structure, and relationship of IS to senior management and to the wider organization largely reflect the historical development of data processing and of the communications utility. Very rarely are these a conscious response to the realities of the electronic marketplace. A new approach to organizing IS is needed.

Organizing is not the same as organization. It is easy to draw new organization charts and shuffle jobs around. "Organizing" implies a much more dynamic emphasis on communicating, and on roles-literally, the parts they play-rather than tasks. On the whole, telecommunications and information systems organizations have been defined more in terms of tasks than roles: projects, specialist skills, technical niches, and responsibility for specific applications. The key themes in organizing IS have related to building systems and running corporations.

The new roles related far more to marketing, communicating. supporting, and planning. The old skills remain essential; If anything, solid, reliable operations are more not less important when failures affect service and are seen by customers instead of being hidden behind the walls of the data center. But the new information function is a full-service company, rather than a manufacturing department.

This means that the criteria for organizing become:

• Coordinate the planning, implementation, and use of the information resource, balancing central direction with decentralized application.
  
  
• Shift the organization for IIT toward being a staff function comparable to corporate finance, instead of being mainly a unit that builds systems.
  
  
• Amalgamate telecommunications and information systems within the IIT organization as interrelated departments within the information company, not independent functions.
  
  
• Use human resource planning to drive, not follow, technical planning and implementation. 
  

Figure 9-3 shows the likely formal organization structure that results from these principles.

Suitable Centralization: Coordination, Not Control

No organization chart can communicate the main role of the IIT function: to find a suitable level of centralization to coordinate the integrated business resource. The main principle for managers of IIT has to be: Respect the reality of decentralization and establish the criticality of coordination. Very roughly, this means that the key infrastructures, especially telecommunications, require a move toward centralized direction and that building the applications that carry the traffic and making decisions on what traffic to add should be increasingly decentralized. If the architecture is clear and technical standards are backed up by rules, guidelines, and procedures, "distributed" IS units in the business groups can handle most development needs. This is a very big "IF."

Guidelines with Teeth

B. Williams of the consulting firm Arthur D. Little provides a useful framework for assessing the degree of centralization of any particular telecommunications organization. He defines a spectrum ranging from fully autonomous to integrated/centralized. Each extreme seems undesirable. Autonomy, with every unit making its own decisions, means that a corporate resource as opposed to a set of incompatible technical facilities will never be created; full centralization contradicts the principle of decentralized decision-making that is one of the most basic realities of modern business.

The two intermediate positions, "guided" and "coordinated," are unstable-they combine a little of each extreme. They both have many merits, but they can be made to work only if senior management defines a vision to justify them, establishes the policies to make them possible, and clarifies the authority and roles of the centralized architect and planning unit and of the decentralized business operations. The spectrum of organizational choices and some of their implications are shown in Figure 9-4.

The phrase "guidelines with teeth" addresses the issue of authority. "Standards" is an ambiguous term. It can mean anything from a set of recommendations that can be ignored by business units to corporate architecture where there is no local discretion allowed. The technical standards may be the same in both instances; the key question is who either enforces them or decides on exceptions?

As one telecommunications manager in a major international consumer goods firm discovered, publishing a set of standards does not answer that question. His company, Quintex Inc. (a pseudonym), planned to install a common worldwide financial reporting system; to support this, the manager defined a set of computer and communications standards to be followed by each division in each country in which Quintex operated.

The head of Taiwan subsidiary decided not to wait for the new system. The volume of business was expanding rapidly and existing computer systems were inadequate to handle the unit's needs. He approved the purchase of a software package that ran on a "nonstandard" computer and used the equipment manufacturer's nonstandard communications protocols.

The corporate telecommunications manager tried to get the decision overridden. He pointed out that he had been given the responsibility to define a companywide policy and that Taiwan's action threatened the whole concept of shared computer systems, common reporting, and integrated communications. The head of the subsidiary responded in a memorable telex that he had been given the responsibility to make profits for the firm, that he had immediate needs and did not intend to sit around and wait.

The communications manager responded that the local decision threatened long-term integration. He argued that it would add costs in the end and slow down the implementation of the worldwide system. He lost the argument and Taiwan has its independent communications facility.

It is not easy in such instances to decide who is right. Here, it did not matter; the senior business manager had the authority and the communications manager had nothing more than a piece of paper and might was right. For standards to be effective, they have to have teeth. The communications manager recognized this after the event. He asked the information systems steering committee, which set policy for computing and communications, to clarify his mandate.

He listed the benefits from the integrated approach and the costs of local autonomy. He accepted that sometimes exceptions would have to be made but argued that he must have, if not the final say, then at least some real influence. He wanted "a preliminary veto." All local systems must follow the standards, and his unit's approval should be required for any deviation from the standard. He would have vetoed the Taiwan proposal and suggested that they find an alternative package. If Taiwan wanted the veto overturned, they would have to make their case to the IS steering committee. "The onus should be on the divisions to justify exceptions, not on me to justify the standards."

THE CORPORATE ARCHITECT

Most large firms have an architecture or are trying to define one. That is a basic requirement for any coordinated communications plan. They need to make sure they clarify the role of the corporate architect. At the extreme of fully autonomous management, he or she is a staff adviser and at the other extreme, fully integrated and centralized, a controller. Guided or coordinated management requires a custodian-someone who can guarantee the integrity of the overall architecture, while adapting it to special needs and exceptional situations. This means having at least a preliminary veto. Quintex's manager defined an architecture, but his role as an architect was not made clear.

In almost every firm where telecommunications is seen as more than an internal technical utility, the trend is toward centralization. This assertion is based on analysis of almost 50 large companies, half of which are U.S. companies and half European. They come from every major industry. The analysis is based on published and private documents and was carried out in mid-1984. Follow-up analysis in late 1987 confirms the trends; the only main change has been that telecommunications is more and more interlinked with information systems. Regardless of their specific strategies, almost every firm is trying to resolve the issue of how to get centralized coordination.

None wants to push toward more decentralization of planning, although most of them favor decentralized network operations. The firms with central units most successful politically and technically share the following characteristics: 

• The central group plays a strong consultancy role for the other units. It relies on having a pool of first-rate technical staff to encourage them to draw on it; rather than try to control by fiat, they control by incentives and expertise.
  
  
• They have a clear mandate to design and maintain the optimal topology for the corporate network, supervising almost every aspect of planning and operating facilities that are identified as "corporate."
  
  
• They use accounting mechanisms and provision of service and support functions to ensure credibility, equity, and incentives for their client units. 

The accounting mechanisms include charging by use, not budget, with a predictable standard cost per unit, such as a transaction or monthly subscription fee per terminal. Another mechanism is providing both consolidated and detailed billing reports so that user managers can predict and control their usage. Many of the firms try to set their prices below the outside market rate.

In many of the firms, especially outside the United States, relocation of operations motivates coordination. Many of them are moving information systems and administrative units away from central cities. Another trigger is office technology, and a more general concern to reduce overhead and staff costs. A third force toward coordination is simply underestimating growth in demand for telecommunications. One oil company predicted and planned for a 20 percent increase per year in the number of terminals in use between 1980 and 1985; the actual figure was 70 percent. Bank of America anticipated in 1982 that it would process 80 transactions a second on its main online systems by 1986. In 1984 it revised the estimated to 500 to 1,000. A British insurance firm based its five-year plan for 1986 on the assumption that it would have 1 workstation for every 10 workers by then. By late 1985, the ratio was already 1 to 3.

THE INFORMATION EXECUTIVE

The title "chief information officer" (CIO) has recently become popular in describing this new style of business-oriented executive in a previously largely technical role. One natural question is: Does the mandate create the person or the person the mandate? Is this a job title or a way of operating? Just relabeling the old-line data processing manager as a CIO does not change his or her skills, attitudes, and ways of behaving. The information executive needs some distinctive personal skills, especially the ability to communicate in the widest meaning of the word, to translate between the worlds of business and technology, and to earn attention from and credibility with senior managers. Information systems and telecommunications managers need to be honest with themselves in answering the question "Why should the CEO give me the mandate and title?"

The CEO should also be honest in answering a parallel question "Is top management the blockage to creating an effective information executive role?" Figure 9-5 summarizes the managerial resources and style of operating that facilitate or inhibit its emergence. Figure 9-5(a) shows four somewhat stereotypical types of information systems and telecommunications managers.

The Monopolist is the old-line technocrat, who had complete control over the corporate computing resource, and resisted end-user computing and personal computers; monopolists have (or perhaps more accurately, had) plenty of authority and little if any responsibility for business development, support, and innovation.

The Information Janitor has neither the authority nor the business responsibility to be anything much more than an operator of an efficient data center; the action is elsewhere, often in the business units. The Whipping Post has-or tries to take on-a high level of business responsibility but lacks authority. The Information Executive combines both authority and responsibility.

Figure 9-5 (b) complements the first one. It shows the impact of passive and reactive versus active and innovative leadership at the top of the business and the top of information services.

The Loser is the passive, reactive IS manager supporting a business leadership that is similarly passive and reactive in its views of the use of integrated information technologies for competitive positioning. The Footdragger, who is often also the Monopolist, has fallen behind the business leadership and plods onward, taking the attitudes and techniques of the past into a future where they are less and less applicable. The Missionary is ahead of the business. The Information Executive is an activist supporting and supported by activist business leaders.

The two diagrams can be combined (Figure 9-5 (c)). Losers/Information Janitors are largely irrelevant to business in the coming decade. The Footdraggers/Monopolists are part of the past that can slow down the future. The Missionary/Whipping Posts are the people who-given improvements in business management awareness, changes in policy, and understanding of the competitive urgency of IIT-can become Information Executives. Without these, they generally become consultants.

The Chief Information Officer/Information Executive is created by a combination of IS leadership, personality and style, business management leadership, policy, and real commitment. In 1978 information systems and telecommunications units in the Fortune 100 were largely populated by the footdraggers and monopolists. In 1988 there are more and more missionaries looking to create the dialogue with business leaders that multiplies the ability of both to be practical futurists.

LIAISON FUNCTIONS

Some of the mechanisms for two-way coordination include steering committees, liaison units for applications, and formal and informal planning groups that include representatives from the business units, divisional IS group, and all other groups affected. Their job is to establish priorities and plans, and to resolve issues of resource allocation, phasing, staffing, and project management.

One key liaison mechanism requires much senior management direction or attention, especially when the firm is trying to accelerate its use of technology to make major business moves. That is the top policy committee of managers who can make things happen, and who share, review, and update the business vision for telecommunications and make it credible. This is not just another committee. If it includes two or three of the most senior managers in charge of key parts of the business, a few who may be more junior but are recognized in the firm as innovators and opinion leaders, plus the head of any corporate function who is a very powerful force in the firm, then the title of the committee is irrelevant. Citibank called its planning committee for international electronic banking "the gang of seven." Tom Theobald, its head, assigned some strong personalities from marketing to direct its efforts. One of these was famous for his aggressive money making for the bank. The technical organization in the international bank was very weak, and no bland committee could have given it the political muscle that the gang provided. The selection of these people sent a clear signal to the rest of the firm of the importance the bank placed on telecommunications.

CROSS-FERTILIZING THE PLANNING OFFICE

No firm that is trying to move quickly to exploit IIT has the skills in-house to direct its planning. IS and TC leaders need accountants to find ways of funding, costing, and pricing what is now a complex economic good. They need marketing experts to shift to a service role. The information center, support for end-user computing, assignment of client or account managers to handle particular business units' needs, and the development of business systems analysts are only a few areas where information systems and telecommunications groups are adopting a market-oriented rather than product- and application based service role. But they have very little knowledge of marketing principles and techniques.

In the same way, IIT needs economists to help in forecasting, pricing, and modeling the relationship between the business plans, the external environment, vendor strategies, and trends (especially IBM products and prices and telecommunications costs) and the technology strategy. It increasingly has to be able to draw on people who understand ergonomics, psychology, education, and human resource planning because every aspect of IIT is now intrinsically interlinked to behavioral and organizational issues.

Sincerity is no substitute for technique. The best IIT organizations are sincerely doing their best to broaden their planning base. But sincerity just isn't enough. Techniques come from:

• Systematic cross-fertilization between the IIT unit and the wider organization, by recruitment and temporary assignments from within the organization, and by distributing development and support staff to the business units.
  
  
• Using consultants and academics to bring in new knowledge and avoid personal obsolescence, to provide an integrating perspective, and to help educate and advise senior managers.
  
  
• Hiring, growing, and retaining good talent.

Figure 9-3 lists a few of the planning areas for IIT that have to be addressed by some combination of these three sources of talent. Obviously, it is up the IIT organization to handle most of these aspects in the short term the best way it can and by human resource planning for the long term.

To encourage staff to seek and accept the temporary assignments to or from IIT necessary for cross-fertilization, present such jobs as a privilege accorded to the new "fast track." Reassure the assignees either by guaranteeing a position to return to or by creating permanent liaison roles. Insist that there be no poaching. Many IIT units report that their users, quite sensibly, try to retain any good people who are loaned to them. Remember that the goal is to build a cadre of hybrids. Time the lateral development carefully: It is silly to take someone who has 20 years' technical experience and very limited exposure to the business and expect him or her to be credible or effective outside that sphere; the VP of Systems Development should not become an overpaid apprentice in marketing.

Conversely, if trainee programmers are shipped out to Finance, they are of little value since they have not yet mastered their own trade. The best time to make the move seems to be between two and five years after a person's employment. The move across should last no more than two years so that the person's old knowledge does not become obsolete.

If 10 percent of incoming recruits are targeted for such a process in both directions, the long-term human resource problems for IIT will be solved in about five years. The sooner a firm starts, the quicker the chief bottleneck to exploiting the business opportunities of technology will be unjammed. Good IIT managers and good personnel managers know this. They generally cannot do much to solve it, because it requires both senior management initiatives and clear signals from the top that this is the path for the future.

As for consultants, in the field there are bad and good consultants, greedy and responsible ones, merchants of hype and solid professionals. It can be hard to tell which is which, especially in new technical areas. The best advisers often apply their business experience to a new area involving technology although they will not be able to show success in it.

Often senior executives bring in academics or well-known experts to help them get a sense of the main options and issues. When they do, however, managers should beware of joining the fad-of-the-month club. When Business Week in 1985 published a cover page article on the coming wonders of expert systems, for example, many IIT managers groaned. The article, like so many on a hot new topic in the field, gave managers false expectations about the progress inexpert systems and artificial intelligence (AI). It led to their pushing for action and bringing in experts to talk about what the firm should be doing.

These people often come from a scientific or academic environment where their experience is with small-scale applications or pilot projects; that is where work at the state-of-the-art is being done. They do not know what they do not know. They have no understanding of large-scale commercial processing and operations, of organizational aspects of information management, of the difference between feasible and practicable. It is not that their knowledge is invalid, only their extension of their knowledge to the world of business and business uses of technology.

The main differences between the worlds of academic/scientific and large-scale business computing are shown in the following list.

It's Easy.

Bright people who operate only from experience and assumptions often make the IIT manager look like an anti-intellectual neanderthal; he or she is pushed onto the defensive. Until very recently, the field of information technology in large organizations had substantial barriers to entry: experience in the trenches of systems development or telecommunications operations. That barrier has been removed. The areas where firms most often heed top level advice are ones in which such experience is not necessarily relevant. Business planning for telecommunications is a particular one. The best advisers will be people who are thoroughly up to date on developments in Open Systems Interconnection (OSI), advances in local area networks, value-added networks (VANs), ISDN, or digital PBX. Examples where, because a concept is proven or a framework available, the inexperienced adviser says it's easy include large-scale database management, international standards for telecommunications implementing local area networks, and voice/data integration. It is not easy and it is misleading to persuade managers it is.

Have Transparencies Will Travel.

The IIT field is grasping for ways of making sense out of the bewildering changes and dilemmas firms face. But they need simple, not simplistic models. How do they tell the difference? The deep and the shallow thinkers use the same transparencies in their presentations. Conceptual models and mere notions look and sound the same. The deep thinkers have a base of proven results, either their own experience or the successful implementation of their recommendations.

Have Good Idea, Will Sell.

Sometimes, a leading adviser, especially on the busy conference circuit, comes up with a useful framework or striking message. That speaker will be in constant demand. The temptation is then to stop learning and to stick with the one idea, well and often wittily presented. Again and again in IIT, good academics and consultants have used up their intellectual capital by turning it into temporary income.

IBM-Phobia.

This is a problem of intellectual adolescence. IBM represents the orthodoxy of information technology. Many of the Young Turks in the consulting field are explicitly anti-IBM. There is a lot of truth in the criticism of IBM (see Chapter 7), but the new IBM is not the old one. It has been the aggressor, not the follower, in the market. With all its faults, it has moved to head off all its competitors, including even AT&T, except the Japanese-this now is the battleground. Most important, it has established its architectures, rather than its products, as the reference for the field. SNA is the de facto standard. That is why every major manufacturer of computer and telecommunications equipment has adopted it. Its personal computer has never been the best in the field, nor have its office technology products generally matched the best of other vendors.

Experienced IIT managers and planners know all the pluses and minuses of IBM, from the value of the plastic wrapping to the cost of its cumbersome operating systems. For them, the issue is "If not IBM, then who?" For the new generation of consultants, the issue has tended to be "Not IBM." As a knee-jerk reaction, that is as silly as the stereotypical old-line data processing manager's on-the-knees reaction of "Only IBM, of course."

QUESTIONS TO ASK WHEN CHOOSING AN ADVISER

Does the prospective adviser understand the craft of large-scale information systems and telecommunications development and operations? Has he or she worked on a really big project (involving at least a dozen people for a two-year period, say) from inception through to operational use? If not, there is a fairly strong risk that he does not know what he does not know and overlooks the complexity of the management process and the interaction between technical and organizational issues in large-scale business applications. One cannot simply extrapolate from scientific projects that involve small, simple or well-structured databases, or from personal computers and local area networks, to an environment marked by a myriad of interdependencies.

What is the candidate's pedigree, in terms of intellectual base and the quality of the firm(s) he or she has worked in? The exemplar firms described in Part II provide their people with a training ground that in itself adds a value to their own qualifications, job titles, and project experience. The same is true for the very best of the computer and communication vendors.

Does the adviser know the field, in terms of the research literature, what is going on in the leading vendor and user companies, and the practical state-of-the-art? Ironically, at a time when the field of IIT needs a combination of first-rate analytic ability and some mix of breadth and depth in business and technical areas, anyone can become an "expert." It is very easy for people to grab the latest fad term or hot topic and sound convincing. This happened in the early1980s with office automation, and more recently with expert systems. It is increasingly commonplace with business telecommunications, which is among the hottest of all topics.

The reason senior managers have to address the issue of how to validate outside advisers for IIT is simply that they have no choice but to use them. The same is true within the IIT organization. Bad advisers do damage, however. They raise expectations about what is practical, mislead the organization about the risks and returns, and add to fog and fantasy, not vision.

Development and Organizations

The most immediate change large firms have to make in how they organize the IIT unit is to move from having information systems and telecommunications as separate functions, each with a development and operations unit, to splitting the IIT organization into a development arm and an operations arm, each of which includes telecommunications and information systems groups within it.

In many large firms telecommunications and information systems have evolved on largely separate paths. In addition, the pace of change in communications, from voice and analog to digital technology, and in information systems from automation of clerical processes and "batch" systems to a broad range of on-line and data- and communications-oriented applications, have both increased the fragmentation of responsibility and authority. The company then has voice specialists who do not understand data communications, data communications staff who disdain data processing as a technically unsophisticated function, and data processing specialists who view telecommunications in terms of the software requirements for on-line applications. The development staff have up-to-date technical knowledge and relatively little experience, while the operations personnel have the solid experience and an obsolescent knowledge base.

The cultures have to be brought together and the organization based on each one's strengths. In the development arm, the information systems functions include: 

• Software acquisition to build and buy applications. The trend is toward buying packages, "end-user" software, and "fourth generation" languages. Standards for system compatibility are important.
  
  
• Information management. Data is among the most valuable traffic on the network highway, and the delivery of and access to data via telecommunications is a competitive resource. Database management software and procedures and technology to create the data architecture shift the focus in IS from programming to information resource management.
  
  
• End-user support. An information center should be a do-it-yourself store for non-technical people to develop ad hoc small-scale systems, and should offer assistance in acquiring and using microcomputers. 
  

There is a growing trend in leading firms to create an account management function for IIT. Instead of the traditional project-based structure, they operate as a service unit either analogous to IBM or comparable leading vendors, or a joint venture for partnership-a word that appears in more and more statements of the IIT unit's mission.

First-rate operations remain critical. Reliability, security, response time, smooth installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting translate to quality of customer service in the business resource era. When the network is down, the business is down. The old-timers are not obsolete. They provide a critical skill. Rather than turn them into mediocre development supervisors (and the digital communications whiz kids into ineffectual managers), surely it makes most sense to recognize that strategy needs cables as well as vice versa.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST: FACILITIES

The final major innovation in organizing for IIT is one whose importance is easy to overlook: the fact that the office of the future is very physical in nature and telecommunications has tremendous implications for office design and administration, and vice versa.

Many telecommunications-related functions are controlled by administrative service units, especially at the local level. When an employee now moves to a new office, there can be several days of work needed for drilling and cabling to install a workstation. Furniture, lighting, and desks have to be picked on the basis of ergonomics and health and safety factors for users of terminals. No office can be designed now without careful attention to cabling for local area networks, PBX, and a ratio of employees to workstations that is virtually certain to move close to 1:1 during the lifetime of the building.

The information executive needs new authority over many aspects of office design, must supervise any relocation of business operations, and control the planning of office equipment and facilities. This is a very different aspect of IIT from development and technical operations.

Facilities management has traditionally been a subset of administrative services. The move is now in the other direction. One British manager of IS in a large insurance firm is quite candid about his objective here: "I want to get full control over Administrative Services because by 1990 the main evaluation criteria for my group's performance will depend on trivial details that they now handle."