IT: The Hero and the Goat

by Scott Lewis

Ihave been very fortunate to be in the technology business for more than 30 years on both the private company side and working on the consulting side of the business. I have designed thousands of systems, worked in hundreds of technology departments and work with organizations both small and large to turnaround underperforming IT departments. I have had the opportunity to work with business owners who understand technology, and those who don’t but think they do, along with business owners who don’t want to know anything about it other than they just want it to work. Then there is the owner who has a nephew or brother or some other long distant family member who has no exposure to what the technology is or what has taken place but is asked to offer an opinion. This is always a fun conversation to have with a business owner.

Technologists are always going to be the hero or the goat. It has just become part of being an IT person. Whether you are in-house or an outsourced company, many times you end up in a love hate relationship with your supervisor or client. When things are working, you are the hero, or when something minor is not working as a technologist, you can swoop in and save the day! However, when a server crashes or the Internet goes down then it is amazing how fast you become the goat.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a client recently around a server going down. The cause was determined to be corruption in the Microsoft Active Directory. Microsoft themselves could not determine the reason for the corruption, so all you Microsoft haters should love that. Of course the business owner is upset, and right then and there we are the GOAT. We reminded the owner to keep in mind no data was lost, because we had a complete backup – HERO.  The server was rebuilt and up within a few hours – HERO. Now the last step was to wait on the accounting software people to load the software, and of course they had limited weekend support, so we were back to GOAT status.

Now here comes the nephew who the business owner consulted because he is a software guy. The point he asked and the owner wanted an answer to was why was there no redundancy for this accounting server? Back to GOAT, but it is a great question, right? The answer is that we had proposed a redundant system for the accounting system server and other critical systems, still the GOAT. The business owner didn’t want the cost. He didn’t want the cost of the servers, software or licensing. He just wanted to save the money – now bigger GOAT.   

Hero or goat? In this case, the business owner didn’t want to spend the money, but maintained an expectation that either the in-house or outside technology provider would somehow make the magic work without the money to fund the redundant systems and licensing. These are tough situations for IT people because the owner didn’t remember the discussions around redundancy, but maintained his expectations for his business. The IT person is doing their best with the resources that are provided by the owner. In the end, we should be the HERO because we quickly got the system up and running. Due to the fact it happened on a weekend the overall business impact was not as great as it could have been – HERO!

Being a business owner, I often find myself in this situation around managing a budget, operating costs, and the other needs of my business, while at the same time trying to insure that we are running a smart business and investing in the right areas of our business to insure that we can provide the products and services that our clients are expecting. This is a tough balance for any business of any size, and we all struggle to meet those goals. As an IT person I also hear and have to have the conversations with our clients around funding upgrades, projects to allow us to meet their expectations and the needs of their employees. We try very hard not to ever waste our clients’ money and help them control costs, invest where we need to, complete projects on time and on budget so that when we need them to invest they will. However, as an IT person internal or outsourced we are an easy target when the frustration builds and we get little sympathy when things go wrong due to lack of funding, so maintaining a balance protecting the data and doing the best job we can is what IT people do! n

Scott Lewis is the President and CEO of Winning Technologies Group of Companies.  The Winning Technologies Group of companies is an international technology management company. Scott has more than 30 years of experience in the technology industry, is a nationally recognized speaker on technology subjects such as Collocation, Security, CIO level Management, Data and Voice Communications and Best Practices related to the management of technology resources.  Learn more about Winning Technologies at www.winningtech.com.