Opinion: You think you don't need buy-in?

Computerworld - Travel being what it is, I decided that I had had enough of being an IT consultant, and I accepted a position running a corporation's IT operations function, reporting to the CIO.

But on some level, I hadn't really decided to stop being an IT consultant. I figured I could take what I had done on all of my engagements and apply it to my new job.

I had been a consultant long enough for it to become ho-hum, and for me to become arrogant. The job seemed to promote these developments. We had a template, and we stuck to it, domestic or international. I would go in with the assumption that the IT organization was dysfunctional (why else would an outsider be called in?), and after just half an hour with the general manager who had contracted for the IT review, with no contact at all with the staff, I'd be lining up my recommendations. Nothing ever interceded to tell me I might be wrong to do this. Time after time, my hunches were borne out by what I found later during the review.

My final reports all said pretty much the same thing: "If you want to accomplish this, then you have to do that. If you don't know how to do that, you have to learn how to do that. If you don't know how to learn that, you can have someone like us teach you." Get on plane. Repeat.

At the new job, at least, the IT operations function seemed to be in pretty good shape. There was a forthright management team, and no one was afraid of work. Dusting off my trusty consultant's microscope, I began the process of looking at the details.

I found some wear and tear here and there in terms of folks that were a little overworked and undertrained for the work that they were assigned. A boost in head count and some training bucks should fix that. Mainframe and network capacity margins? Working, but way too thin. No capacity plan. Some midyear budget relief should fix that. Single points of failure? My, my, we can't have that. A little more budget relief was surely understandable. PC help desk? Swamped. Why? No training in the business units when new desktop software was issued without warning. Because administrative and clerical staff couldn't use the new software properly, business unit productivity dived, big time. Why? If the software deployment was a surprise, the PC help desk couldn't help folks use it. The help desk folks weren't trained, and so trouble tickets mounted. Gee, we'll need some more training funds, plus some additional staff and overtime money to fix this. You get the idea.