Evidence-based IT Improves a...

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February 27, 2006 (Computerworld) --

Stanford University professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton

...team's odds for a project's success. Nothing sounds more obvious than nailing down the pertinent facts before venturing into an IT project. Yet it happens less often than you'd think, according to Stanford University professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, authors of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management, to be published next month by Harvard Business School Press. The book is chockablock with examples of corporate executives running amok with fixed ideas about how the world ought to be as opposed to how it is. You'd think the bits-and-bytes reality of IT would be exempt, but you'd be wrong, says co-author Sutton. "IT is incredibly ideological," he says, noting the hard-core beliefs some IT managers have about, say, Linux vs. Windows. And, he says, workplace ideologies often conspire against projects at two levels. First, he says, CIOs don't always "calculate the real costs and real risks of big IT projects," such as ERP deployments. Often, Sutton argues, they just see the benefits to the company and "are a bit too overconfident in their own abilities." Second, he says, some CIOs ignore the past success of project teams when starting a new endeavor. He claims studies show that the No. 1 factor in a project's success is the experience that a team has working together. Too often IT execs mix up a team with new talent that undermines the chemistry that made it successful. Says Sutton, "In an era of distributed development teams, if you have a successful team, why would you break it up?"

Adam Miller, CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand Inc.

Team creation: Is it a science...

...or is it an art? Sutton claims it's a bit of both, but Adam Miller argues you can turn it into more of an exact science with the right tools. His, of course. He's the CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand Inc. in Santa Monica, Calif., which offers its eponymous service for companies that want quantifiable measurements of worker performance, as well as career tracking and development. Miller claims that with the right data on IT staff members, a manager can assemble the best team for a project by simply telling the system what skills are necessary to get the job done. (It doesn't account for personality quirks.) The Cornerstone OnDemand service will deliver a list of those with the necessary talents. Miller claims that identifying team member skills is increasingly difficult, especially in large IT shops, because of such new realities as offshoring and the rapidly disappearing talent of baby boomers. The service starts at $30 per user per year.

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