Worldly Disconnect

Jamie Walters is the founder of Ivy Sea, a US consulting and advocacy collaborative that works with big-vision entrepreneurs, healers, educators and visionary non-profit or corporate leaders whose innovative work makes a positive contribution to society and the planet. Ivy Sea seeks to provide those involved in changing organizations and the wider society with resources, counsel, ideas and support.

Walters also believes the "user backlash" is serious, in that it usually translates into conditions that cause considerable angst to the executive team and shareholders - like lowered productivity, increased stress, inefficiency, redundancy, budget overruns and security risks. He says it is important to realize that there are two elements of the user backlash - one being a backlash from business units and the executive teams, and the other being from individual users throughout the organization.

"One cause of the chasm between the perceptions and priorities of technologists and the executive team - or other managers throughout the enterprise - is the 'organizational culture worldview' - the way that each group 'sees' the primary objective of the enterprise," Walters says. "For organizational leaders, the business is the bottom line and technology is a means to an end - one facet of a successful organization. For the technologists in the IT department, the technology is the point and, too often, the business bottom line is viewed as a hassle or limitation. In some companies, a randomly surveyed IT employee may not even know there is a recession, for example, or that market conditions are affecting the company that employs him."

Walters counts myriad reasons for backlash, from "macro" reasons such as the increased reliance on outsourcing for functions usually associated with IT, to "micro" reasons like the fact that the average user more than likely resents what seems to him or her like unscheduled and insensitive intrusions by the IT department. To the average technology user in the organization, IT also is often seen as making major changes that affect workers without adequate notice, communication and forethought regarding the implications of the change on people throughout the organization.

"In addition, people who see constant layoffs resent the large-scale expenditures of the IT department, particularly when people hear of chronic cost overruns and mismanaged budgets. These are things that surely anger people, and justifiably so. Backlash is a result," Walters says.

The Road Ahead

In her Journal of Information Technology Education paper, Mann focuses on how universities can address the user backlash via changes in curriculum and teaching methods.

Mann says IT departments in academia have tended to be marginalized for many of the same reasons as those that cause the IT-user gap, with the gap lying between business unit faculty and IT faculty. Now, with business departments discovering IT's importance and incorporating IT issues into their courses, she fears IT departments may again be marginalized. Her solution is a hybrid minor that would demonstrate that the IT department is best at educating people to manage the information resource even for students in other majors. Such courses would help organizations satisfy what she believes is a growing demand for people to fill the myriad "hybrid" liaison positions that are growing up in organizations that have realized the gap is not going away.

"Personnel in these positions bridge the gap by helping end users deal with the IT personnel and vice versa. Moreover, despite extensive obstacles, these people are taking on the challenge and becoming quite successful. The names of these positions may vary widely - relationship manager or IT-user liaison, are examples - but they all have similar roles in the organization," she says.

IT-user hybrids address many aspects of the gap by influencing the behaviours and perceptions of end users and IT personnel alike, and by acting as a mediator between the two groups, Mann says. However, these hybrids do not have an easy passage, with conflicts of interest often apparent when the position reports to IT but needs to defend users over IT, or else reports to a business unit but needs to defend IT. Mann says in some cases, the position is either poorly defined or lacks the authority it needs to be successful. Hybrid people can also find it hard to build credibility without support from the IT side.

"Still, persons in these intermediary positions seem to manage very well by using higher level influencing skills such as negotiation, conflict management, facilitation and translation," she says. "And for the most part, they find the work highly rewarding.

"If the CIO is thinking strategically about his or her IT function, then he or she would create hybrids, especially when the relationship is suffering," Mann says. The hybrid would work to create a better relationship between IT and non-IT people overall, which impacts the ability to build and implement systems more effectively. The help desk should also become better and customer relationship management and the tech support people better at customer service, she says.

"One of the things we advocated is the use of marketing concepts and impression management theory, while another opportunity relates to project management and change management. One organization's IT function was so good at managing projects and change that the users regularly ask them to lead project teams outside of IT stuff," she says.