Remember your friend ‘Bob’, the guy who spent all his time in the high school auto repair class learning how to take apart and rebuild auto engines? You wouldn’t have him design a new car for you, but if your ride was sputtering he might be your first call. Bob learned how to use a specific set of tools and, using those tools, he was really good.
Even though Bob knows car tools very well, he doesn’t know woodworking tools, or plumbing tools or drafting tools. To you and I, all of the tools may look baffling and similar, but they aren’t.
Information Technology is the same, just not as grimy. The people that fix it and maintain it are not the people you want designing it. These roles require dramatically different tools and approaches. And therein lies the story of many major IT project failures.
You have come to trust the person who is able to get you and your company out of a bind when a server goes down, or workstations are constantly screwing up. He or she may also know about a lot of other IT tools and issues and seems like a great talent to deal with all the IT issues. But, the skill set that provides the immediate fix is almost always NOT the skill set that is needed to step back, take in the whole picture and understand, maybe even better than you, your organization’s real needs and how to meet them.
Your carpenter should not be your architect.
Information Tech Skills and Tools
There are also more levels of skills to consider. I would think of three, maybe four, major areas of skills and experience that would go into the life cycles of providing your organization with the right IT applications and supporting infrastructure. Each one knows a certain set of tools very well. And the tools that are used in each area are quite different.
First, the repairman, like Bob the trusty mechanic: Not a designer or even an admin, but a ‘Troubleshooter‘, the one that can, through tenacity, talent and possibly compulsiveness.
The next skill is the daily ‘Admin‘. This is the methodical, consistent person who makes sure that the backups are done, the passwords are changed, new users added, old users removed. They do new user and day to day application training and some application support. They track all the expensive equipment, keep track of issues that come up and generally represent the ‘system’ to the users. They might monitor the website and internal Sharepoint system.
Third we might find the IT skills that are similar to the house renovator or ‘Handyman‘. This person will handle small projects to modify existing systems, ‘build out’, tweak, upgrade, and generally take existing applications and keep them in tune with the organization’s changing needs. They might handle the Web site content and structure, Sharepoint applications, report writing, minor database changes and building Excel applications.
The last in the line-up is the concept person, the ‘Architect‘. Somebody who can see the big picture of your organizations needs, but also has a good understanding of the available technology and some sense of the developing technology that your organization may benefit from in the future. This person has been around IT for a while and understands the cycle of technology changes. They have had lots of experience in IT retooling projects and understand how difficult it may be to change an organization’s way of doing things.
So, Troubleshooter, Admin, Handyman and Architect: Your organization needs each of them for their intrinsic skills and their knowledge of the tools that allow them to be effective. I don’t think that these skills sets are ‘one better than the other’, while they overlap and many people have various strengths in other areas, they are fairly distinct.
Using the Right Talent
People have innate qualities, talents and knowledge of tools that predispose them to being good at each of these areas. Because you trust them, you may expect a person who is incredibly successful in one of these roles to do more. This may be a catastrophic mistake! A mistake compounded because once they have moved to an area they are not suited for, you may lose confidence in them all together and lose them as a resource. So, pushing the Troubleshooter to be the Admin or the Renovator to be the Architect will lead to a wide set of issues including very expensive project fails.
Personally, I am most comfortable being the architect.
