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A Revolving Door |
Last year, SkillSoft, a Nashua N.H.-based seller of training software, surveyed 2,800 workers in the U.K., including about
300 IT employees. Among the findings: 90% of the IT managers surveyed are looking for another job.
IT workers are "always looking out there to see what else is in the marketplace," says Dennis Brown, SkillSoft's co-founder and senior director of market development.
So CIOs face a constant struggle to replace departing personnel. Midmarket CIOs are especially challenged because of their smaller staffs; in midsized companies, each employee wears many hats and is more difficult to replace.
A State of Denial
Karen Rubenstrunk, a senior client partner at executive search firm Korn/Ferry International, says she recently attended a conference where CIOs discussed these issues. "It's as if they're in a state of denial," she says. "They understand it's an issue. But they don't really face it" by doing succession planning to pass on knowledge to new hires.
Most CIOs try to make sure that staffers with specialized technical expertise pass on these skills. But they usually overlook the importance of transferring what Rubenstrunk calls "tribal knowledge." For instance, who must give the unofficial nod before a project can go forward? Which meetings can be safely skipped?
The best companies make their new hires effective in their jobs within two months, Rubenstrunk says. But in reality, "I've seen a lot of people who still don't know their way around after six to eight months." Overall, companies "have not spent enough time adding some structure around the transfer of knowledge," she adds.
Formal Mentoring
One of the problems is that few companies formally reward IT executives for mentoring or setting up systems to institutionalize individuals' knowledge and pass it on. This is especially true of midmarket companies, which have less money to invest in formal training programs.
Some CIOs use the annual review process to ensure that employees are mentoring. But if all those reviews are due at the same time, odds are the CIO doesn't have time to discuss these issues in depth. "If I'm always under the gun and I have to do [performance reviews for] all 25 people at the same time, in reality, how can I do my absolute best?" Rubenstrunk asks.
CIOs and their staff may benefit from staggered performance evaluations throughout the year. If your company clusters reviews at the end of the year, here's an alternative: Have quarterly discussions -- not reviews -- with your staff about how well they are learning and teaching their jobs.
"Any one of those little things just adds that much more to your ability to understand what a person knows or doesn't know and what they should know," Rubenstrunk says.
-- J.I.R.
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Input From the Front Lines
Ron Campbell, director of the agency's HIV/AIDS initiatives, is glad Anderson signed on. Four years ago, when Campbell was country director for Tanzania, he had a roomful of Macintosh desktops that ran several different operating systems. They couldn't read one another's Microsoft Word documents. Campbell stopped using an Internet connection because it took 20 minutes to load a single website. And just one person among a staff of 30 could do computer troubleshooting.
When Campbell tried to email documents to USAID or the U.S. Embassy, "half the time they couldn't open the blasted file" because it had been created on an out-of-date Mac, he says. "I was really limping along out there."
Just before Anderson arrived, the agency standardized on Wintel PCs. Under Anderson, the agency upgraded from a 31-bit Amdahl mainframe to a Unix environment. Now Anderson is working on installing a virtual private network to make it easier for staffers around the world to communicate securely with one another, not just headquarters.
Campbell thinks enforced turnover made these changes happen faster. Because the agency is constantly hiring and because some of the hires at headquarters have previously served as Peace Corps volunteers overseas, headquarters has "a fresh and constant connection with the field," he says. About 15% of the Corps' domestic IT staff and 2% of its overseas staff are former volunteers who have some expertise in technology. Some hold technical college degrees; some volunteered in a technical area for the Corps; and some held IT positions before applying to the Corps' IT staff.
These former volunteers arrive with firsthand experience about how to improve IT in the field. This also means that few people on staff have been around long enough to be bored. "We've avoided some of the pitfalls of a mature bureaucracy," Campbell says.
The programmers in the trenches agree. Duncan Hays, an application systems development expert, is one of the select few Peace Corps employees who have managed to exceed the mandated tenure limit. He has been at the agency nine years. After serving two tours, he was chosen to serve a third. When that expired, he achieved "expert" status because of his knowledge of systems, which means that, if invited, he can renew his contract one year at a time.
During his tenure, Hays has seen the agency buy and jettison its Amdahl mainframe and adopt Microsoft's .NET. With the five-year rule, "the modernization happens much more rapidly," Hays says. In comparison, Hays' friend works for a state government agency that "had a mainframe and had a crew of old mainframe programmers that you couldn't get rid of," he says. "They weren't going to change their ways. There's nothing you could do. They were just stuck.
"Whereas here you get new managers that have new ideas and things get promoted," he says. The challenge is passing good ideas on to the next generation: "How do we capture and bank the knowledge base that we have created?" Campbell asks. (See "A Revolving Door," above.)
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