Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

The Yancey Men
First published 03 October 2006
An IT director with strong views and opinions is a
walking time bomb. It is much safer to install a
'Yancey Man', whose actions and words can be
minutely controlled by the team. However, as Phil
learns to his cost, a puppet might bow to your
bidding; but only when it is you who is pulling the
strings.
I was once part of a team of managers in a large corporate IT department
who hired a 'retired' actor to be the IT Director.
This statement requires some elaboration.
The IT director of a large company actually has little work, so long as the
members of his management team know what they are doing. He does,
however, need to look smart, sober, and dignified and to behave at all times
with a natural 'gravitas'. His only duties are to arbitrate, convene meetings
properly, and have the knack of being able to summarise a mass of detail into
an overall picture. He must also work with complete integrity to reassure
nervous stockholders and board members. His final task is to translate complex
technological issues in such a way that everyone thinks they understand them.
He can then spend the rest of the week on the golf course, or staring out the
window, meditating. The last thing he should think of doing is 'getting
involved'. 'Smartness' is not to be encouraged in an IT director. He should never
have ideas of his own, but merely encourage others to have them; he can later
turn them into a departmental initiative if the consensus favours them.
This may come as a surprise. To outsiders in a large organisation, the IT
director seems a man of inestimable importance. 'I wonder if Tony can come up
with the goods for the new project', they will say, or, 'Let's ask Tony what the
long term strategy should be with the reorganisation of the logistics'. It is as if
Tony is rushing around personally doing everything in a muck sweat. Actually,
if the IT department is working as it should, he has almost nothing to do
besides looking serious, and promising to 'get back with an answer'.
Once an IT department is running in this harmonious way, it causes
disruption if the IT director leaves. There is always the temptation in other parts
of the enterprise to jolt the IT department out of its complacency by hiring a