Re: bonuses

With very few exceptions, I have worked as head of IS & all staffing 
positions of a small computing shop in a mid sized enterprise - SA, security, 
PA, Operations, Help Desk, etc. in which I report to the senior person in the 
accounting department.

It has always struck me that everyone in such a company looks upon accounting 
as a neccessary evil, while my department is a service function, but everyone 
in the company does not make the rules, the accounting department's 
management does.

My sense is that trends in distributed computing to pass on traditionally 
accounting functions, such as data mining & calculations of efficiencies, to 
end departments, is taking away from their productivity on their traditional 
specialities & expecting everyone to be proficient in too broad a range of 
skills, to the detriment of the overall corporation.  People have lost sight 
of the value to a company of having specialists.

There was one time I suggested to a CEO that there might be some value in 
having me work out of different departments of the company for 6 months to 1 
year at a time so that I would get a good feel for what is the most critical 
need for each department, instead of being governed by the latest squeaky 
wheel syndrome, and it would be your budget to allocate time duration that I 
am in each department based on each department's relative importance to the 
overall corporation.  The CEO thought that was a great idea & how he 
implemented it was to transfer my department so that it reported to the head 
of a department for a fiscal year, then each fiscal year switch departments.

This triggered the interesting phenomena of illustrating the great divergence 
between the perception of my department as seen through the eyes of other 
departments that had not previously had much contact with IS & those that had.

Almost all department heads fought tooth & nail to have IS come under them.

The winner would then get a briefing from me that they wished they had got 
before fighting so hard.  Here are the 20 projects I am currently working on 
& my perception of their relative priorities.  Here are the 250 requests I 
have on hold until one of the active projects is completed, with my tentative 
assessments of their relative importances.  Here are the major problems & 
bottlenecks we have that in my opinion are solveable only by buying more 
hardware or other comparable expenses.  Here are the major problems that I 
have that are due to corporate culture.  If I am to have any budget, here are 
the aquisitions & policy changes that I think would be of greatest benefit 
overall.  Do you want to make any additions & changes to my lists?

It was the classic story of ... if have not been hearing what IS is doing, 
they think that here is a corporate resource that can be harnessed to benefit 
your department exclusively & what they find is a mountain of 
responsibilities to be carefully managed.

>  From:    DBale@lear.com (Bale, Dan)
>  
>  One of the keys here (and, yes, this does sound trite, but it's so true...)
> 
>  is whether the company sees IS as an asset or a liability.  

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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