Looking for an IT manager? Don’t go chasing unicorns

Unicorns exist — or do they? It seems as if many medium-sized organisations do think so, looking at their list of expectations versus what is generally possible in a single IT person. What I mean by this, is that they want someone who is all of the following: technical expert, strategic, operational, good with managing people and vendors as well as happy to jump to help any user whenever needed.

The job description for such a person would then read something like the following – decide for yourself whether this sounds feasible.

Job Description: IT Manager (click to open)

These unrealistic job descriptions (JDs) are often initiated by the business leader responsible for the IT function. In small and medium companies this is usually the FD, and sometimes even the MD.

Specialist vs generalist
The problem is that the finance and HR departments often involved in drawing up the JD don’t really know much about IT – not enough to fully understand what can be expected from a single individual.

Also in the small and medium market segment no real job description template exists and so it is usually put together from a wish list compiled by a number of executives and business unit leaders. The wish list for the role typically includes aspects of three to four specialist resources – such as a Chief Information Officer (CIO), System Architect, IT Manager and technical specialist.

Many of these are difficult to combine into one person or are even mutually exclusive. Many of the tasks are also on different levels of maturity — a strategic thinker will no longer want to perform hands-on operational tasks. A single IT resource is only going to have a generalist capability across such a wide area of expertise.

Of course, the IT job seeker does not help matters by claiming he or she can do everything and, in amongst all the tech jargon the candidate and/or the standard placement agent uses, no-one can determine whether they are right or not.

On top of this, because IT in general is seen as a cost centre, the salary allocated to this “superman” is usually only sufficient to be attractive to a relatively junior resource.

Typically the individuals fulfilling a generalist IT role, both within the IT industry and businesses in general, come from technical implementation and support backgrounds. Most often this leads to a technical approach to addressing areas for growth instead of the business value proposition, thereby inadvertently widening the business-IT divide even further.

A question of cost
Medium businesses, however, cannot afford to hire several full-time employees to cater for the various specialist roles needed. A single resource with some strong points is thus often employed and the business hopes that the individual will over time address the most pressing needs. Unfortunately this in most cases leads to disappointment and unfulfilled expectations.

While it may be possible to find these unicorns, there are not many around, they will typically demand a higher salary than what medium-sized companies are willing to pay, will often not stay long at one company and, being one person, can only do so much. There are better ways to address the IT needs of organisations with between 30 and 300 people – what we call the SME.

What to do?

Here are some of my recommendations:

1. Find out for yourself what roles are needed to run IT both strategically and operationally. Then determine the roles you need. Consult with HR on this if possible.
2. If the roles needed require more than one person (very likely), then consider which of the following three models would suit your business: full insource, full outsource, a hybrid of these two.
3. Weigh up the cost of each model with your priority for achieving more business value from IT. It is very likely that the more you are prepared to invest, the greater the value that you will realise. Naturally, it is not quite that simple, however!

On the note of insourcing vs outsourcing, some of the immediate benefits of outsourcing are:

• You will get access to resources that are specialists in their respective field and are generally more experienced than you can afford on a full-time basis
• Utilising shared resources from an IT provider means that these individuals get exposure to other environments, the industry in general and can introduce new thinking
• While full benefit will only be gained over time, it is possible to terminate outsourcing contracts at relatively short notice should the relationship not work out, thereby greatly reducing the risk.

To conclude, I want to highlight that the type of person, or people, that are responsible for your IT systems will depend on the stage your business is in in terms of the level of integration and the role technology plays in your organisation.

There is no doubt that the trend is for businesses to become more and more “digital” and thus requiring their IT function to become all the more business savvy whilst still maintaining a stable IT platform.

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This article by Mathias Tölken originally appeared on Space Age Technologies and is republished with permission

Image: Rob Boudon (via Flickr).