In Cyberspace, Nobody Can Hear You Scream

Are we burning out our best and brightest IT talent? Nate Viall, an industry consultant, has been tracking IT staffing trends and compensation for almost two decades. He's finding that the rate of burnout has increased to the point where no one lasts more than two years in an IT position. Painful cutbacks, long hours, lost weekends, emergency pages, and boring assignments have more than offset any salary gains made over the past few years.

What's amiss here? Information technology used to be a haven from which we escaped the more mundane or stressful jobs. A few years ago, the possibilities for IT seemed limitless. In recent times, however, it seems we have been bumping up against all kinds of limits. There's the hopefully-recovering-but-still-crummy economy, of course. Economics is cyclical, and eventually things will get moving again. But as things pick up, many people will jump at the first opportunity to leave - leaving projects high and dry. How can you ensure continuity, maintain institutional knowledge, and promote a high-performance operation without going off the deep end yourself?

If you're a manager, there are tried-and-true strategies for hanging on to IT talent. Competitive salaries and benefits top the list, of course. Educational and training opportunities follow, along with a decent and fair work environment. These are all important. But one more key ingredient needs to be in place to mitigate burnout and keep your talent motivated. And that's a sense of greater purpose - the "vision thing," if you will.

Look at what made many early computer companies, and more recently, the dot-coms, such innovation hotbeds, and therefore so attractive to technical folks. It wasn't just the money, though often there was plenty of it. These companies had compelling organizational visions. Both Microsoft and Apple evangelized a vision of making computing available and affordable for everyone. Apple shared that same philosophy. SCO's vision was to make the powerful Unix operating system accessible and affordable on the desktop. The dot-coms saw themselves as building a new economy that wiped away the barriers to entry for anyone with a great idea.

How is IT poised to change the world over the next few years? Here are just a few examples of how information technology may be re-arranging the way we work and do business.

* Virtual organizations: Call it Dot-Com II; Web services represents the next wave in the growth of online business. Currently, most Web services deployments are around applications within the firewall. As we become comfortable with the standards, techniques, and tools, Web services will be supporting unattended, organization-to-organization transactions. This is already happening within the insurance industry, between carriers and agent networks.

* Virtual systems and grid computing: We're creating huge parallel processors. Virtual machine technology provides an abstraction layer over all types of operating systems, and storage virtualization does the same for storage subsystems. Grid computing ties it all together across a network. Vendors are just starting to roll out tools that support these new approaches.

* Global organizations: Many IT professionals view offshore outsourcing with suspicion, but the implications go far beyond immediate job losses. Offshore outsourcing heralds the rise of the global, transnational IT organization. IT management has truly become a borderless endeavor, which can be both exciting and exhausting.

Your organization's vision doesn't have to be grandiose, or even IT-related. But does your technical staff feel they are sharing in the vision, and making a difference in their profession, industry, nation, or world at large? Many dot-coms may be in the dustbin of history, but they left us with some interesting lessons about what turns on technical talent. Namely, IT makes a difference, and is always presenting new opportunities. That's something IT people are hungry for more of these days.

More Articles by Joe McKendrick

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