Believe it or not, it’s for the same reason Ancient Greeks would go to visit Oracle of Delphi or modern management would order “Gartner” report – the fear of responsibility for making decisions.
Board and sequential interviews are falling along the same lines - isn’t it wonderful to spread responsibility for hiring wrong person among group of coworkers, so no one would serve as a scapegoat?
Reliability, profitability, presence or absence of the 24/7 support infrastructure – all of it does not count, unless somebody could be blamed for the failure.
Why Microsoft is a huge success among corporate management? Seriously, why ???
Aforementioned company releases more fixes for its products than its clients could implement timely. The swingword of the software giant is “Agile Development”. In short, agile development theory states that one should provide customers with a half-baked product and continue with improving it while collecting customers’ feedback ( screams of joy).
One of the training courses for the latest “agile” technology even suggest that it is not important to worry about producing an end-to-end vision of your product – most likely, you will not be the one to finish its development…
Again, have you detected the leibmotif playing quietly on the background – “you will not take the blame, since you will not be there to receive any. By the time unpleasant substance hit the fan, you will be developing another piece of agile nature.”
So why is this company highly popular among stakeholders and key decision-makers? It’s simple – it is ready to be a scapegoat. This is more important than tech-support, service contracts, expertise, etc…, etc…
Just recently, Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, while going over recent acquisition of MySQL, dropped invaluable hint about fear of responsibility - “traditional CIO’s disallow the usage of products that aren’t backed by commercial support relationships”. He maintains that under umbrella of Sun, MySQL will find more open doors in IT shops around the Globe.
Why? Does it change the fact MySQL is running behind almost every CMS website hosted elsewhere, including this one? Does it improve it a bit? Ah-ah, it simply makes it blamable.
Managers don’t like to deal with a little fish. They like to talk to the Big Daddy. Big Boss. Capo Del Capo. It is laughable, because support promises do not guarantee you anything. In most cases, your internal resources will find solutions faster than support personnel at “trusted” vendor’s.
So, before you approach your boss with an idea of implementing “OS”, do some research:
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Did he already order Gartner report? If yes, attempt to read it under disguise of love of Gartner reports.
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Is Gartner report saying same thing your CIO wants to see in it?
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Is your boss ready to have his head served on the silver platter before dancing politicians in your office?
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Do you want to be labeled as controversial, untrustworthy, lacking business knowledge person?
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Do you understand why Christ was crucified?
Having answers to the above questions beforehand may save your life…
