Free Article By Paul Glen of C2
Consulting
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What We Have to Fear
(This article originally appeared in
Computerworld USA and Computerworld Australia.)
Lately I've had a troubling sense that there is
a cancer growing in IT departments these days. No, I'm not talking about
constrained budgets, poor alignment, hiring freezes or project failures. I'm not
even talking about the growth of outsourcing and offshoring. While these issues
are all real, there seems to be something even more toxic eating away at our
industry. What could possibly be more threatening to IT staffs than offshoring?
Fear of offshoring.
This faceless, nameless dark terror seems to be
gnawing away at the morale of IT professionals everywhere. They are filled with
dread that they are witnessing a major sea change in their fortunes. It seems
like the bursting of the tech bubble was more acceptable and less threatening
than the prospect of offshoring. Those jobs just went away. They didn't go to
some highly skilled engineers half a world away who were willing to work for
less pay.
I wish I could quote Franklin Roosevelt and
suggest that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." But I can't. I'm not
going to join the ITAA and the parade of economists telling us that offshoring
is good for us (perhaps collectively and only in the long run) and that we
should welcome it with open arms. I'm not so sure about that. Although
management consultants like me are often heard chanting the "embrace change"
mantra, I'm not sure that I want to snuggle up to this one.
But frankly, whether I like offshoring doesn't
really matter. It's here, and it's not going away. Although the legal remedies
being batted around Washington and various state capitals may slow the trend, no
one can stop the relentless march of work across borders. We created IT to
enhance the efficiency and mobility of labor, and it seems to be working.
But the natural and reasonable fear that this
sort of metamorphosis brings seems a more immediate threat to our organizations
than the change itself. Even though some estimates suggest that as many as 6% to
20% of IT jobs may eventually be moved, a relatively small percentage is
directly affected by offshoring today. The fear of being on the losing end of
this transformation is much more pervasive and immediately debilitating than the
longer-term threat.
As a manager of a technical group, there are
things that you can do to help alleviate the distractions and tensions that
result from industry trends like this that are largely beyond the control of any
of us.
Address the issue openly. Once a concern has
entered the consciousness of a group, ignoring it won't make it go away. The
fear of the unspoken is much more intense than the fear of an issue openly
discussed. If you're going to experiment with offshoring, explain the purpose of
the experiment. If you are going to do a major project, explain the boundaries
around the project. Otherwise, the rumor mill becomes an echo chamber, and the
scenarios played out there are probably much more imaginative and damaging than
anything that might actually happen.
Plan for the future. A group without a clear
understanding of its future imagines that it has none. Even if you're not sure
what the future will bring, plan for what you can foresee. If you can't foresee
much, develop a scenario and go with that. All plans are provisional and can be
changed, but the disquiet of indecision can last a very long time.
Work for the future. A while back, I was asked
to take over a group of IT professionals who had suffered a major leadership
defection. I was constantly being asked, "Are we going to shut down this
office?" I didn't really know, but I was sure that if people kept quitting at
the current pace, it was much more likely. So we all went to work recruiting new
staffers to replace those who had left. Once they were involved in this
optimistic work, the questions and resignations stopped.
When it comes to offshoring, there may be
nothing we can do to slow its progress. But if we let our fear of it diminish
our productivity, the trend will only accelerate. So while it may not be the
only thing, one of the biggest things that we have to fear is fear itself.
