Fortunately for the CEO, after our conversation, he decided not to terminate the IT professional and keep him on board. The CEO will arrange management training for the IT professional.

In my experience, not all of the very best IT professionals are also excellent leaders and managers. Expecting all IT professionals to also be good at management reminds me a little bit of the flying cars, or amphibious vehicles. Those vehicles are pretty good at both, but not excellent at either.

Although I have met a few, should we expect IT professionals to be good managers? Many of the C-level executives I speak to feel this is a reasonable expectation. Please post your comments on this blog.

When CNN ran the story, Study tracks effects of interruptions on doctors, I immediately thought about the effects of interruptions on the “doctors” who take care of your IT—your IT professionals!

If you have seen me speak, or experienced an IT Vital Systems Review audit, you have heard my soap box spiel about how IT professionals all need at least one 45 minute period of uninterrupted time each day to accomplish tasks. My preference is that they get even more than one of those periods.

When solving an IT related issue, planning the next upgrade, or focusing on some other IT related process, it is crucial for the IT professional to be balancing multiple ideas and multiple subjects around in their brain simultaneously. One unnecessary interruption can throw the IT professional back to “square one” again in a nanosecond.

The CNN article says doctors did not even return to almost 20% of the tasks they were doing when interrupted.

Interruptions are dangerous to medical professionals in hospitals, pilots in aircraft, and IT professionals in your organization.

Save them time, and yourself money, by allowing them to work quietly from time to time.  If you have them on staff, IT developers are the same way. Writing code is a thought intensive process.

I was interrupted twice while writing this article. How many times were you interrupted while reading it?

For that matter, some of the CEO’s and other key executives that read these blog postings can benefit from some uninterrupted time as well!  Please post your thoughts on this blog.

I recently had a shocking conversation with an IT professional working as the sole IT professional at a company in the US. I encouraged him to apply patches to his network and his response was, “I do not need to patch the operating system or applications—I have anti-virus and that protects the network from all security risks.”

At first, I thought he was joking with me. He wasn’t! I asked, “What if a user writes the password on a sticky note and the cleaning crew logs in as them to access secure files—does anti-virus prevent that?” The IT pro said yes he was protected.  Several of his “IT advisors” told him anti-virus was all he needed.

I attempted to get through to him for almost 10 minutes with other examples, sent him links to articles on news sites showing reality, and he kept going back to “his trusted advisors told him not to worry about it.” I asked who the “trusted advisors” were and he didn’t want to divulge their identities but assured me “they are really smart.” I even offered to have a conference call with the IT professional and his advisors, but he felt that wasn’t necessary.

This poor IT professional totally believes his reality. He probably will until something bad happens—and at what expense?

I experience this to varying degrees fairly often with “IT professionals,” and frankly I find it unsettling because executives trust their IT professionals with the safety of their business. Executives need to trust their IT professionals.

Executives please make sure your IT department’s advisors are trustworthy as well!

IT professionals naturally, as most of us would, gain a great feeling of satisfaction when they swoop in to save the day. The real question I ask of the IT team during an audit is, “Why did the problem develop to begin with?” I’d rather there never be a problem and, when you see your IT professionals, it is to talk strategically about your IT systems rather than to solve another emergency.

Some of the IT professionals at the companies who’s executives bring me in to audit their systems say, “Thank you Mike. You taught us to drain the swamp so we could stop killing alligators. Once the swamp was drained, most of the alligators left.”

Some of the biggest encouragement you executives can provide your in-house and IT professionals are to focus on the following areas:

• Strategic—IT professionals who are too bogged down in tactics fail to discuss important decisions with executives. A perfect example is whether or not the company wants to use full disk encryption on some or all of your computers. Too often the first the executives ever hear of full disk encryption is when they learn it is not installed and they are about to have to mail a letter to all the clients since a laptop was lost or stolen.
• Automation—Servers can, when configured properly, do a lot of the work automatically that your IT professionals may be wasting time doing manually.
• Central Management—IT professionals can configure the network so they can use one quick tool on one computer to take care of every computer in your organization—without having to visit every computer. The money savings and increased security can be staggering.
• Metrics—IT can provide you with useful information such as most common help desk requests so you can reduce the causes, statistics on what web sites your employees visit most often so you can control bandwidth, and can sometimes bring information from two different programs together using business intelligence tools to give you important metrics related to your sales, processes, or even client demographics.

These are all a much better use of time and money than for your IT professionals to be fixing the same old problems they keep fixing every week.

The IT professionals can use tools like anti-virus, firewalls, application and OS patches, etc. Many IT professionals are not using the tools as effectively as they could, and frequently aren’t using them at all on one or more computers. None of the tools are “set and forget”—all of them have to be monitored.

I feel the executive’s real challenge is, “I don’t know how to help my IT professional fight viruses.”

Responsible executives:

• Provide enough uninterrupted time for the IT professionals so the IT professionals can get their work done.
• Allow ongoing training for the IT professionals to keep up with ever changing technology.
• Hold the IT department accountable for fixing issues discovered during an audit.
• Provide managerial support for policies that support security—such as forcing computer screen savers to lock after a period of inactivity.

Just like pilots perform a pre-flight check before every flight, every morning someone needs to spend 10 minutes verifying items such as:

• Backup report(s) – check for any errors in the logs
  - If the errors can be corrected by excluding files that do not need to be backed up anyway, then exclude those files and folders
• Operating system and application high priority security patch status
  - See list of machines needing updates
  - If a machine needs patches, they need to be applied as soon as the patch can be tested
  - Hopefully all patches are tested and applied the same day they are released!
• Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware
  - All machines have scanned all files within the last 24 hours – or on whatever schedule you use
  - All machines have an updated signature file and Anti-Virus program version
  - You decide how often remote users need to connect to be checked: daily, every 2 days, etc.
• Appliances and servers used for Intrusion Detection Systems / Anti-Spam / Web Filtering / etc.
  - Software firewall program version
  - Any errors or messages that need attention
• RAID array utilities – verify integrity of RAID arrays
• Main Firewall error log
• Event viewer log consolidation tool
• Any other appropriate checks

Moreover, even better than having someone check these manually, is when each service automatically sends a short and complete report via e-mail to an IT professional every single day.

You may choose not to check every single item, and you may choose to add even more. Just please make yours a conscious and informed choice.

Many CEOs believe their IT staff is intimidated by them. In reality, it’s simply that the IT professionals don’t know how to sell an executive on what needs to get done. Think of the typical IT professional as the antithesis of your star salesperson. Your star salesperson knows the art of persuasion and how to make something important and meaningful to the listener.

Conversely, your typical IT professional can’t always put into words why the new technology the company needs is important, even though it is very important. Rather than focus on the bottom line benefit the new technology will give the company, the IT professional drones on about its cool features. And what do you do as the CEO? Most likely, your eyes glaze over and your mind drifts to some other topic.

So what’s a CEO to do? Here are some suggestions to help you develop the relationship with your IT team and get them on the same page as you.

* Send your IT professionals to some communication training. I do a three-hour presentation about what the IT professionals wish the executives knew, and what the executives wish the IT professionals knew. It’s a real eye-opener for both IT professionals and the executives they work with. You can get more information at www.fosterinstitute.com. There is also an expanded workshop for IT professionals that shows them project management skills as well as many other skills at www.supertechevent.com.

* When you’re talking with your IT professional and she drones on about the features of a new item, ask her point blank, “What is the ultimate benefit of this technology for the company?” Get your IT professionals in the habit of thinking in this manner. Remind your IT staff not to try to impress you with big words and acronyms but instead focus on the bottom line result.

* Send your IT professionals to project management training of some kind. Often IT professionals have little formal project management training.

* Provide your IT professionals with some authority, but not too much. If the IT professional needs to tell someone, “I will fix your printer in a little while because the network server is about to crash,” then the IT professional needs the authority to make that decision without being reprimanded later.

* Hold the IT professionals responsible for their actions and provide measurements so that they can see how effective they are at their jobs. Some companies choose to measure down-time, help desk requests, or other values that are easy to track.

* When hiring your next IT professional, seriously consider the person’s people skills as well as technical aptitude. If his people skills are lacking, he won’t change until he reaches a hurt level in his life that is so bad that he decides to change.

As the CEO, it’s your job to initiate open dialogue with everyone on your team, including your IT team. If you don’t, you’ll end up in a situation where your IT professionals will believe they can’t come to you with issues that affect the company, and you’ll never know where your company’s weaknesses are until it’s too late.

What are your thoughts on this topic?