Being an Information Manager...

Fighting perceptions, through certification?

Recently I read an interesting letter in a dutch newspaper - which told me a lot about perceptions people have about IT. The industry was accused of being 'technology pushers', with lots of promises, no realism and through that responsible for the many well-published failures. The letter ended with the idea to claim billions of dollars from the IT industry for frauds like the Millenium bug.

The letter was a reaction on an article about large government IT projects - why they fail. The article itself was pretty clear; using IT to push change, with ill defined scopes, ... etc were all to blame - and I fully agree with this. And as you may understand from my blog - I am convinced that more 'architecture' and more focus on the softer side in project in these type of project may help (so technology becomes less of an issue as well).

But I think there is more. Why is it that still many people see IT as a big scapegoat for everything that goes wrong? Why do people underestimate the complexity of large change projects (and think it is an IT problem)? Maybe it is true (in a way) that some of our professionals do push technology before looking for real solutions - and that's why I have advocated to but more 'I' in IT. But how do we achieve this?

Maybe as an industry we should have a 'code of practice' that prevents us from doing projects that are un-achievable? Maybe we should only do projects when there is sufficient resourcing & the right approach! I guess that's all wishfull thinking. As an industry we have already tried to set up all sorts of certification scheme's - but the bad news is that certification does not always help! CMMi level 5 means first and foremost a lot of bureaucracy - and not necessarily that you get the right solution for a clever designer for the right price. PMI certification does not mean that the project manager is a really good communicator (which is 50% of project management!). Now I have also seen architecture certificates popping up and even stuff related to data and document management ...

As I wrote earlier - IM is an Art, in some ways, and in many ways it is closer to social science than it is to technical & engineering. In the same way Architecture is an art as well - but an art with a purpose. Just like Norman Foster creates beautiful functional buildings - we should recognise the great IM & IT architects in terms of their artistics skills beyond the certificates. And we should make clear that these enablers for real change cost more than the bog standard VB programmer (so when we source project that we do not always look at price).

I only don't know how we can define this quality label, if certification is not the answer. Can we learn from the academic world? (citation index, peer reviews, ...) I don't know - but it is a thought.

Labels: certification

posted by Evert Ruijs @ 3:15 AM