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I’v been with the same technology company now for 16 years, and over that time I have seen it grow from a medium sized business to a Fortune 500 company that defied the wireless industry status quo, and made people re-think what they thought they knew about wireless communications.
I love the company that I work for, they have done nothing but treat myself and the other employees with the utmost respect and they have been there for me most of my adult life as a positive force.
Throughout this journey I have taken with them I have worn many hats, Novell Systems Administrator, Windows System Administrator, Software Development Manager, and Technologist. At some point or another I have probably worked with most areas of IT at some level or another, and because of that I think it’s given me an understanding of the challenges and issues that we have faced both over the years and today as a large 15,000+ employee company.
So having reflected upon all of this, I sat down and started rethinking my job, and came to the conclusion that I, like many others out there, might suffer the problem of being unable to see the forest for the trees, when it comes to what my job is vs what I do for work.
My job is not the Windows 7 Rollout or launching an e-commerce site for Qualcomm. It’s not software patching, or hardware roadmaps.
My job is looking for ways to bring our chips to market sooner, to make our legal team more nimble to defend us in litigation, to enable our engineers to be more productive, to find ways to reduce costs, and to overall improve the value of the company for the stock holders, and I can help achieve these goals by some of the tasks I just mentioned.
I think more thought needs to be given to the bigger picture.
When you consider what I just said, I imagine if I sat down with the top eight business unit executives at Qualcomm and said “If I could fix, improve, or achieve just one thing in each of your businesses that would have the greatest impact to Qualcomm, what would that be?”
I doubt they would be asking me migrate to the new 8.3.x e-mail client, or look at moving to 15k drives in the Hitachi disk array.
I believe they might say things like “Reduce our build times from hours to minutes”, “Allow any attorney to have access to case information anywhere at any time”, or “Make Gobi the ubiquitous solution for computer OEMS”.
These are the strategic goals that would help our company succeed, and my job as an engineer should be to determine how best I can help achieve them working in IT.
To borrow a phrase from the green movement, “Think globally, act locally” might be a better way for IT engineers to think of our job, in the framework of a large corporation.
Instead, more often than not I think we suffer from a combination of isolationism and disconnection from goals that leave us thinking about success and failure in the terms of our department rather than the long term goals of the company.
For those of you who don’t work in the technology sector, much of what IT engineers are focused on, is ensuring that everything is up and running, and that users have access to their data. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by not introducing change into a working system unless necessitated by capacity need, security risk, or some other reason that would make the risk of disrupting an existing system worth while.
Unfortunately this has often become the primary or sometimes even sole metric in measuring success for an IT department, which just re-enforces the desire on the part of IT to not want to initiate change into an existing working system and to not take risk and stifling innovation.
The culture of “maintaining” the existing status quo, and keeping an adherence to extensively planned evolution has become what I believe to be an Achilles Heel of the IT culture and although I’m not advocating radical risk, I am a proponent of calculated risk that could lead to a competitive advantage for the company.
So I’m rethinking my job and how I keep the big picture in mind, and not lose ourselves in our own world, and that we are a cog in a much larger machine.
Not an easy task, and effecting change is never an easy process, but I’m not hired to do just the easy tasks or the popular ones but to do the ones that will help the company succeed in what is a very competitive world.
