When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers
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The reality is that even an automotive engineer would still go through the same buying process because:
- It’s how the channel works.
- Someone who designs automotive chassis isn’t going to track who has the most cup holders of the smoothest ride.
A SE still has value even with a hardened IT engineer as an SE ca. Provide insight into a niche said practitioner doesn’t spend 40 hours a week on.
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Forked off the majority of responses because someone got super confused and didn't read even the title, let alone the body, of the OP and started a long discussion about open source and closed source software. Please do not derail this conversation, which is about IT (like the profession and professionals who do it) with products that people (IT or otherwise) may or may not buy.
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Another wording to the original post to hopefully make it more clear. This isn't about the resulting decision that is made or products of any sort but rather "doing the evaluation" or "buying the evaluation." IT's primary value is in evaluating options, often an insanely broad range of them in loads of highly disparate arenas, and taking into account all the tech stuff, and applying all of the applicable business stuff, and making a decision as to all kinds of things that might involve.. buying software, hiring programmers for bespoke software, buying hardware, how a network is designed, who is hired, where they work, and on and on.
In some cases, these decisions are made by IT people inside the org. In some cases, the people inside the org don't have the time, resources, ability, or maybe desire to do this, so the decisions of IT (which is to say, IT itself) is "bought". Sometimes it is bought by hiring an open IT consultant who clearly is hired to "do IT". In most, it's "bought" buy buying something else and having some unaligned IT decisions thrown in "for free" behind the scenes. But bought, regardless.
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@scottalanmiller I thought it was perfectly clear what the topic was about. I think people just like to argue or something.
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Interesting topic.
But it seems to me that we need to clarify definition of the term "IT manager" to agree on answer to SAM's questions.
I don't understand why "buyer" is not IT, and "doer" is IT (if SAM is trying to say that)
To me, it seems logical that (in SMB) IT manager is buyer, not "engineer"@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
the buyer would claim to be an "IT Manager" or "Director of IT" and the salesman would be presented as a "solution engineer" and all the people doing any actual IT are just nameless bodies somewhere behind the scenes. To me, this isn't "doing IT" or "working in IT" any more than sending your secretary out to buy you lunch makes them a chef.
I'll try to compare this to other departments:
- I have "Director of sales". She manages 80 people, almost 70 of them are selaspersons. I do not want her to "do sales", I want her to "buy" best salespersons she can and manage them (of course, she needs to understand sales, and our whole business). Does this means she is "not Sales", she just "claims to be Sales"?
- I have "Maintenance manager". He organize maintenance of our vehicles, production plant..., but I want him to buy services or hire employees. I don't want him to do actual maintenance (repair vehicles...). Does it makes him "buyer who only claims to be Manitenance manager"?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
IT's primary value is in evaluating options, often an insanely broad range of them in loads of highly disparate arenas, and taking into account all the tech stuff, and applying all of the applicable business stuff, and making a decision as to all kinds of things that might involve.. buying software, hiring programmers for bespoke software, buying hardware, how a network is designed, who is hired, where they work, and on and on.
It seems to me that IT is just different (than examples in my prevoius post) because it is hard to find person who understand business needs and have deep knowledge of various IT solutions available in various IT fields as SAM described in this quote.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
So now the question becomes... how much IT work does someone do in position X before they are classified as a buyer or hirer of IT rather than IT themselves?
I see "managing" and "actual work" as two different things.
(But all managers also do both things - the higher you are in business hierarchy, more time you need to have for managing, less remains for "actual work")
To me "Managing Sales" and "doing Sales" are both part of Sales.
Also "Managing IT" and "doing IT" are both parts of IT.
And to me, it can be fine that manager is "buyer", but that does not mean he cannot be excellent at his job.
Of course, if IT manager doesn't understand IT, makes bad decisions.. than he is bad manager (not competent etc.) -
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
salesman would be presented as a "solution engineer"
This is usual marketing stuff, ridiculous to me, but some buyers buy this, so marketing use this.
But it is not important for our subject. -
@Mario-Jakovina said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
salesman would be presented as a "solution engineer"
This is usual marketing stuff, ridiculous to me, but some buyers buy this, so marketing use this.
But it is not important for our subject.That's true. Sadly, sellers will sell anything buyers want to buy.
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@Mario-Jakovina said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
I don't understand why "buyer" is not IT, and "doer" is IT (if SAM is trying to say that)
Because one actually performs a task, one hires someone else to perform a task.
I like the plumber analogy. There is a huge difference between being a customer who pays for a plumber, and being a plumber. You need both. Plumbers need people to work for, and plumbing work needs to be done. But for some reason, in IT, we tend to confuse the two.
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@Mario-Jakovina said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
To me, it seems logical that (in SMB) IT manager is buyer, not "engineer"
Absolutely, but this would logically only mean one thing....
That the CEO or someone very high "buys" IT at a CIO level and then that person does IT and oversees the department or team. You would never have an "IT Manager" that is only a buyer, because logically the only thing that they buy is a single vendor to oversee IT and they need to buy any other IT if they don't include it. It requires "doing IT" to buy IT well. So either you limit it to the singular task of getting the right person to put it together, or you have a problem with this approach.
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@Mario-Jakovina said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
I have "Director of sales". She manages 80 people, almost 70 of them are selaspersons. I do not want her to "do sales", I want her to "buy" best salespersons she can and manage them (of course, she needs to understand sales, and our whole business). Does this means she is "not Sales", she just "claims to be Sales"?
This is very different. If I have a sales manager (and I do), I want him to be able to do sales, to know when people in the department are good at sales or not, to know how to hire and fire, to train, to mentor. If he can't / isn't "doing sales" work, he's a useless manager.
If you have a "Director of Sales" who has no sales skills and/or doesn't do anything related to sales other than hiring another person to do the job she was hired to do, then yes, it means she is only "claiming to be in sales." Her job is to "do nothing", it's a passthrough. The CEO could simply fire her, and promote the person beneath her, and save money and improve the process by removing a useless extra step that did nothing but add risk.
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@Mario-Jakovina said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
To me "Managing Sales" and "doing Sales" are both part of Sales.
Managing isn't buying. Managing IT means you understand what you are doing and using those skills to make decisions, just at a manager level. Buying IT means you aren't managing. The title manager is often given to buyers to make them appear to be managers, when they really are not.
Managing is a real job that requires real work. Buying / hiring someone else to be the manager is very, very different from being the manager. What we see most often is someone with the IT Manager title, who manages nothing and often has no idea what he's supposed to manage, who them "buys" IT elsewhere and often ignores the need for management and ends up with unmanaged IT.
You'd never accept this in another division like finance. But in IT, people tend to be so confused and accept such a low standard from their employees that it's often easy to hide.
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@Mario-Jakovina said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
IT's primary value is in evaluating options, often an insanely broad range of them in loads of highly disparate arenas, and taking into account all the tech stuff, and applying all of the applicable business stuff, and making a decision as to all kinds of things that might involve.. buying software, hiring programmers for bespoke software, buying hardware, how a network is designed, who is hired, where they work, and on and on.
It seems to me that IT is just different (than examples in my prevoius post) because it is hard to find person who understand business needs and have deep knowledge of various IT solutions available in various IT fields as SAM described in this quote.
I don't believe that it's hard to find people, because nearly everyone you find that knows this stuff struggles to get hired while those with zero skills or clue are readily hired. I think it's more that finding a competent CEO is really hard and they don't want to admit that they dont know what they are doing and tend to favour people who pander to their egos rather than those that do the job. If a CEO actually wanted good work, it's not hard to find people. If every CEO cared, we'd run out of people fast, but in the real world, there's a lot of great people and companies with loads of excess capacity wishing companies would let them do a good job for them.
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@Mario-Jakovina said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
And to me, it can be fine that manager is "buyer", but that does not mean he cannot be excellent at his job.
Everyone in IT is a buyer sometimes. The question isn't "should we ever buy IT", it's really about "when do you stop being IT when all you do is buy?"
Example... a CEO hires a CIO / vCIO / MSP whatever. The CEO would never, ever claim to do IT even when the CEO makes the only buying decision (to hire a full firm to handle everything.) It's a quick, one time (more or less) decision and, if done well, provides for all the IT needs. Same goes for finance, the CEO hires the CFO and/or hires a financial firm. Same for legal. And on and on. The CEO picks all the people at the top. But the CEO doesn't claim to be a lawyer, do IT, etc.
But if the person that the CEO hires, and calls an IT Manager, then turns around and simply does the same thing again and hires yet another person to "do IT" and does none themselves, why would they claim to work in IT if the CEO didn't? They both did the same job.
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@Mario-Jakovina You have some good points for sure. In my opinion, IT should not just be buyers though. In my situation, they have very few skills and spend a lot more money "buying IT" than they would if people in those positions has some skills. We have a couple good people but the rest or meh. So to me, if your spending more money like this its a bad business decision not to have people with skills in those positions. There is also the fact that if they had better skills then they would make better buying decisions too.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
This is very different. If I have a sales manager (and I do), I want him to be able to do sales, to know when people in the department are good at sales or not, to know how to hire and fire, to train, to mentor.
I like this point. Managers need to be competent in the area they are managing. They also need to do a little of the work to stay competent. Also nothing is more encouraging than seeing your boss in the trenches with you helping getting stuff done once in a while. That really improves morale.
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@jmoore said in When Does It Stop Even Being IT: Buyers vs Doers:
In my situation, they have very few skills and spend a lot more money "buying IT" than they would if people in those positions has some skills.
Right, a key skill of doing IT is "good buying." If you bypass that and just buy the buying skill, you end up with having not bought what you needed in the first place.
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@scottalanmiller Maybe one way to phrase the "buying of IT" is to call it "buying of IT skills" so that it differentiates it from products. That is really what has to be done at time. You fill in gaps in your teams knowledge with this.
