Conquer the Fear of IT!

I inched closer to the edge with my heart racing and I took the plunge. About 8 seconds later I was nearing terminal velocity – close to 125 mph for a sky diver. Not a whole lot of time to think, but I had good people on my team to help ensure I would land safely and I had someone behind me that expected me to take that very first step. This person was not the tandem instructor physically strapped to my body.  This person was my daughter who was farther back in the plane in position as the last sky diver in juxtaposition to my position as the first to exit the plane.  Yes – this describes my first tandem freefall skydive, but it also describes every day in my office.  As CIO I frequently have to take the first plunge into a calculated risk, while my office family ... my teammates and employees, watch in eager anticipation ready to follow my lead.

IT is a never ending series of challenges in a ceaselessly changing landscape. Some of these challenges are truly scary. In my line of work, I have to safeguard data federally protected under PCI and HIPAA rules. I have to ensure that my phone lines are open and available 24 x 7 so that I can take in orders, the lifeblood to my company, as well as provide round the clock service and maintenance the lifeblood to my customers. My R&D team needs to have work environments where they can ‘play’ yet be able to save and restore their work and pass along updates to my QA team. My development partners need the ability to pass through our border networks without compromising the security of our infrastructure. All the while I have to balance these safeguards with giving the business and my IT team the freedom to move quickly and adapt to the rapidly changing market demands constantly put before them.

Taking the plunge in sky diving is not unlike taking the plunge when embarking on an IT project. When I first jumped out of the plane it was all or nothing – succeed or face the ultimate failure. In IT our failures can also mean life and death – the life and death of our careers, our business or in the worst case even our customers. Yet proceed we must, as long as we exercise the due diligence needed so that we mitigate the risks and have contingency plans in place so that when the inevitable mistake or error occurs we can react immediately and correct the situation.

I once interviewed someone who was fired for making a mistake in their role … I hired that person. If I fired everyone I met who made a mistake, I would have no employees … and would be obligated to fire myself. The reason this person was hired was not because they made a mistake, it was because their response when I asked what they learned from it. A few key themes surfaced:

 Understand the Risk

Do the homework necessary to address the risks of what can go wrong, or what happens when things do go wrong. Some industries may be more tolerant of mistakes in that no individuals will be harmed if a mistake happens. The change introduced by this individual, albeit a horrible one, was the loss of corporate goodwill to its customers and some lost productivity. This person told me in exquisite detail what he learned from his actions and how to evaluate risk in future projects. In my industry the stakes are significantly higher and the ability to evaluate risk is a critical one.

When You Can ... Test … Test … Test

Sometimes, maybe even more frequently than we would care to admit, IT is forced to make changes in production.   This is a fear that sends shivers down most seasoned IT vets. Not too far back one of my most experienced software engineers came to me and sheepishly confessed that he ‘fired off some SQL in production without backing up the database’ this lapse in judgement, one made under extreme pressure I’ll have you, cost him and our customer hours of lost productivity while he reconstructed the database to return it to its desired state. It is critical that whenever and wherever possible you establish redundant and/or test systems to give you the freedom of testing outside the production environment.

Have Contingencies In Place

There is a saying out there … “I have met the enemy and the enemy is us.” In the IT world the enemy is US. Our enemy can be the paralysis that IT fear places on the business causing them to go around IT to get the job done without understanding the risks. Or sometimes it could be the opposite when an IT group pushes for and embraces new and unproven technologies. My boss, who does not come from an IT background understands this very well and is fond of saying “there is a fine line between cutting edge and bleeding edge.” He’s made it crystal clear that my job as CIO is to keep us, as an organization, away from the bleeding edge, but yet remain close to the cutting edge to remain competitive. Simply put, a bleed out can happen way too quickly. When you assess what can go wrong and assume that it will, you can put the roll back and contingency plans in place to quickly recover from the inevitable disaster. If there are no viable roll back plans … think twice before proceeding.

Learn From Your Mistakes

The last piece of the puzzle is to learn from your mistakes. We need to embrace mistakes if we are to move forward. My career has been and continues to be focused on organizational transformation. This transformation comes in the form of introducing a change in the people, the processes and/or the technologies that are employed to drive results. As you make mistakes you develop a rich history of lessons learned which will help you from making (or allowing) the same mistakes in your current situation. Be bold, share your lessons learned and let others see and help you develop better ways to avoid the same mistakes as you move forward.

Summary

Making mistakes is painful. In IT mistakes lead to much of the fear based behaviors we see today. This aversion to fear is what drives our business partners crazy!  Embrace the fear, expect mistakes, take calculated risks and safeguard against them as best as you can.

In IT there are few givens except that change happens – and it happens quickly. Disruptive technologies introduced by nimble startups are out there every day. One of our most important jobs within IT is to keep abreast of these disruptors so that when our business partners come to us with ‘Solution X’ we can set our fear aside to look at the risk, figure out safe ways to deploy, have roll back plans in place and apply prior experience to the situation.