What a Woman Wants...

Karen Lopez - listmistress@Infoadvisors.com — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:29:04 GMT

CIO magazine has interesting article on how to better recruit females for enterprise IT jobs.

Business technology needs broad-thinking candidates from a broad range of undergraduate and graduate curricula who want to learn how companies—not computers—work; who can work with a global project team, rather than with programming languages; and who can see business process linkages, rather than map out electronic connections.

Meanwhile, the collection of jobs that saddled business technology with its geeky image—network and data center administration, code maintenance, programming and help desk—may soon be centralized, automated or offloaded to outsourcers. The stereotypically inarticulate men with pocket protectors who hold these jobs—and who defined the image of the profession way back in the '70s—will soon retire en masse (taking with them their pocket protectors).

Now you need business analysts, program managers, vendor managers, relationship managers, information architects or process analysts. These jobs (any of which can lead to CIO) demand employees with excellent communication skills that many of the women you know have: the ability to speak, negotiate, influence others, write, analyze, manage projects or programs, and lead cultural change. These jobs are not about writing operating systems or learning programming languages. They are about helping companies change the way they work. "Driving changes that help the business generate more revenue, lower cost or improve customer service—cracking these business problems—that's fun!" says June Drewry, CIO of the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies.

Some good points in that article. Having spent a few years as the Canadian Information Processing Society's national spokes person on this gender issue, I agree with a few points and disagree with others. Let's start with the agreement part:

IT does a terrible job recruiting for IT careers.

I'm not sure whether this is due to the fact that the marketers are mostly men and therefore us marketing messages that they'd want to hear or that all of IT is terrible at all marketing. These recruiting errors start early, in the marketing literature of computing-related educational programs at colleges and universities. If you visit some of the most prestigious computing programs you'll see bland descriptions of computing science and information systems programs -- all focused on things like "learn C++", "algorithms", and "good careers as programmers". If the website is maintained by the computer science department you might even be wowed with some nifty flashing HTML or scrolling techniques from The Information Super Highway(tm).

Visit a website of other professional-preparation programs like law or engineering and you'll see photographs of people actually talking to other people, smiles on their faces as the solve some intriguing societal problem. At worst, you may find a link describing finite element analysis or even algorithms, but it won't be the focus of their recruiting pages.

You'll find the same scenario on the careers page of your local newspaper. IT jobs will display some long list of foreign sounding terms about computers (PeopleSoft, Microsoft, etc.) or even worse, a set of acronyms that sound as if the successful candidate will also suffer from food poisoning (SAP, ERP, CRUD, C#, CRM, etc.) . Postings for IT jobs rarely focus to any degree on solving people problems. In fact, they tend to describe jobs that require one to sit alone in a basement, staring at a monitor everyday.

We need to stop trying to drag techies up the Zachman Framework, against their will

I cringe every time I read a recruitment add for an enterprise architect or other strategic position that demands several years of hands on technical skills in very specific areas. Sure, enterprise architects, data architects, and process architects need to have a thorough understanding of the technologies that help run the business, but they don't have to have done that job in order to understand the architectural role. We don't demand that lawyers be police officers for 5 years before they can be legal experts. We don't require that professional engineers be construction trades people or draftspeople before they can be engineers. Why must all IT jobs start with 5-10 years of programming? The reason why that may have been true10-20 years ago was that there used to be only a couple of routes to get into IT at all. This was due to the fact that people didn't have 6 mainframes in their basement to get hands on experience with technology. That left formal education and training as the primary route to a career in computers. But those days are gone.

Most DBAs I know are excellent technical professionals. I think they'd do a wonderful job of data modeling or data architecture. For many though, I think they'd hate it. These guys (and most of them are men) love understanding, working with, and managing detailed technical nuances of their jobs. They think I'm crazy for wanting to spend days and days with business users, working on process or data models. As for me, I'd go crazy spending much time on indexing strategies or tuning someone else's SQL code day in and day out. Whether it is differing Meyers Brigg profiles, DNA, or brain make up, people tend to be drawn to certain jobs. When I see those job postings that are looking for the ideal candidate who will spend an equal time working in Row One and Row Five of the Data Column, I know that most likely the organization will spend a great deal of time talking to people who are very experienced at one end of column over the other end. And with all the inherent risks associated with gender stereotyping, I'd say that women tend to be drawn to jobs that have more interaction with the business. Not all women, just most.

If you are recruiting candidates for multiple roles (and who isn't), I'd recommend you recruit along the same rows but perhaps multiple columns. Think Business and Data Analyst, not DBA Modeler. Look for Programmer DBAs, not Programmer BPM architects. Let people who are "good at what they do" do what they are good at.

Karen Lopez: Musings on Data, Process, and Architecture

What a Woman Wants...

IT does a terrible job recruiting for IT careers.

We need to stop trying to drag techies up the Zachman Framework, against their will