IT StrategyRaj Sheelvant’s blog on harnessing Information Technology to create and sustain competitive advantage for the businesses

Knowledge Worker and Resource Allocation

The Knowledge worker is still perceived as a semi-skilled or an unskilled worker by the mid level executives. This is how it typically plays out in a budget meeting. One of the finance management member looks at the amount that is being spent on sustaining the application that has been in production for past 2 years. They want to reduce the cost (because IT is cost center and everyone is looking to IT department reduce cost). Let’s say two developers are involved in sustaining that system. Executive will begin talking in term of reducing the head count to 1.5. How can you reduce 2 developers to 1.5 developers? To the non IT management this is simple. Ask one of the persons to be on the sustaining application for 50% of his time. Find another project to work on, to fill another 50% of his time.

It seems simple superficially, but as we dig deeper it’s impossible to divvy up the work this way. Knowledge worker’s output is not strongly correlated with time. Granted more time IT programmers spends more lines of code he writes. But the inspiration/ideas to program come in bursts. It’s not extraordinary for a programmer to write most of the code in 2 hours after 5 pm after seemingly loitering his time during the day (meeting anyone?). This is not typical to IT but to all knowledge workers. By putting time limits (work only 4 hours in the morning on sustaining work and afternoons on another project), the management executives will end up making the Knowledge resource less productive. Again, it would have worked in Industrial Assembly line (Work 4 hours on Car A assembly line and then later in the afternoon move to work on assembly line for Car B) for semi-skilled workers.

This is a bad strategy to save cost and I see it done again and again. I would challenge all the IT managers to educate themselves and their non technical peer about the short fall of such a method. In the long run this is not a cost saving strategy.

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Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Knowledge Management, Human Resource, IT Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.