Discussion on:

Beware the zealot in an information technology management role

Do you have a technology zealot for a manager? What technology is sacred and what problems has that zealousness wrought on your projects or your career?

Perhaps you are a zealous manager?take the IT Management Communication Quiz and find out.

http://techrepublic.com.com/5138-10878-5428923.html

On the flip side - a download asks:

Embrace the software zealot in a development role
http://techrepublic.com.com/5138-3513-5764801.html

Are you a zealot developer? Has your passion helped your career or has it hindered it? What is your advice for the zealot software developer?

All clients play this game to a greater or lesser extent of favoring one technology over the other. If the manager has become a demogauge of a particular technology, then one should be prepared to face the lion's rage when seeking to bag him in his den.

It is neither an employee's or a conulstant's place to question the decisions made on this level. Very few members of upper managment deal well with hearing they've been led down the primrose path, not matter how politely it is conveyed.

The best solution to these issues are well-informed technical management having steering committess of all the involved participants, users, developers and engineering support staff, being included in the decision making progress.

I hate that point which I agree is the truth. I hate that management has to have their ego stroked. When I was a boss I didnt like being wrong, but it was far better being enbarrassed infront of a few than hundreds. Management gets paid to make the best decisions for the company not for themselves, that's why its a team effort, oh well. I dont want to be surrounded by yes men/women I want people that are willing to make a contribution. Anything less is stupid and suicidal.

When i read it article i thougth that the author tries to blame the developer. Because never i seen that Mr. Manager makes the controls or something else from programming - it is not his job. Manager is man who has sharp eye, like eagle(better if it increased by glasses). Manager is GOD of any business, he is honour and conscience of any company. He is responsible man and he must use the ready product only. He never said that the raw product will usefull for his parthner. He can't make the risk deal for his clients. BUT!!! He MUST lead their collegues, he must study any platforms by his subordinated pro, by their hand and brains. And IF THEY ARE NOT FANATIC in some platform or technology WHO is MANAGER THEN? He is stupid donkey, because he will WASTE MORE TIME to find profitable IT product, because his collegues are not modern and not crazy in ASP.NET, BPEL, Oracle 10g, webservices, XML, XSL and so on. Manage must opens in EVERY ONE the ability to be FANATIC in modern technology. Manager must try to open in everyone from his band their CREATIVE POTENTIAL. And let it be, i love that in our small planet are peole who believe in everyone and who see that every one people need for God.

As the author of article above, I can assure one and all that my observations about the dangers of brand-name zealotry in a development manager are confined to that role. In fact, I believe that brand-name zealotry is a virtue, not a vice, in developers who are implementing designs rather than originating them - and have written a subsequent article on that variation of this general theme.

I've seen this all too often. Some wannabe IT manager joins a company and starts turning it upside down by wanting to tear out the stable and secure systems that the company is running in favor of some other crap (read Microsoft), simply because he read about it in Gartner. He knows nothing about the technology, nor does he know the pros' and con's, but because everyone else is doing it, he has to jump onto the bandwagon and join in on the stupidity. I want to know how in the flying $#$%%^ these morons get their jobs and what schmuck hires them to make such assinine decisions? I have left previous jobs because of such pompous asses and I am facing it again where I currently work.

What about the ?old-school? managers? The managers that were programmers when dinosaurs ruled the data center, that reminisce of the ?good old days?. Relatively recently I worked in a shop where a manager tried to put off moving from classic ASP to ASP .Net until the COBOL .Net compiler was available. It wasn?t until change was forced on them that a moved was made and then anything that went wrong was due to that unproven ?mad scientist s**t?, for example, OOP and multi-threading.

Considering the spectacular failures I've seen in "Wow! It's Hot! It's New!" technology, I've often considered writing CIO's of large organizations and asking if they have filled their "Igor" slot yet.

I certainly can say, "Abbie Normal, Master!" as well as Marty Feldman did.

As an IT Development Manager I don't favor any single vendor source or product for the organization that employs me. I much rather have vendors "work their a***s off" to ensure that the products and services they are hawking will fit both with the legacy applications and future directions. I ensure the best fit and value for the objective. I look at short, medium and long term benefits and risks.

Zealot? No way! I/we simply can't afford it. But I do have my professional conviction which is to always strive for what's best for the organization. Not so with vendors who see someone like me as an obstacle to go around. And go around me they do try and go.

Working for the current CIO who, as another poster has mentioned, has his ego stroked by the vendors, in this case Microsoft and Gartner, the challenge becomes almost insurmountable to remain unbiased. Don't get me wrong, if MS or Gartner really knew what my organization needed and could prove it, I have no trouble utilizing that product or service.

Regardless, my current organization is not a MS everything shop. We have been on Lotus NOTES/Dominos since 1995, Novell since the day we left proprietary vendors such as Wang. We use and have HP UX, Oracle, J2EE, Eclipse, Linux and Apache as well as Win2000 or 2003 servers and IIs, MS Office, Visual Basic, Access, MSDN and third party MS products.

We had adopted Java early on - C# and dot net were not even in the picture at that time. My development staff are versed in both architectures. We have produced business applications with the various tools as appropriate. We found that dot net is an assumable risk for smaller departmental applications but on enterprise level the risk is to high. Why? Because of MS's long term plans.

In comes the last year or so of MS and Gartner stroking the CIO who aside from the title is not truly a "techy" with knowledge of how the dot net framework will impact our organization. The truth of the matter is that dot net is going the direction of proprietary dinosaurs like Wang. To benefit from dot net and all the current software that MS is releasing we will have to adopt it wholesale or we don't get all the extras MS is hawking. My CIO has become blinded to the risks which include "ripping" out every currently stable system that is not MS and replacing them with more unstable, security deficient MS products.

With our current infrastructure, we have enjoyed a very long cycle of stability and security which includes peace of mind. Anywhere we have MS in place we are constantly patching (but not until after testing the patches), creating redundancies and fighting the "hordes" at the door.

When any of my staff come to me with a proposal, my first question is not "what tools, language, etc." but a review in how well it will fit into the organization - does it "talk" with our other systems? Can it be scaled? What is the cost in time and effort? And so forth. We developed our own n-tier architecture framework quite some time ago. If the proposal cannot adequately fit, why not? What can we change? What will it affect? And so forth.

Am I a "zealot"? No way! But I am mindful every day of the pressures from vendors who work their way around the system just so they can sell their products.

So let me stress again, I'm not obliged to any one vendor's vision. I'm not against MS but they sure haven't done anything lately to assuage the risks or to paint a future picture that ensures their product offerings will work well with others. So what does an IT Development Manager do? They hedge their bets while keeping a very very close eye on the long term prize.

What I see most is zealots that will not look at another technology. This is a real big problem. It should be about what makes for a sound business decision. I have worked with Enterprise Java and the Dot Net framework and there are very few cases were using Java makes since.

Microsoft will help you get your staff trained almost free. The framework is open source and will be here for some time. Even if Microsoft was to completely drop it. Alot of the development tools are available for free or little cost. There is huge community support.

A number of Java developers and yes zealots are making the move to Dot Net. Dot Net development goes much faster and the developers do not charge as much for there time.

For distributed applications I would go with Dot Net too.

In my experience the Anti-Microsoft crowd is blind to anything Microsoft helps advance. What surprises me is when big business gets caught up in the hype and goes Anti-Microsoft too. Even at the expense of the bottom line. I guess the stockholder is really not that important after all.

If you want to pay the hidden costs for being beholden to Microsoft, fine, just don't complain when the pain starts e.g. the VB6 developers suffering because it was not practical to port some application. I saw this issue at work, with a legacy VB project.

As for community, Java has a far larger and more active community than .Net, and the .Net community even ports OSS platforms from Java OSS! If you look carefully, you can have a totally free development environment in Java, with very little lock-in, forget that with .Net, BTW an don't regard Mono as serious competition given it's lack of (probably patented) libraries.

Well this Java developer see no good reason to move to a less flexible environment, like .Net, with less libraries (even with some ports from Java) and less capable support products. I have so much OSS choice (e.g. Castor, Apache XML, Apache Jakarta) that we don't need to buy any software components, this really does save money and time! I once needed to load and process massive XML files, Java did fine, all the Microsoft 'solutions' failed!

Sorry to break your bubble, but many people do not trust Windows for mission critical systems or do not want to change over to Windows compatible systems (very costly for a large estate), in these instances you need portable software, Java makes this easy and we have used this flexibility.

Lastly, I have a pared-down Windows system (heavily secured and non-microsoft firewall) so that I can use some Windows only software and hardware, but I would never use Windows for a mission critical server given all the performance hits, security hits and system maintenance issues, the TCO is just too high. I have no problem putting software on a customers Windows server if that is what they use, I naturally assume that they don't mind the extra work and downtime. We have even had customers compain about Windows bugs (not our software), but politely told to get lost by Microsoft.

Have a look at this rant, in amongst the angst and wordiness, there are some quite valid reasons to avoid all Microsoft products e.g.
http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS.html

Having worked my way up over 20 years and loking at the situation from the 'other side' (Director of IT and eCommerce), every time I hire someone THEY want to turn the place upside down and start reorganizing the system with what THEY know and love best.

EVERY operating system, tool, technique or technology has its own particular strengths and weaknesses -- and it is up to the manager/director to decide the corporate standard, and to enforce it where and when appropriate.

Running a company is NOT a "democracy" -- management needs to make tough (and often unpopular) decisions based on BUSINESS NEEDS. Managers have NO obligation to explain the reasons behind every decision they make -- as employees, until you are running your OWN company -- better get used it.

Any smart manager or director WILL ASK for recommendations and proposals -- but in the end, it's his or her ass on the line, and the decisions made must reflect what is best for the business.

Best of breed is NOT always the best 'solution'. Mixing and matching technologies produces some pretty ugly bastard children -- impossible to maintain -- and taking ten times longer to just integrate and interface.

I've had consultants come in, and try to ram certain products or technologies down my throat -- and I find this unacceptable. AS THE CUSTOMER, if I ask for a database written in Microsoft SQL Server, I DO NOT WANT the consultant to go off and return with one developed in MySQL or Oracle, just because HE feels it is BETTER.

In my current organization, we have UNIX, DOS, Novell (all flavors), and every possible version of Windows. It is a SUPPORT NIGHTMARE. I am now in the process of simplifying and standardizing on current Windows platforms -- and struggling tooth and nail to get cooperation from the old guys who are happy with their DOS and Novell systems and don't want to learn new technologies.

We run a 24-hour operation -- when our systems break, MY phone rings -- 24 hours per day -- 7 days per week. If, by enforcing corporate standards for hardware, operating systems and application technologies, I can REDUCE the number of times my phone rings at 4am -- both me and my wife will sleep better at night -- and the business will continue to operate more trouble-free.

As in all things, the trick is to find the proper balance between the rational & the irrational (i.e., emotional). This is no mean feat.

Given a position of authority, it is to be expected that one will be more easily tempted to give sway to his irrational. Detractors will be more easily dismissed, either by an explicit exercise of authority, or by making the burden of proof to required to counter one's position sufficiently high so as to render rebutal ineffectual.