Harris Kern’s article on IT Discipline Mentoring program is right on target. I bet some of the negative discussion threads on the article came from folks who never had the opportunity to work at a company that invested enough time and effort to put them them through such a mentoring program. In case people have not noticed, IT hiring is actually up this year and IT employees have more choices than ever where to work. Putting together a good mentoring program sounds like simple management 101, but few companies have the discipline and skills to be able to step back and organize the type of workshop that Harris discusses. I’ve been in numerous similar situations and the efforts to take on this sort of activity without an impartial outside expert usually fail.
One more idea I would add to the proposed outline is to spend some time up front interviewing not only IT executives, but also non-IT business partners within the company to get a better view on how those outside the IT organization actually view it.