Consulting Up The Ladder
I just read a article on Adaptive Path’s blog called The Frozen Middle and it reminded me of my days with Web Plantation, consulting on largish site overhauls and training in-house web teams how to integrate their work with the company at large. Like in the article, the most personally challenging part of my job was working through the corporate structure - climbing the ladder to work through the Frozen Middle and make the connections company-wide that would allow the web teams we worked with to be more successful. I was always surprised when we’d end up in a meeting with a CEO to talk about reducing the number of rungs in the ladder so that good decisions from the bottom made their way to other places in the company faster and more efficiently.
What struck me about Peter’s article is that my experience wasn’t unique - that “web” consultants the world over find themselves morphing from CSS / XHTML hackers into corporate management consultants. What qualifications does a guy with an art degree have for giving advice to the head of an amazingly successful company? Why does this happen and… this is the strange part… why do they listen?
I think part of the the reason for this phenomenon is in the character and work of web developers. We create tools that work in a global setting, not just a localized one. When we come to a problem, we’re almost always thinking in terms of integration and collaboration - it’s the open-source way! We understand the power of communities of individuals to be catalysts for innovation in disciplines far outside the scope of that community’s interests, and often times find our own inspiration comes from people who may have never even used a web site. Add to that a healthy dose of “delusions of grandeur” and I think you’ve got the beginnings of why this sort of thing happens.
Why do you think this happens?
Typically, web developers show results on a bigger, more substantial level than the usual IT dept response to a request or problem. While IT managers tend to be tied up with all of the “why nots” of corporate technology, we are lucky enough that a large percentage of our work exists outside of that bubble. we get to work on a solution without going through the regular channels.
At the end of the day, its the IT director that spends millions to simply “run things” (exaggerated common misperception), while “that web guy” went and built something visible on a shoe string budget.
more often than not, the technologies that we are working with are not any more complicated or important than the internal workings — they are just wholly accessible to us.
Good ideas get brought into production quickly.