“When someone has their first layoff, they want to say, they will never do this again. Please don’t say that — sure enough, you will have another one six months later.”
Carol Bartz, former CEO of Yahoo! and Autodesk, April 24, 2020, on MarketWatch
Carol Bartz’s wisdom comes from executing large layoffs and cutting costs. She now passes her experience on corporate boards with the same options.
The posts here talk to how to make cuts. Let’s talk about why enterprise IT (and other IT) will get cut. Enterprise IT is targeted for layoffs like any other – or maybe more than any other – department. All factors together: higher wage scales, specialist knowledge, and projects that can be cut for now; point to enterprise IT as a place to cut.
In the “C” suite and the Boardroom, Enterprise IT management has a reputation for asking for more every time: more money, more people, more management attention, more time to get work done.
Enterprise IT projects fail more than 50% of the time. Once large projects finish, few managers want to repeat the effort for years – sometimes a generation. In that climate, the Enterprise IT assertions often fall on skeptical ears. Skeptical ears opine that enterprise IT can get cut. That is becoming a reality in these challenging times.
Next post - How Enterprise IT can change management perceptions.
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