from EuroBiz Magazine
February 2009
by Bill Dodson

What makes Information Technology (IT) implementation and support services in businesses in China any different from any company in the West? I dare say we more frustrated by our IT departments and service providers here in China more than in our home countries. The feeling stems as much from an inherent – if unspoken – fear of the unknown that IT represents with its gadgets, its opaque terminologies, its secret nerd-handshakes, as from the fact that The Chinese Way of IT support compounds the mystique surrounding the discipline. But with operational expenses at the forefront of every company’s mind in 2009, reducing the cost of IT service expenditures by reducing their need will surely please even the most fiscally conservative headquarters.

Unfortunately, the entire relationship between Western companies and the IT function in China is complicated in that the vast majority of organizations have to outsource their IT to a plethora of small, local outfits. This has as much to do with the dearth of IT talent in the marketplace as with the newness of IT as a discipline in China. The West has been fouling up corporate IT projects for decades; in China, a mere ten years at most. Outsourcing IT in many ways can be more frustrating and expensive than using qualified, in-house resources. Outsourcers have multiple clients they are juggling; your Management does not have the convenience of interviewing outsourcing resources, who are typically young and whose English language capabilities might be wanting; and outsourcing companies in China never seem to give adequate time to thinking through to the root causes of organizational IT problems, or to sticking around long enough to ensure issues never recur.

In taking over the position as General Manager of a professional services firm in China last year I immediately saw that IT was a sore spot in every user’s side in the company. Users were quite visibly agitated when their computer went blank or locked up or ate their word processing document. It was also an expensive sore spot: downtime kept staff from working on client projects. Problems also promised that in future IT contracts to the service provider to which the company outsourced support would be larger. I realized that something had to be done when the Founder of the company stormed into my office one day and declared, “Either IT solves this [network outage] problem in the next two hours or we fire the whole lot of them.”

It was then I decided to treat IT as though it was an internal department reporting directly to me. Soon after I required of the Chinese principal of the service outsourcing company that he and I meet with the Office Manager every afternoon of the following week to get to the source of the IT instabilities and to put in place controls that would reduce the chaos IT had become. I explained to the services principal that the controls and habits he helps introduce into our company he will be able to replicate in the offices of other customers to bring his own operational costs down. He embraced the idea with gusto.

One of the first things I noted in our discussions that week was that Chinese staff in the office and Chinese IT support staff were encouraging each other’s sense of urgency. Chinese society is extremely urgency-driven: all other issues take a back seat to the immediate situation at hand. We who live in China see this everyday: a driver stops in the middle of the road when he’s confused about which fork to take; an electric bike sees a gap in traffic she simply must take in that split second between life and death; a scrum of would-be passengers press into the entrance of a bus, simultaneously.

I saw this most clearly with a Chinese employee who was sitting blithely beside her desk while an IT technician was fiddling with her computer. “What’s the problem with the computer?” I asked. It was Monday, mid-morning, when he should have been hard at work on a project. “Oh, I couldn’t get a wireless connection with the laptop in my home. He’s here to fix the problem,” the employee said blithely. “Is this problem keeping you from doing your work at hand?” I asked, suspecting that in lieu of a coffee break this was a more convenient excuse for taking a rest. “No.” I pointed at the technician, who looked up at me lamely. “Go. Now. Arrange a time with him either before or after work or at lunchtime to fix this little problem. Right now he has work to do.” The technician quickly gathered up his bag of tricks and trundled off, mystified by my reaction.

To the technician I was the irrational Westerner; his job was to fix the problem the user had called him on. My job was to make sure staff had an environment in which they could be productive and have somewhat fulfilling work to do that was profitable. The problem, I explained to the principal of the IT services company, was there was no triage system in place to help both users and service representatives prioritize issues. To both users and service providers, every issue was an emergency. The result was that IT was actually creating as many issues as it was solving. IT and user habits brought in off the busy streets of China were maintaining a destabilized work environment.

Another problem offices in China suffer involves QQ, the Chinese social networking phenomenon that sees complete saturation of the Chinese internet market. QQ supports an MSN style texting interface, as well as the most popular website in China. The website offers games and news and forums and music that keeps Chinese netizens occupied for weeks, if they so choose. QQ also spawns a fair number viruses, worms, trojans and what-not that can bring any computer and network to which it is attached to its knees. So no QQ in our office. (One user plaintively defended her use of QQ by explaining to me she had downloaded QQ’s own virus protection software. I had to expand the ban to all QQ products). And at the start of every month since I began my frequent meetings with the IT principal technicians run a diagnostic of all computer systems to ensure all software on the network remains standard, remains acceptable to the business and remains virus-free.

My monthly meetings with the principal of the IT service provider also gives us an opportunity to review the logs and statistics of virus protection programs, and file and email server logs. The reports permit us to identify persistent attacks and bottlenecks that keep staff from getting their work done. We noted in one review session that a particular user above all seemed to attract an inordinate number of virus attacks. After a few questions put to the user we determined it was his use of the laptop computer at his home that exposed the system to viruses. We told him to go buy one a computer for his home use.

Finally, we had to develop new habits in both users and IT technicians. A requisition form that each employee now has to fill out identifies and prioritizes IT issues. Prioritization forces both employees and IT to slow down a moment, consider the implications of the request for service, and to schedule repairs accordingly. The requisition forms also create an audit trail that the IT principal and company managers review at the end of each month to determine if indeed root causes for issues have been resolved, and if there are other related issues that may cause problems in future.

Entering the winter of 2008 we were able to substantially stabilize the IT environment in the company and drastically reduce the amount of time IT spends in our office fighting fires. We look forward in the Spring of 2009 to renegotiating the IT contract at a much lower rate than the year before, and reinvesting the difference in professional development for our own staff.

Copyright ©William R. Dodson, 2009