Your top concerns
Managing employees worries you most, finds an exclusive Network World survey.
By Julie Bort
Network World, 07/17/00
It's 11:30 p.m. You close your eyes . . . and find yourself in a swirl of green fog, sitting at your desk, typing madly. Lightning descends from the sky with a heart-thumping crack, and in that one brilliant flash your stack of project requests magically doubles. Moments later, red flashing alarms beep at you from your monitor's screen. As you turn to dispatch one of your network administrators to fight this fire, she evaporates . . . you bolt awake. It's 2:30 a.m. Employee management worries are keeping you up at night.
So indicates the results of a survey we undertook to find out what parts of your job concern you most. In the three-part survey, conducted for us by Research Concepts in Berlin, Mass., 100 network executives at companies with 1,000 to more than 20,000 employees ranked overall areas of concern. They then rated their general concerns on a scale from 1 to 10. Lastly, they drilled down for ratings on 35 specific concerns.
When ranking overall concerns, management came up tops against technology, career and industry changes. Forty-two percent of respondents ranked management as the area that causes them the most concern. Technology followed closely, with 38% of respondents giving it the "most concerned" rank. Career was far behind, with only 15% rating it as the area of utmost concern, and the network industry was rated last, with only 3% most concerned. Fifty-eight percent ranked the network industry as the area of least concern. As one respondent explained: "My main concern is being able to accomplish high volumes of work with the amount of staff I'm provided. I either need more staff or less work required of me."
Once employees are found, network executives scratch their heads over how to keep and train them. "Employees? They're the ones who get the job done! If you have good employees, how do you keep them? How do you find and attract new employees, with new skills, who work well with us?" one respondent declared.
The issue of finding and retaining qualified employees rated an 8.36 - your highest concern on the list. Employee training rated your second highest concern, with an 8.08.
For the latter, expense is the problem because training is costly, respondents told us.
Worse still, once trained, you are often forced to increase pay for the employee or risk losing that person to a better offer. As one respondent put it, "We lost a [network] person to retirement and hired a younger person to take his place. When he gets his training, we will not be able to pay him what he will be worth in the market today."
Security scares you
On the heels of human resources concerns come overall technology worries, security in particular. Security, as a general issue, hit a mean of 8.01. The closer the respondent was to direct network responsibilities, the higher the concern over security. Senior corporate-level managers to whom technical units report rated security a 7 while network directors/managers gave it an 8.33. Clearly, computer security has become the domain of the network executive.
Of all the ways to have a breach, hackers are the threat that knits your eyebrows most tightly. Keeping the network safe from hackers rated a 7.94 among all respondents, again with those claiming titles of network director/manager more concerned about this than any other category of respondents. For them, hackers rated an 8.34. Many told us the source of the concern is someone gaining unauthorized access to the company's financial information and confidential data about customers.
Others added that the perception of being insecure is just as deadly as a successful attack. As one respondent said, "If someone broke into our Web site or our network, it wouldn't matter what the network had on it, we would be shut down because we wouldn't know how badly we were compromised. No degree of network infrastructure would mean anything if we were violated."
Personally speaking
Although few people named career as their top overall worry, some specific personal concerns have you extremely anxious. The choice between high pay and quality of life weighs heaviest on your minds, rating a 7.96. Or as one person described: "Money is the only reason I do this. It's why I miss my kids' birthdays. It's why I put up with this job."
Many long hours are spent frantically trying to keep up with the whitewater-fast pace of technology. Acquiring skills in new and emerging technologies, such as quality of service and VPNs, rated a 7.74; maintaining skills in established technologies such as routing or switching, rated a 7.62; and acquiring and improving upon business skills rated a 7.59. "If I don't improve my training," one respondent said, "I lose my ability to advance. And if I don't stay ahead of my employees, I lose my effectiveness."
End of the line
Interestingly, those with network-specific titles remain unworried about finding outsourcers, rating that task at a mere 3.61. Yet, those who hold broader IT responsibilities - senior IT executives including chief information officers, vice presidents and managing directors of MIS - rated this task a 5.85.
"I'm still responsible for these subcontractors doing their job," explained one respondent.
When factoring in all job titles, the areas that concern you least are implementing and managing hosted services, and building and maintaining supplier management systems, such as e-marketplaces. The former rated a 4.18 generally, and a 2.75 among network managers/directors specifically - the lowest number in the survey. The latter task rated a 4.45 generally and a 3.94 among network managers. However, it was of significantly more concern to corporate executives, who ranked supplier management systems a 6.0.
Those tasks are coming, yet today they don't take precedence over managing your current needs, which one participant succinctly described as: "Too much work, not enough people."
Contact Julie Bort
Top 10 general job concerns
Top 10 concerns by job title
Digging into the concerns
