Consultants and analysts share their stories about working in the IT trenches before making the leap to advising clients.
Joe Skorupa, once in the IT department at Indiana University and now a research vice president Gartner, is among those with IT tales to tell.
Skorupa today is a research vice president covering networking and communications equipment at Gartner. He values the lessons he learned early in his career, as do many other industry analysts and consultants who also got their starts building switching equipment, setting up networks and putting out fires on the front lines of IT.
“Nobody can know how IT interoperates with the business as intimately as someone within that business, because they eat, live and breathe it all day long,” says Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of enterprise research at Yankee Group. Kerravala started working as a Unix programmer at Canada’s University of Victoria and moved into enterprise companies, including investment banking firm Alex Brown.
“Having this experience gives me credibility and helped me a lot early on. I know it’s not just about speeds and feeds; people don’t really just buy off that, it’s just one part of the equation,” he says. (For tips from Kerravala and others on becoming an IT analyst, check out our related story.)
Takes one to know one
Having spent time as a practitioner makes it easier to establish a rapport with clients who need advice about how to run a project, says Mark Nicolett, a vice president and research director at Gartner covering security and privacy.
Nicolett worked at several insurance firms in the Hartford, Conn., area until he spent 15 years at Aetna, working on projects such as disaster recovery and client-server management systems. Now with 10 years under his belt at Gartner, Nicolett says he still works to keep his technology knowledge fresh, even if he doesn’t get the chance to touch technology daily.
“Any IT practitioner, regardless of their background or current position as an analyst, faces technical obsolescence and must refresh their skills. But as an analyst, you have to adjust to a situation where you are not placing your hands on technology,” Nicolett says. (Read more notable quotes from Nicolett and other IT analysts.)
Not only does the hands-on experience lend analysts credibility among end user organizations today, but it also instills in them an ability to attack business and process problems with technology. Thinking like a technologist translates into the analyst role, some say.
“In principle, working as an analyst is not far from working as a software architect. You just have to adapt your conceptual and logical skills to another type of process,” says Jean-Pierre Garbani, a vice president with Forrester Research.
Garbani started in IT at a small company in France that was automating control processes of nuclear power plants and moved to Bull GE, where he developed networks and transactional systems. Garbani also took part in launching a software company, but ultimately made the leap to analyst after two of his colleagues in IT at John Hancock moved into the area and lured him to the other side.
Garbani can still recall how he perceived consultants and analysts when he was in the trenches and works to avoid coming across that way to his clients. In addition, his past life as an IT professional gives Garbani a healthy dose of cynicism when evaluating vendor pitches.
“I remember trying to make sense of Gartner or Giga reports and finding them lacking in details and sometimes downright inaccurate,” he says. “I now know how it is done: the politics, budgets and influences. I have been there, and it has not changed in all these years. I know the B.S. that is served to analysts [by vendors]. I did it myself.”
Reality check
For some, early IT experiences provided an opportunity to be a part of industry-making events.
Peter Sevcik remembers the day his work with the Advanced Research Projects Agency in Washington, D.C., led to the dividing of the Arpanet into multiple networks and the beginning of today’s Internet. “I pulled the switch along with Col. Heidi Heiden at noon, Oct. 4, 1983,” he recalls. (Hear more about Sevcik’s Aparnet memories in our podcast.)
But more important for his work today, Sevcik says he remembers the politics within an organization that makes technology adoption a challenge. He keeps that with him when trying to help user organizations solve a business problem with technology.
“Consultants and analysts don’t always take into account the organizational inertia that exists in companies,” says Sevcik, who today is president at NetForecast, a consultancy that specializes in application performance and real-time traffic analysis. “In order for some new technology to succeed, it will require supportive processes and dealings with other parts of the organization that maybe have never been dealt with before.”
Despite the benefits these industry watchers gained in their early IT roles, some say transitioning out of IT and into network industry research wasn’t necessarily a natural or easy process. For many, the move required honing business, communications, presentation and writing skills — and even sharpening their technology skills.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” says Rich Ptak, a founder and principal analyst with Ptak, Noel & Associates. “I hear a lot of folks talking about getting off the corporate treadmill and relaxing into consulting work, but it doesn’t always represent a steady paycheck, and you don’t always lose that boss you wanted to escape. You get more bosses — your clients.”
For some, the transition represented a bit of an ego check.
“You think consultants don’t know much when you’re in IT. You think you know a lot about technology, but what you know is a lot about how technology is deployed in your organization. That was a big — and very rude — awakening for me, and it took me a while to ramp up,” says Yankee Group’s Kerravala. “You have to be comfortable giving up the hands-on technical edge that you once had.”
Others say that while they miss the daily contact with technology, becoming an analyst gives them the opportunity to broaden their knowledge by talking to many end-user organizations about their large-scale implementations.
“The nice thing is I get to work with a lot of folks that are working with a lot of technologies, more than I could work with in IT on my own,” Gartner’s Skorupa says.
For more reading, check out our Q&A with Gartner security analyst John Pescatore, whose early IT days include jobs at the U.S. Secret Service and later GTE.
