February 2014: In Praise of the Corporate Plodder

At face value, that might not appear to be the most complimentary epithet, but before any of Waters' readers accuse me of being unnecessarily pejorative ─ or worse, downright rude ─ let me explain. The pages of Waters tend to focus on the industry's leaders and its luminaries and visionaries. As a result, we focus almost exclusively on capital markets firms' IT directors and chief information officers (CIOs), and not the legions of workers at the coal face, putting in the countless hours of often repetitive work, necessary to transform the vision and strategies of the organization's upper echelons into tangible results.

Remove the plodders and all you're left with is a vision, and, as everyone knows, it's far easier to make plans than it is to effect them. In short, plodders are invariably companies' "doers", which any IT director worth their salt will acknowledge is one of their most crucial "tools" to deliver on their vision. It's not that the plodders aren't valuable to their organizations, but at the same time, it's only natural for one's focus to fix on those individuals occupying the apex of their hierarchical pyramids.

Corporate plodders tend to be professionally unremarkable. That is to say, they tend to be followers, not leaders; they tend to be listeners, not speakers. That doesn't mean they lead boring lives, although in terms of the strata they typically inhabit within the IT organizations they comprise, they are, by definition, ordinary.

Ties that Bind
One of the ties that has bound the various buy-side and sell-side CIOs featured on the cover of Waters for the past four years is their acknowledgment of the outstanding efforts of those on the lesser rungs of the corporate ladder. A cynic might argue that this is purely lip service motivated by political correctness. But speak to any CIO for any length of time and scratch a little deeper than what might be construed as professional platitudes, and it becomes clear just how important firms' corporate plodders are.

Similar to offensive linemen on a football team, they rarely score the winning touchdown in extra time, although, like their football counterparts, they are responsible for allowing their CIOs ─ the running backs, tight ends, receivers and quarter backs of the corporate world ─ to sprinkle their magic and directly influence the outcome of the game. How important is that?