Creating Diversity in Your IT Staff

Can your IT operations be at their peak without diversity?

Compared to other industries, IT’s record with race-bias lawsuits might

not be the worst, but if CIOs aren’t tracking diversity, their IT

organizations may be at an even costlier disadvantage.

All things being equal in terms of skills and abilities, IT staffs that

are racially, nationally, and gender diverse build better software and

attract more customers than non-diverse organizations.

So why don’t more CIOs make diversity planning a higher priority for

their technology organizations?

It could be the belief that IT organizations don’t discriminate much on

the basis of racial lines. Data from a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity

Commission (EEOC) investigation released in 2002 found that IT

organizations don’t suffer much from racial bias. Only 2 percent of

race-based complaints to the EEOC were from technology companies.

However, it also could be the belief that IT workers spend more time

communing with their computer screens than they do with their colleagues,

making talent the fundamental basis for staffing and salary decisions.

Whatever the reasoning, say experts, CIOs shouldn’t pay attention to

diversity simply out of fear of a racial-bias lawsuit — such as the $5

billion case brought against Microsoft in 2001 by some of its

African-American workers. CIOs, obviously should never discriminate, but

they also should pay attention to diversity because it makes them more

competitive.

”It’s really hard to find a non-diverse environment that survives,”

says Hamid Alipour, vice president of Technology and Systems at New

York-based ESPN Mobile, which brings ESPN’s content to mobile devices.

That’s because a diverse IT group draws from more cultural perspectives

in creating software to serve an increasingly diverse marketplace.

”It’s definitely very critical… Just imagine if you are all white male

Americans and you were to [focus on] a one-dimensional kind of IT,

serving perhaps that very category or class of society that we have

recruited from,” adds Alipour.

In ESPN’s case, having such a homogenous workplace could turn off

millions of customers. The company has viewers from different races and

nationalities in more than 60 countries with 90 million viewers in the

U.S. alone. Many of ESPN’s viewers (and mobile device users) are

Hispanic and African American, says Alipour. So Alipour wants a diverse

IT group in order to design better user interfaces, for instance, that

will appeal to a demographically diverse audience.

Recognizing the importance of a multi-cultural workplace goes beyond just

corporate America.

Technology membership organizations such as Black Data Processing

Associates (BDPA) and the IEEE-USA are working for diversity because, in

a general sense, many IT shops don’t have the data to support that

they’re doing anything at all about diversity.

”Every company has given good lip service to the idea that diversity is

important,” says Wayne Hicks, BDPA national president, and president and

CEO of Cincinnati Business Incubator. ”What (the BDPA) is hoping is that

companies will recognize that we don’t think your company can be

successful moving into the 21st century if you don’t have this as part of

your culture.”

In IEEE’s case the Washington, D.C.-based organization wants to foster

diversity in corporate America and among its membership.

”Representation of blacks in the IEEE membership is in the single

digits, and in most engineering societies, it’s pretty low,” says Pender

M. McCarter, director of communications and public relations at IEEE-USA.

McCarter works on career and technology enhancement policy for the IEEE,

the world’s largest technology association, and also sits on the

diversity committee of the American Association of Engineering Societies.

What can CIOs do to improve diversity?

”[CIOs] don’t need permission from anyone to [take charge of diversity].

They are in control of their IT operations, including their IT

workforce,” says Hicks. Take leadership and make the managers within the

IT department accountable for creating a diverse workforce.

Create metrics that track diversity. The top five best practices that

encourage diversity, according to a National Urban League Study called

Diversity Practices that Work, conducted by Global Lead Management

Consulting of Baltimore, are: