Re: Again
IBM in the UK has an organisation called the Technical Consultancy Group (TCG), which is supposed to be the collection of the most senior technical people in the UK (Distinguished Engineers and other senior staff, upcoming technical stars voted in (mostly) on merit etc.). Every year they hold 1-2 face to face meetings, where they get together and talk technology, issues facing the business and so on. This spring's meeting - to be hosted at a business partner - was unceremoniously ditched in favour of a "virtual" gathering (which must have pleased the partner immensely) due to the new travel restrictions.
To me, this was an inflection point: it's long been clear that IBM senior management views the idea of its technical staff getting together in anything other than a customer-funded project context with suspicion and disdain; that TCG can no longer run its talking shop is a sign that the beancounters have overrun the last holdouts of the technical side.
As others have noted, the idea of a divisional GM personally approving all travel requests is ridiculous, and any organisation that is even in the position where it thinks something like this might be a good idea is deeply unwell. Let's not forget the chain of managers that every such approval must pass through also. The amount of non-productive crap that IBM managers have to deal with is already immense.
Retrograde steps like this travel policy, in combination with the switch to running redundancy programmes on a statutory minimum basis, are hollowing out the façade from the inside out.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
