Story:
Favouritism vs. Expertism

After a decade of working in IT business, I noticed among organizations and its members there are always same complain which I believe ends up in such comparison: Favouritism vs. Expertism. It has been always a extremely challenging decision to be made by IT managers, to pick who as a technical decision makers. I think there are few ways of making such kind of decisions such as Favouritism or Expertism. Regardless of what approach we need to make sure the selected person has following pre-conditional skills:

• Having a strong leadership skills which helps him to deal with IT people who are knowledge workers
• Holding enough technical skills 
• be a software passionate
• being able to make a balance between: quality, maintainability and delivery.

According to my experiences in enterprises, in my humble opinion non of those approach independently will work fine. I strongly believe the best approach is like team and votes; I have provided a process and guideline for such concepts while ago in here which is called technology council.

There are always pros and cons, if I would like to do a Strength/Weakness of technology council I would pen down following items:

Strength 

• Less risky to have architectural failures
• Keeps all developers, architects and all project members happy because they have a common place to share ideas
• Having a centralized place for different ideas is so much valuable that in these days car manufacturers (Kanban is coming from there too) are focusing on make a centralized place for ideas and do a POC as soon as possible.
• Having a centralized place will give ability on the time, to mix the old and even refused ideas to make a new and effective idea
• Improves the quality
• Improves the ROI and TCO of organization
• Improves the level of knowledge among organization members
• It saves time and money in a long-run

Weakness

• If you are having a old-fashion school that conflicts makes progress to be delayed, then you will think technology council is not a good choice for you. Because technology council strongly believes in conflict of ideas and emphasize on team communication to align the various ideas with organization goals as well as individual goals. 
• It needs a commitment from everyone
• It is not an approach for old-fashion managers

Please provide your ideas and suggestions. Perhaps we should try to make an extra effort to re-invent the management.