CIOs have never been under
such a pressure to perform as they are today. The IT department can no
longer act as an impenetrable black box that no one in the organization
dares question. IT must show accountability in hard numbers that relate
to dollars on the balance sheet – or it will be gone. Business
executives are now demanding results and transparency from IT, and they
have learned that if their internal IT department doesn’t perform, they
can scrap it and outsource.
The
logic for IT to transform itself into an accountable business unit is
impeccable, ruthless, and undeniable. IT has no choice: change is the
imperative. IT must run itself like a business.
As IT
shifts from a cost center to a profit center – or at least an
added-value center – it must change its own culture away from asking
for budgets, which only keeps it in the underdog position of having to
justify expenditures. Instead of being on the defensive, IT must learn
how to go over to the attack.
“This is new territory for IT, which is why it’s so
hard. “Businesses measure themselves on financial numbers, on customer
satisfaction,” says Rubin. “If you look at the history of IT, for
years, there wasn’t process management in place, there weren’t quality
measurements or product measurements. Huge pieces were missing. For
CIOs, it has been like trying to run a business before the invention of
bookkeeping.” – Analysis
There are several strategies, best
practices, and systematic schemes that IT can follow to improve its
operation in technical terms – invest in architecture for agility,
rationalize governance, institute process management modeled on
business management, and the like.
“We already talked about spending too much time
keeping the lights on and spending too much time maintaining rack after
rack of servers. But what about development and testing? Do you have an
architecture that allows rapid deployment and reusability? Have you
separated your business rules from your applications? If your business
rules are embedded in your applications then you are creating
additional work to maintain and test your applications thus increasing
your chances of creating defects.” – running IT like it’s your business
But all of this will be useless unless IT
learns to communicate its achievements and its value additions to the
rest of the company. IT has to learn to sell. More to the point, IT has
to play a role in the business decisions beyond simple advocacy.
“The best position is having a seat at the table
where business units make decisions. Having that seat means having a
real understanding of the conditions facing a business unit and being
able to make contributions that help the business unit achieve its
goals. Once alignment is achieved, then IT managers can begin to gather
requirements from internal customers and develop a comprehensive
catalogue of IT products. Only then can IT be considered a true
business.” – How to run IT like a business
Teaching marketing to IT people is not as
improbable as it sounds. The people on the business side of the
enterprise – those who should understand customer service in their
bones, for example – have not done well at learning marketing
themselves, as every analyst of CRM and
customer relations will attest. In this very real sense, the technical
experts of IT stand at least an equal chance of doing better.
