“This change shows that IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance.
“However, IT leaders are less confident that they are
driving innovations that lead their companies to new products and
processes. Innovation demands a new approach to IT planning.” – From
McKinsey’s The next frontier in IT strategy
Current forces are acting to change IT in
two connected ways. First, it must run its own shop like a business,
along verifiably accountable lines. Second, it must actively advocate
the enterprise development path, in close concert with the rest of the
executive layer.
In changing the way it runs its shop, IT
will have to expose all of its processes – which itself may be
difficult, and uncover deadwood – and describe these processes in
business language.
“Where line-of-business managers often talk about
time-to-market, IT pros are tragically too often stuck on
mean-time-to-repair. The term ‘repair’ can be an indictment of spending
too much time looking in the rear-view mirror. I’m convinced that IT -
and network and systems management specifically – have to force
themselves to measure their success based on more business-relevant
metrics like mean-time-to-change or, ultimately, mean-time-to-adapt.” –
The Evolution of Management Metrics: From MTTRepair to MTTAdapt
The rest of the company is never going to
learn the specialized technical language that IT has to speak to do its
job: IT will have to learn to translate its value into its company’s
standard corporate language. But there’s much more here than mere
translation. IT has to think in this new language, and change its
culture to become a new force inside the enterprise.
Changing
culture is difficult, requiring self-challenge and courage. But people
do it every day, often because circumstances compel them outside of
their comfort zones. Speaking of IT managers addicted to specific
technology solutions, Paul Murphy says:
“Peer support is one of the most powerful means we
have of ensuring that we get only information that’s consistent with
what we already believe” – 6 steps to IT management freedom
CIOs should caucus with enterprise
architects to help set into the enterprise culture an understanding of
the roles and rules of all the parts of the company, both technical and
business, and to surface a map of the enterprise terrain that all
stakeholders can subscribe to and own.
“The ‘Zachman Framework’ is ‘a logical structure for
classifying and organizing the descriptive representations of an
Enterprise that are significant to the management of the Enterprise as
well as to the development of the Enterprise’s systems.’
“The Framework is represented in a matrix covering
the six vital questions which an enterprise needs to ask and answer
namely Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, These form the columns of
the matrix. The framework is further split into six perspectives (role
based) namely Planner, Owner, Designer, Builder, Subcontractor and User
– allowing the stakeholders to visualize specific information without
losing the overall enterprise context.” – Business – IT alignment : A brief look into EA and Zachman Framework
IT can help create an updated business
language that models business processes, and that offers new analysis
to executives and managers. It should after all be the chief INFORMATION officer who brings to the whole enterprise the means to improve its corporate decision-making.
