Under pressure to run itself
like a business, and now forced to provide value to stakeholders in the
same way commerce provides satisfaction to customers, the IT division
of the enterprise has to find new ways of talking with the company.
“If the business does not think that IT is providing
value, you can use metrics to show them otherwise. Metrics about
availability and uptime, SLAs, change requests implemented, money saved
due to process or performance improvements, and many others can
highlight the things that IT brings to the table. Create executive
level dashboards that sell the value of IT real time. One of IT’s
biggest faults is that IT rarely celebrates its success stories. IT
falls victim to the ‘what have you done for me lately’ routine. If you
got it, flaunt it!” – running IT like it’s your business
One large and new focus of IT can be to
supply information to the company proactively instead of reactively,
and this can be bound up with its advocacy for the development path it
sees. While the rest of the company doesn’t speak the technical
language of IT, there are many issues of great importance to executives
that fall on IT’s shoulders.
The concepts that the
business people grasp include business intelligence: IT is increasingly
tasked with developing systems that provide BI. Currently IT is asked
to provide dashboard views of the company so executives can make
decisions: IT is the supply end of a demand dynamic. This can be
reversed, and assertive CIOs and IT cultures do reverse this, by
actively educating and persuading stakeholders.
“BT’s SOA proponents have
been able to evolve the company’s focus from maintaining operations to
concentrating on the customer experience, he explained. Now, even BT’s CEO
is talking about services such as order to cash. ‘The language of the
IT department has now percolated right up through the business,’ he
said.” – Who takes credit for SOA ‘success’? Should IT?
Agility is another concept that the C-level
executive suite grasps well, at least in terms of its benefits, if not
the technological sea change required to develop it.
The
internal politics of corporate endeavor mean that CIOs must become
adept politicians to advance the technology position of the company.
The culture of IT must change, and this can best happen through the
influence and collaborative efforts of all IT people, not simply from CIO
leadership. The need for IT to change remains real no matter who in the
enterprise acts to initiate change, whether IT personnel, dynamic IT
leadership, or non-IT forces within the company.
“Businesses are already organized in silos which
means politics already exist inside and between silos [...] The
existing great divide between business and IT, makes any new IT
initiative a political issue” – Enterprise Architecture politics, executive overview
IT culture is going to have to understand its “customers” and speak in their terms – this is not so hard, since IT understands the business process often at least as well as anyone in the company and sometimes much better.
Several
models taken from commerce are useful to emulate, including a
storefront relationship with managers and workers, but most importantly
a live, always-on place in executive discussion.
But it
would be tragic if IT learns the wrong things from commerce, throwing
away its insider status, and alienating its customers. Marketing wisdom
exists in abundance, but is more rarely executed in business than might
be expected. IT people have to become marketing experts now as well,
but they’ll have to be rigorous in choosing only proven best practice
in learning to sell the IT path to the company.
Information
and communication are the greatest lubricants to change, providing
cushions against the stress of dislocation. Information technology, as
IT will do well to remember, is its realm. No one is better placed
within the company to open dialog enterprise-wide, to engage all of its
customers in discussions and expressions of opinion that gradually
illuminate the consensual view. IT can take a proactive stance in
deploying the modern collaborative tools of discussion, not just among
the workers and managers, but also in the C-level atmosphere.
