Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a three-part series on strategies for making IT work in the enterprise. Parts 2 and 3 will appear Thursday and Friday, respectively.
Beyond the endless discussions about death march CIOs who report to CFOs, and Cheshire
CIOs who’ve landed seats at the big table courtesy of their CEO-reporting
relationship, are huge issues around how to make IT “work” in your company. Here are a
few of them:
imperatives of the new millennium: Companies will look to IT to (really) integrate
with the business and provide competitive advantage; organizations that fail to assume
this new role will be ousted in favor of new regimes that “get it.”
relationships will be (partially, not completely!) replaced by strategic partnerships
that will be judged by performance – not historical inertia.
IT organizations at a moment’s notice. This will dictate against large permanent
in-house staffs organized to protect their existence. New applications pressures will
kill entrenched bureaucracies and give rise to a new class of results-oriented hired
guns.
requirements which in turn will lead to business applications and computing and
communications infrastructure specifications.
Given the pace of technology change, it’s essential that your organizational infers
requirements and produce specifications quickly and efficiently. This will require
companies to tilt toward staff with these kinds of capabilities as they
proportionately tilt away from implementation skills. IT organizations will be driven
by “architects” and “specifiers” – not programmers.
staffs current in the newest business technologies. This means that IT organizations
by default will have to outsource certain skills. The approach that may make the most
sense is one which recognizes that future core competencies will not consist of
in-house implementation expertise but expertise that can abstract, synthesize,
integrate, design, plan and manage IT.
How many of the above drivers hit home?
The components of your organization strategy appear in Figure 1.
Business Strategy Linkages
If you live in a decentralized organization – where the central IT organization owns
the enterprise computing and communications infrastructure and the lines of business
own their applications – pay very special attention to IT organization. Unless you’re
prepared to fight lots of religious wars between central IT and the lines of business,
organize your internal IT professionals in ways that support the lines of business.
If your current organizational structure in any way, shape or form encourages an
adversarial relationship between central IT and the lines of business then your
organizational structure is flawed.
Assessment of Core Competencies
Let’s make some assumptions about where you are today and where you’re likely to be
tomorrow. These assumptions will help you think about IT products and services
acquisition as well as organizational structures:
and adaptive; “entrenched” or “traditional” processes will not sustain profitability
or market share … organizations pay “lip service” to the value of thinking “outside
the box,” but seldom actively encourage or reward it.
“process improvement” and similar attempts to change organizational processes for
higher profits and greater market share, play out as expense reduction efforts – not
as strategic initiatives that provide long-term vision … there is very little
evidence that these efforts have long-term payoff, except as “political” processes
that create the impression – both inside and outside of the organization – that there
is a logical process at work.
now staffed with professionals who have a “bottom-up” view of the nature and purpose
of information and software systems.
in fact, the amount of time, effort and money spent on retooling and retraining has
seldom – if ever – resulted in measurable returns on the investments … the effort
necessary to reach these professionals is disproportionate to the return.