The role of IT and the role of the CIO is changing. Those IT leaders who don’t see that won’t become business leaders, and we’ll find business leaders becoming the next CIO. Those who are about tech heroics are talented, but their talents are misdirected. My mission is to get the CEO and CIO interacting at a business leadership level, but the business guy doesn’t want to talk to the CIO if all the CIO wants to talk about are the newest technologies and look at the cool things we did.
How do you set the stage for strategic alignment?
The CIO has to set expectations around the capacity for strategic alignment that could be created. One of the things I tell the IT organization is that we can’t say yes to everything; IT will always have more demand than ability to meet that demand. So the expectation has to be set up front that we must do more strategically for the business.
Historically, what we’ve done is increase budget and staff—but that’s the wrong initial step to take unless you’re completely understaffed. The first thing is to see how much capacity there is in IT to do more for the business, than look at how applications are supported, how much help desk resources are consumed…Is there overabundance of spending in those areas?
A CIO has to have the guts to say that we have too many people in this area or are spending too much time on an application that doesn’t provide a lot of return for the business. Then other areas might be reduce telecom costs, renegotiate contracts with software vendors to create those dollar capacities. But the big expenses are around people and reducing the amount of people-effort that goes into day-to-day support for the business.
How should CIOs expect the business to take that?
The metric is productivity for the business. If you make a change to moving from misalignment to tactical alignment, you actually do less for the business, so productivity goes down….But as you retool the IT organization and position people in different areas, your productivity will overshoot where you started.
You’ve got to give the business the reason why you’ll do less. Business leaders love it when it’s explained to them in business terms. In practice it gets tough because you are delivering less in the short run.
What are a couple of the practical steps to take to drive alignment?
We need business leadership within IT and IT leadership within the business. We also need effective IT steering committees—they need to be called by the CEO, because if the CIO calls them, most heads of business units will show up only if they have time. If it’s called by the CEO, they show up. The whole point of an IT steering committee needs to be that this is the business leaders’ opportunity to be a leader of IT.
Our model is to hire IT strategists whose job is to live within IT but who are assigned full time to be business partners. They can’t be pulled off into other projects—they live with and help the business become aligned by helping the business prioritize tactical and strategic needs. Their model is ongoing education, communication, and collaboration. That’s their full job.