“What is the value proposition for IT in your organization?”
IT can be just a service organization that provides a commodity service (and is outsourced to a cheaper provider), or it can identify where to add value to an organization, to the business, and to business leadership.
Hallmark does not sell greeting cards– you can buy the same card cheaper at the grocery store. Rather, Hallmark sells an environment of empathy and customer intimacy.
Similarly, exemplary restaurants do not sell food. Rather, they sell service. You can buy food anyplace.
Apple is not a computer or technology company, but sells instead, a compelling user experience.
One’s actual value proposition may not be intuitive. In each case, the value proposition itself is what distinguishes your organization, your company, and your success from just being another business in the industry.
IT Organization Leadership
Leadership is not something you can simply do with the tired cliche of leading by example. To get to the top, you also need to create a compelling vision, possess unique value, and enable others to succeed. You rise not on the backs of others, but carried on their shoulders in triumph. What can you do to make your business counterparts into heroes? It is not about making IT look good, but in making the business players become everything possible with your help.
What Can You Do as an IT Leader to Move to the Next Level?
- Invite IT people to staff meetings in every organization.
- Create a liaison/business partners group with technical people who can understand business.
- Meet the business leaders daily to find out what they need.
- Share the unique insights as to what IT capabilities can provide.
- Work out if it makes financial sense, balancing the risk/reward tradeoffs.
To the CIO, take down that wall. If you want to be part of business, then join the business. Change the dialog. A CIO should be 80% outside of IT; the 80% is your VP/IT’s function to be inside of.
Do you think disaster recovery is an IT function? If so, you weren’t listening. 80% of business continuity and disaster recovery don’t even have an IT component. Be the leader, and bring the whole plan into play, not just getting your data back.
You think system reliability is measured in 3-4-5 nines? The business couldn’t care less. They care about two things: tolerance for planned downtime measured in window of opportunity and duration, and tolerance for unplanned downtime measured in duration and time to recovery. The latter provide a completely different engineered result, with far different costs than some arbitrary statistical number.
Learn to speak in those (and other) business terms, and the business will be your partner, not your customer.
Conclusion and Summary on Building a Business Centered IT Organization
Today, IT typically covers half of what the functional role of the organization should be– the half that all IT organizations are comfortable with striving to deliver.
The other half that many struggle with is business intimacy, or moving from the back end of business requirements to the front end. Business intimacy requires moving to a business partner and peer who works hand-in-hand on solving identified needs, collaboratively finding ways for IT to expand business success. In other words, business capabilities encompass how technology can best enable future business strategy. This way, the IT organization transitions from reactive services organization, to improved business interactions, to trusted adviser, to proactive definition of future state business vision.
If your organization is in a functional delivery role, then your CIO is functionally equivalent to a VP of IT, with an inflated title. If your organization is integrating with the business, then your CIO is on the path to C-suite success and peer respect. Welcome to a small, but highly successful group.
