In a recent InfoWorld article Bob Lewis offers a strategy to “the promised land, where IT is a strategic partner to the rest of the business, not a subservient order taker content to process work requests while accepting the blame for everything that goes wrong.” Sound like a familiar problem? He maintains that the common practice of treating technology services as an internal business treating other departments as customers in a fee for service relationship is at the heart of the problem.
This relationship puts the information technology (IT) professionals in the role of reacting to customer requests and working selfishly to maximize the charging potential of every opportunity. Efficiencies that might reduce service requests across several customers also reduce charging potential for the IT units. IT responds to individual customer needs and priorities are set by those units most willing or able to pay. This all results to an us-vs-them mentality that rarely rewards the parties for considering wider, institutional opportunities and broader implications of technology decisions. For instance if one department contracts with the central IT programming unit to build a web-based student application, and pays dearly for it, they will be disinclined to ‘give’ it to another deparment (why shouldn’t they pay too?) — and the IT unit builds the application to so specifically meet one department’s needs that it probably can’t be used by others without a lot of rewriting anyhow. I speak from direct experience — this stuff really happens.
So what is the path to Mr. Lewis’ proposed promised land? When working with other departments IT directors “..say, ‘My job is to help you and the company succeed, ‘ followed by ‘Show me how you do things now.’ NOT ‘I know better than you’ but rather ‘let’s work together so I understand your needs and we can find a solution that works for everyone.’ The conversation starts by asking ‘how can we operate better” rather than a focus on simply delivering software and hardware infrastructure. Technology planning is aligned with the overall strategic objectives for the organization. Budgets priorities are set in the discussion over how the application of technology can help meet those objectives in an efficient, timely and cost effective way. Sounds good to me.
Run IT as a business — why that’s a train wreck waiting to happen | Adventures in IT – InfoWorld
..the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL… My advice? Don’t act like a separate business. Do the opposite — be the
most internal of internal departments. Become so integrated into the
enterprise that nobody would dream of working with anyone else.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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