Recycled Bullsh-IT

Some of you will still be basking in the glow of some sullen and gritted-teeth thanks from your business sponsors for responding quickly to the rapid change in working practices needed for lockdown. Who knew you had so many laptops stashed away in your cupboard, and had previously ordered excess bandwidth ‘just in case’? Does this mean that we are now loved by the business? No, we continue to be barely tolerated, like leeches were in the middle ages.

For many years every CIO had a PissPoorPoint slide showing how they were making IT relevant to the rest of the organisation they worked for by providing ‘Business/IT Alignment’. This invariably showed the rippling down of business goals to business objectives to IT Strategy to IT delivery. The reason this came about was because IT was becoming fed up with being the whipping boy for the late delivery of expensive and unusable systems (See Do you Want Governance with That). This alignment approach allowed IT to continue to deliver late/expensive/poor systems but could now blame everyone else for the failures.

 However, times have moved on again and the users have cottoned on to this wheeze. Alignment is not enough when boards can now outsource complete business operations, along with any IT that go with it. In fact, the poorer the IT systems the more likely this is to happen. Where IT itself is deemed as poor, there is a good chance that the whole computer department (remember those?) will go. In the current financial meltdown, boards are going to be looking to cut costs quickly, and they’ll start with IT as they always do.

 In many cases this is bad news for the whole business. As any fule kno, outsourcing a problem will cost you more in the long run than fixing the problem and outsourcing a working solution. CIOs, being inherently clever but not always street-smart, are now talking business engagement to get closer to their paymasters. This is a step along the path to true enlightenment but is not the end game to which IT needs to aspire. Engagement still implies an Us and Them situation with IT and the ‘Business’ as separate entities. I covered the result of this in Partnering for Profit or Pleasure.  This situation is self-fulfilling in that They then feel They can change the Us if We don’t deliver. If You follow Me.

 For many IT departments this journey from Internal Soreness to Service Provider is hard enough, and it feels like being the turkey fattening itself up for Christmas. Of course, this is a danger but by moving quickly to a more integrated model of operations you can end up in a stronger position for both you, from an IT perspective, and the rest of the business. 

 Note the use of the term ‘rest of the business’ in the last sentence. This is key to achieving true integration of the services IT offers into the needs of the company of which you are a part. Leading organisations are embedding the key IT personnel (senior executives, analysts, architects, relationship managers) into the key business functions to provide focused, agile service provision. IT delivery then becomes a managed service provided by a combination of internal and external business partners. In some cases, internal delivery teams will be more responsive, more flexible and cheaper than external vendors. This is typically in complex, dynamic areas of the business where knowledge and decision support are critical. Other more stable and transactional areas may be better serviced by a specialist supplier offering economies of scale or niche processing capabilities.

 At this point IT is no longer a separate department, but an integrated part of the change and service management functions embedded in the key business divisions that require these services.  Does this sound far-fetched or worrying? If so, start preparing the stuffing and basting yourself, as both Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming!

John “Computer Love” Moe