Reinventing the IT Department

Terry White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136369162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

'Reinventing the Information Technology Department' is both anecdotal and informal but deals with a subject which is of vital interest to Chief Information Officers and IT Managers, addressing questions such as: * How does the IT department keep pace with business change?
* How do we provide stable and responsive IT platforms?
* How do we add recognised value to the organisation?
* How do I reinvent my department?
* How do I get onto the board?
It offers an alternative view of the new roles of the in-house IT function and proposes a rethink about IT services within companies, suggesting a self-help approach to redefining/reinventing in-house IT for CIOs.The author explains that new modes of business thinking and operation are essential if a company is to succeed in the near future and in light of this covers topics such as self-organising systems, knowledge management, multi-stakeholder perspectives, and empowerment initiatives in relation to the overall business and in particular the IT function.Each chapter contains implementation templates for the readers to take themselves through the repositioning or reengineering of the IT function and their own departments.

Introduction – days
of wine and roses

1.1 Mirror, mirror …’outside’ perceptions of the in-house IT function

There is a danger that far from being the leader in the transformation process, the IT function runs the risk of becoming an inhibitor to change and therefore irrelevant.

(Ralph, 1990)

I'm driving back from a very successful workshop, in which I have helped a large bank refocus itself on the customer, and set a vision for their future service. This will revolutionise their bank/customer relationship. They are planning Internet access to any banking service, internet cafe's in bank branches, an Intranet which is directed solely at customer and sales support, data-mining operations aimed at life-long customer service, smart cards and more! There is one dark cloud, however: the bank doesn't think their in-house IT function is up to it. Oh sure, they might be able to handle the technology, but in the last session of a five-day workshop, I took the team through a ‘show-stoppers’ exercise. At the top of the list of show-stoppers, by a long way, came, ‘the capacity of our IT function to handle the new mind-set’. Not the technology, the mind-set.

This is one of many examples. I have experienced this let-down at almost every one of the workshops that I have facilitated. One executive described his company's IT function as, ‘the abominable no-men’. The complaints generally revolved around being powerless in the face of the IT boffins, of having to wage a battle to secure IT resources, of having to fight for priority, and of the IT function turning a simple concept into a multi-staged, multi-million, multi-year project. And yes, heaven help the sorry soul who buys their own technology and gets it working. Mostly business people complain that their IT people are not the enablers of business change that they hold themselves out to be. If anything they are ‘disablers’ of change.

It is of course an indicator of a troubled business/IT relationship when there are no IT people at these strategic workshops. I asked a senior executive why there was no IT representative, expecting the answer, ‘oh, we'll fill them in afterwards.’ His reply surprised me; ‘we did ask them, but they were unable to send someone. Secretly I'm pleased, they only hold back our thinking.’

I'm struck by the amount of ‘them’ phrases that I still hear these days.

There are of course many valuable and successful IT functions, much appreciated by their business. Every year I preside over the selection of the ‘IT Manager of the Year’ award. We get a number of nominations which hold enormous praise for their IT manager, and by implication, their IT function as a whole. Well done! But as a total percentage of businesses, those that feel good about their IT functions are small.

Here's a quote from Kit Grindley¹, who studied what CEOs thought of their IT functions. One of the CEOs responded:

Like other chief executives, I feel I'm being blackmailed. Not just by the suppliers, I expect that. But by my own IT staff who never stop telling me what the competition are spending.

1.2 What is an in-house IT function?

In discussions with various business and IT people about this book the question of what an ‘in-house IT function’ is, has been asked. As you will see later, I redefine the traditional in-house IT function, but for now, we're talking about any company which deems it necessary to have an IT Manager, director or whatever, or has an IT department, which goes by any of an assortment of names. Size isn't important – we could be talking about a three-person operation, up to the multiple-thousand staff establishment. What we're not talking about is the outsource operations, or the independent software houses, although this book will be of interest to them, even if to give them competitive ideas.

I also use the term ‘Chief Information Officer’ (CIO) in its original sense which was to describe the position of the IT Manager, Director, or Department Head, rather than to name the position. In this book the term ‘CIO’ describes the person who heads up the IT function whatever their title may be.

1.3 Research

There is a general crisis for the internal IT function. Research suggests that there is a wide dissatisfaction with the quality of in-house IT.

1.3.1 Time, cost, relationship, quality

It seems that business in general has a problem with the time taken and the cost of developing information systems solutions². Moreover the process of solutions development is seen as inflexible and cumbersome³.

Business executives are unable to assess whether they are getting value for money from their IT dollars^4,5. They know that they need IT (if so many gurus keep on and on about it, they must need it surely?), but they have a sneaky suspicion that things were better before the advent of these so-called miracle machines. They're wrong of course, IT is probably the competitive tool of the era, but not the way their in-house IT people are delivering it.

IT processes do not seem to be tuned into business cycles, cycles which are dictated by the need to respond quickly to the market⁶. And the rules have changed: quality and price are basic pre-requisites. What matters now is the speed of implementation of new ideas which now defines the competitive edge^7,8.

The traditional information systems development process requires accurate specification of business requirements, sign-off on specification documents, and (some time later, perhaps six months, one year, two years or worse), user acceptance testing. Research suggests that businesses frequently do not know exactly what they want, change their minds, and are more concerned with results and outcomes than with the production of a system⁹. And this systems development method has been far from successful.

1.3.2 The trigger point – IT supply exceeds demand

There's another factor to consider: David Birchall and Laurance Lyons¹⁰ talk about the IT ‘trip-wire, or “trigger-point” in the relationship between the needs of business and the inability of IT to meet them (see Figure 1.1). What they suggest is that before about the mid-1980s, businesses needed more from IT than was available. IT people held the upper hand – they were in demand. If you remember, the PC was still a hobby novelty in the late 1970s. It took until the mid-1980s for PCs to become standard business tools, with enough software to meet business and personal needs, and with hardware that was getting cheaper by the day. From the day that the average businessman had more computing power in his study at home, compared to that which his in-house IT function was able to give him, the writing was on the wall for traditional IT methods, organisations and people. It is a logical conclusion that because the average business person's needs are being met in a different way, in-house IT functions must provide services in a totally different way. That's what this book is about. Of course you can choose not to change, or to make token or incremental changes to the way you work in IT, but my bet is that within a few short years, you and everything you hold dear in traditional IT, will be irrelevant.

Figure 1.1 When IT supply exceeded demand (Birchall and Lyons, 1994)

1.3.3 Automating, informating, and transformating

In 1988 Zuboff¹¹ suggested that we could label IT in the following ways: ‘Automating’ referred to ‘the application of technology that increases the self-acting, self regulating, and self-correcting capacities of systems,’ while ‘informating’ describes ‘the application of technology that translates objects, events, and processes into data, and displays that data’. These contrasting capacities of IT can coexist in the same system, indeed informating capacity evolves from automation. My spellchecker revolts at these cumbersome words, but they carry in them the basis of fundamental attitude differences between IT people and business people. This is because business people reckon that ‘automating’ and ‘informating’ are just ‘hygiene’ factors – those things that IT people must get right, simply because it's their job. What really interests business people is the ‘transformating’ role of IT. Your average businessman or woman wants to do business, not IT, and they reckon (rightly or wrongly) that you can buy the ‘automating’ and ‘informating’ capacity off the shelf at the nearest PC store. What they really need are the breakthrough ideas and technologies that will change the competitive equation, that will put their business in front and keep it there. And IT people who get in the way, or are stuck in the ‘automating/informating’ job profile are not really adding value. Now here's the difficult part. There's no way you can get to the transformating stage unless you can handle the other two elements with one hand tied behind your back. You're not paid to make a meal of it, just to do it.

1.4 Inside perceptions of IT

It's not all bad: In most internal surveys which assess the effectiveness of the IT function, the IT people are harder on themselves than the business is. A cynic would perhaps suggest that business people don't know enough to be too critical, and there's some truth in that. There's also some truth in the fact that IT people seem to suffer from low corporate self-esteem. And there's a vicious cycle here: because IT people are subject to unreasonable demands, which require enormous courage and self-confidence to provide realistic costs and time estimates for. So they shave a bit here and there, knowing that once the project is underway the funds will come, albeit painfully. Of course they don't deliver on time and budget, but they knew that would happen.

Figure 1.2 The vicious cycle of IT esteem

However something unhealthy is happening here, which is not good for either party in this sad cycle: business people are learning not to trust IT people, and IT people are setting themselves up to fail. A little later I will discuss the reasonable complaint of IT people, that business people place impossible demands on them. But for now, I just wonder how much time and energy, pain and stress, and how much damage is being done to the business/IT relationship by this cycle. There is no easy answer to the cycle either. The only way to resolve it, is not to play the game, not to provide traditional IT services because traditional IT methods cannot deliver in today's business environment! We have to discover a new way of automating, informating and transformating the business environment. The trouble with a new way is that it is a new way, and that always raises doubts and concerns from the traditionalists and Luddites.

1.4.1 Some standard grievances from IT

‘Grievance’ may be a harsh word, but let's look at its dictionary definition, and judge then whether it's appropriate or not: a grievance is, ‘indignation or resentment stemming from a feeling of having been wronged¹².’ I think the shoe may fit. I have no doubt that IT people have been wronged. And they have a right to be indignant and resentful. But only from within an IT frame of reference. Trouble is that business no longer lends too much credence to the IT frame of reference, if it ever did. Charles Handy¹³ has this to say about your frame of reference:

If the new way of things is going to be different from the old, not just an improvement on it, then we shall need to look at everything in a new way.

In the long perspective of history it may seem that the really influential people in the last 100 years were not Hitler or Churchill, Stalin or Gorbachev, but Freud, Marx and Einstein, men who changed nothing except the way we think, but that changed everything.

(Handy, 1989)

So the challenge is to look at the same thing that everyone else sees, and to see differently. To think differently. And to act on those thoughts.

It seems to me that if we choose a different thought pattern, a different pattern to the same old tired ‘grievances’ that we've all heard, probably even muttered ourselves, then we are on the road to a new way of doing in-house IT. Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad¹⁴ suggest that true leaders are those who can ‘reframe’ the same picture that everyone sees in such a way that it presents opportunities and excitement in business. They believe that traditional thinking can be a millstone which holds progress back:

When environment changes rapidly and radically, these (traditional) beliefs become a threat to survival.

(Hamel and Prahalad, 1994)

So let's have a little fun here and look at the standard IT people's gripes and attempt to ‘reframe’ them to unlock the opportunities that are available if we just choose to think differently.

Here are some of the standard gripes that I hear from IT people, and my reframed view: read through the following section, then later, once you've finished the book, test the reframing thou...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Computer Weekly Professional Series
• Preface
• Acknowledgement
• 1 Learning as Sustainability
• 2 I’m glad the hole is at their end of the boat–business in the new world
• 3 Radicals and revolutions – anarchists in our midst
• 4 Stop the revolution – IT wants to get on board
• 5 Play up, play up, and play the game
• 6 If we’re so clever, why can’t we think? – new way of thinking for IT
• 7 The soft stuff is hard – the new business/IT relationship
• 8 Building on quicksand?–the IT cornerstone–architecture
• 9 The ‘Canute’ effect–bringing new technologies in
• 10 Rules about rules – standards, methods, tools
• 11 Running the race – providing business solutions from IT
• 12 The home fires – core production
• 13 Thinking ahead – new strategy processes
• 14 The new IT people
• 15 Last round please – final observations
• Index