Back when IT was young — and what was then called “electronic data processing” was wrapping up its efforts to automate core accounting — everyone in senior management wanted IT to be their best friend.
Why? Because compared to doing things the manual way, even bad automation was a whole lot better.
Everyone loved EDP.
Fast-forward a few decades and business managers are harder to please. Their processes and practices are, by now, automated already, so IT has the more difficult job of not just process automation but optimization, and not just application implementation but integration.
Why doesn’t the business still love IT? You might be thinking you should make Daniel Goleman’s books about “emotional intelligence” required reading. Love is, after all, an emotion. Maybe having a higher EQ can get you some.
Or maybe, in even weaker moments, you find yourself wishing you could go beyond AI to install artificial emotional intelligence (AEI?). Sounds like a second-rate science-fiction movie, only with a more appalling outcome.
Love v1.0: They love you, they love you not
When it comes to affection metrics, clarity has a role to play. For many CIOs the metric they use is this: how well they get along with senior management.
There’s every reason to aspire to this, but when it comes to the business/IT level of affection it’s a bad metric.
It’s bad because liking you has nothing to do with liking the IT organization. Liking you is interpersonal. Liking an organization? Sports teams like the Chicago Cubs or Green Bay Packers achieve this. A small cadre of relationship-based retailers might qualify as well — among its fan base, Apple has achieved this.
IT isn’t either a sports team or a retailer. And so you may have a harder road because there’s nothing about the business/IT relationship that provides much guidance for getting the rest of the business to even like, let alone love, the organization you lead.
Love v2.0: They like members of your team, or not
Imagine you asked your company’s senior managers how well they get along with key members of the IT team. For your efforts you find a number of senior managers who think highly of the IT analysts they work with. And so, you infer, the business/IT relationship is downright solid.
It’s bad metrics all over again, because there’s a good chance these solid one-on-one relationships are symptoms of the exact opposite of a strong business/IT relationship.
What’s at least as likely is that the managers you surveyed find working with IT through its approved processes and practices to be an awful experience and a colossal waste of time and energy. The IT analyst they speak favorably of is the one who helps them get around IT’s offending bureaucracy.
Love v3.0: They accept IT’s limitations
Business managers at all levels need something or other from IT all the time. Smart CIOs establish a process for handling their requests. The process starts with the premise that there’s no such thing as an IT project. It’s always about business change and improvement or there’s no point.
Beyond this, smarter CIOs school everyone in IT to always enforce the cardinal rule of IT request response: When asked if IT can do something or other, “yes” is always the wrong answer.
“No,” on the other hand, is also always the wrong answer.
What’s the right answer? It’s always, “Here’s what that will take.”
Sometimes — often — the IT analyst trapped in this request/response conversation doesn’t and can’t know what it will take. IT is, after all, complicated, and requests are sometimes — often — too fuzzily conceptualized to be easily dealt with.
If that’s the case the IT staffer should retreat to the defensible position of, “Here’s what it will take to figure out what it will take.”
Shouldn’t keeping systems up and performing well, while making project success routine be on the please-love-us list of things to do, too?
Not hardly.
Yes, keeping systems running and finishing projects as planned do play an important role managing the business/IT relationship. If you want the rest of the business to respect IT, that’s not a bad place to start.
But if you want them to love IT?
Never saying no is a better launch pad. It tells them you’re on their side, and that you don’t base your responses on what’s most convenient and least risky for you.
Never saying yes completes the process, because that lets them know you’re there to give them a realistic view, not an empty promise.
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Read More from This Article: How to get the business to love IT — again
Source: News