Is your enterprise getting the IT it deserves?

I used to tell anybody who would listen: “Organizations get the technology they deserve.”

In doing so I was trying to establish a direct causal relationship between actions and outcomes. I wholeheartedly believe that enterprises that fail to put in the hard work associated with identifying, procuring, installing, operating, maintaining, and ultimately retiring systems will predictably fail to deliver full value on their IT investment.  

CIOs have long recognized that IT expertise, resource, and effort is finite and has to be distributed. I recently discovered that what we in IT call governance has been labeled and studied as “deservingness” — who gets what and why — by social policy wonks, philosophers, political scientists, and medical ethicists. (See Eric M. Uslaner, Chapter 9 “Deservingness,” National Identity and Partisan Polarization; Jelena Tošić and Andreas Streinzer [editors] Ethnographies of Deservingness;and Susanne N. Beechey, Social Security and the Politics of Deservingness.)

CIO success is directly tied to the legitimacy the various tribes making up the modern enterprise attach to the processes associated with allocating scarce IT capabilities — i.e., is the enterprise getting the IT they deserve?

Employees need proof IT is meeting their needs

Brian Shield, SVP and CTO of the Boston Red Sox, is very proactive asking his stakeholders, “Are we meeting your needs? Do you feel you have the tools required to do your job?” Every year the Red Sox IT organization conducts an Annual Quality of Service Survey.

Cheryl Smith, former CIO at Keyspan, McKesson, and West Jet, generated a zero-based budget report for every senior non-IT leader in the enterprise. In that report she specified what money and resources she was allocating to that part of the business.

At the end of the past century, just about every bootcamp, training/certification program, and leadership development curriculum aimed at CIOs paid lip service to the trope “CIOs have to speak the language of business.” If a linguist were to analyze the totality of communication swirling around the enterprise today, they would document a plethora of tribal dialects but not a surfeit of shared understanding.

Richard Plepler, formerly CEO of HBO and now head of Eden Productions at Apple TV, observes, “We’re living in an environment where nobody seems willing to listen to anything but their own tribe.” CIOs have to make sure that not only are the tribes speaking to one another but that they are doing so in mutually understandable language.

Accounting is not even the most important language of business

In their first year, MBA candidates are told that “Accounting is the language of business.” Accounting is a language of business — not the only language of business. While CIOs should be generally conversant with the key elements of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), empirically there is no evidence that CIOs who are certified public accountants (CPAs) create any more value with technology than those without.

Balance sheets and income statements — revered artifacts of classic financial management — fail to represent the bubbling stew of human juices that produces/reduces value in the modern digital economy. GAAP seems to forget that organizations have humans in them. CIOs wishing to maximize value are going to have to master the frameworks and techniques of fiscal anthropology — i.e., the ways humans create value.

The many tribes of IT

Stakeholders outside the technology organization erroneously think IT is one tribe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every IT exec has stories about mediating disputes between prima donna application developers, who perceive themselves as the front end of the horse, and long-suffering operations people, misrepresented as the back-end of the horse. IT’s internal tribal misunderstandings are systemic.

If you were to analyze the IT org charts of the Global 1000 you would be amazed at the broad diversity of structural approaches. Very few — if any — reflect the tribal realities of the technology biosphere.

Barbara Cooper, CIO emeritus at Toyota Motor Sales, eliminated tribal rivalry and confusion by crafting a playbook that explicitly laid out the responsibilities of the business vis-a-vis IT and the responsibilities of IT vis-a-vis the business. This took the form of an actual contract between the parties involved.

Kevin Burns, the always-working CIO/director of IT at the City of Melbourne, Fla., reminded me that some organizations use a RACI matrix — responsible, accountable, consulted, informed — to render who does what unambiguously.

CIOs need to listen to what the tribes of the digital economy are saying — i.e., speak their language — and craft a narrative that demonstrates every tribe is getting the IT they deserve.