Transforming IT culture for business success

Back in the day, IT culture was all about the perks. Would-be employees were drawn in by modern, open spaces punctuated by game tables and fully stocked kitchens along with an array of services that might include on-site gyms, coffee bars, even chef-inspired cafeteria fare.

The evolving role of IT, coupled with new pandemic-era work models, has sifted the culture conversation away from in-office trappings. To be clear, everyone still fancies a high-end perk. But IT culture is now more closely intertwined with creating a unique identity that encapsulates the enterprise vision and rallies IT employees around a common cause.

With more employees working remotely or only partially in office, the usual on-site fanfare has become less important, making it harder to parlay trendy atmosphere and esthetic vibes into real community and connection. IT professionals are prioritizing intangibles such as greater work/life balance, opportunities for reskilling and upskilling, and higher-value, meaningful work more so than in the past, which changes what constitutes winning IT culture.

IT’s continuing evolution away from order-taker to strategic business partner has also had an impact. With IT increasingly driving new initiatives in concert with key business partners, there’s opportunity for technology leaders to nurture an organizational identity that keeps everyone razor-focused on digitally transforming the business in pursuit of strategic goals.

“Giving people access to free pizza or dry cleaning is not about building culture — it’s a way of getting people to stay in the building for long hours and to do a hard job,” contends Tim Wenhold, chief innovation officer, COO, and partner at Power Home Remodeling. “Culture should be mission-driven, and for us, it’s all about driving the business forward through the tools we’re creating.”

Cultivating a culture of creators

Power Home Remodeling’s business model is centered on remodeling the exterior of homes while its IT organization — what it calls the Business Technology (BT) Group — serves as the creative force behind a build-your-own software platform that operates in service to the business. In lieu of integrating and customizing off-the-shelf enterprise applications such as Salesforce or SAP, Power Home Remodeling has constructed its own proprietary NITRO platform used to run and optimize all aspects of the business and customer experience.

The commitment to build and scale your own mission-critical software platform requires a very specific kind of work culture and IT talent bench. Right off the bat, Wenhold set out to foster an IT identity and supporting culture that would nourish a community of creators, many rooted in traditional technology skills along with others who possess robust business backgrounds and have an interest in or propensity for IT.

“Traditional IT starts with, how do we integrate this technology solution and make it secure, whereas we start with a level of autonomy of what you can create,” he explains. “Here, you can do anything you want in service of the business and that’s liberating compared to having to live by a specific set of rules.”

Wenhold has instituted a number of strategies to empower Power’s creator culture. It starts with finding the right people — a practice fueled by a heavy reliance on referrals, a highly choregraphed interview process, and the establishment of new feeders for sourcing talent. One such feeder is the Power Code Academy, a six-month bootcamp that gives nontraditional, business-oriented employees an opportunity to acquire coding and technical skills and gain a pathway into the BT group.

To reinforce the creator culture, Wenhold’s group hosts regular events like hackathons and Nitro Create, a development conference keyed to specific themes designed to encourage people to think outside the box. The “Creatorverse” work environment fosters creativity and collaboration through its blend of virtual work and state-of-the art physical workspaces, Wenhold says. “All of this keeps our culture alive and keeps Business Technology a destination department,” he adds.

An obsessive focus on simplicity anchors the belief and value system underpinning IT culture at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), according to Brian Abrahamson, associate lab director and chief digital officer for computing and IT. For years, the lab struggled under the weight of decentralized IT and government standards and regulations, which complicated procedures and spurred too many overly complex systems that didn’t talk to one another. Under Abrahamson’s direction, the IT organization spent the past decade embracing human-centered design principles, delivering mobile accessibility, and creating personalized and effortless consumer-grade experiences designed to create connections among scientists and give them ready access to a workbench primed for scientific discovery.

“All the stuff about creating a good workplace experience for the IT staff to thrive is table stakes,” Abrahamson says. “What we talk about is the problems that matter to the world and how to make the scientist experience better. It’s a more outward thinking and focused culture, not an inward journey.”

Each time they launch a new experience for the organization, Abrahamson’s team promotes the product with a full-blown marketing campaign, including digital signage and storytelling, which reinforces the mission, culture, and IT brand. Abrahamson also changed some of his hiring criteria, bringing on people with product management and human-centered design experience. He has also invested in training aimed at helping staffers deconstruct and tackle complex problems, and has created avenues for people to share their “Credo” stories about how simplified and personal, “Apple-like” experiences are improving the workflows of scientists and lab employees. “It engenders a sense of pride in the tradecraft and the products they’re producing,” he explains.

Tyler Troutman, a solutions architect at PNNL, says the lab’s IT culture is one of the main reasons he’s stuck around for more than seven years. The latitude to develop new skills, work with state-of-the-art tools and projects, and most importantly, feel a part of something bigger has kept him loyal and engaged. “We’re not just building a new widget or something that affects the bottom line — we’re building something so researchers can change the world and I believe in what we’re doing,” Troutman says.

When Phil Dundas, chief technology officer for the Fixed Income division at Prudential Global Investment Management (PGIM), started at the global asset management firm, his mission was to orchestrate an ambitious IT growth plan that included increasing headcount by three times in four short years. Dundas felt it was important to establish the IT organization’s specific DNA and culture before the hiring surge.

To do so, the team identified key “rock star” hires, exploring the common values and behavioral traits that set them apart so they could find like-minded individuals when hiring new talent. “We established our core values and core DNA to reflect not just who we thought we were, but who we would be in the future,” Dundas explains. “That became part of the interviewing process as we hired dozens of people. We built a culture based on those themes and traits we wanted to see on our team.”

Not only does culture define who you are and how you interact with one another, it also impacts a team’s performance and productivity. “Poor culture impacts a team’s delivery — having a really good culture means delivering what’s needed for the business,” Dundas says.

Making culture stick

One of the most important rules of making culture stick is breaking down silos and creating a more holistic community of IT. First Citizens Bank, which over the past decade-plus has grown from $17 billion to $210 billion in assets driven by a flurry of mergers and acquisitions, has made a concerted effort over the years to establish a “team DNA” instead of individual fiefdoms.

“If the network team, DBA team, or application team drops the ball, it should reflect on all of us in IT, not just on individual team delivery,” explains Dede Ramoneda, executive vice president and CIO for the bank. “We broke down silos and redefined our identity as delivering the whole of an IT solution rather than delivering a specific piece. Sometimes you have to suboptimize individual parts to optimize the whole and that changes how you work with your peers and how you challenge each other.”

It’s also important to be intentional and explicit in reinforcing key values to keep everyone onboard. Ramoneda’s leadership team makes it a point to constantly connect the impact of the services IT delivers to its customers’ lives, especially when there’s a problem. For example, IT leaders shared stories of when a downed ATM network prevented a customer from getting cash to fund the purchase of an engagement ring or another missing their cruise departure time because they were waylaid by a faulty ATM. “We use these types of storytelling to underscore that we’re not just supporting systems, we’re supporting technology that affects people’s lives,” Ramoneda says.

At Brown & Brown Insurance, the IT culture is all about building close alignment with the business to drive positive outcomes — a partnership that is continually reinforced by listening, immersing IT leaders in the business, and changing its interviewing and recruiting process to zero in on people who are partnership- and business-focused, not just technically literate, says Gray Nestor, BBNI’s executive vice president and CIO.

Patience and grace must be part of the process as people may not initially understand what you’re asking them to do and why they might need to change behaviors.

“You have to be willing to give people feedback and examples on a regular basis to drive a different result,” Nestor says. “The real hard part starts with moving the needle — you have to be willing to spend time with the business, spend time with leadership, and be willing to put progress over perfection.”

What’s a key measure that an IT culture is well formed and delivering results? For Deepa Soni, CIO at The Hartford, it’s tied up in validation that the IT organization is seen as a strategic partner to the business — a point driven home when organizational leaders, including the CEO, cite technology transformation as a key lever for the insurance giant’s competitive advantage.

“When business leaders talk about how enhanced capabilities and digital tools help them take market share or feel good about how they’re competing in the market, that’s what success looks like to us,” Soni says.

Perhaps the most important advice from Soni and other CIOs focused on IT culture: Don’t take your foot off the gas.

“You realize pretty quickly that without continuous reinforcement of principles, culture can erode pretty quickly,” says PNNI’s Abrahamson. “Patience and staying power on strategy is really key.”