Has your IT organization had the "ah-ha" moment that you are no longer a back-office function? It’s a less common realization than you may think. In fact, it’s amazing to me how many companies out there still haven’t had this moment.
You may be suffering from a linear thinking problem. If you’re constantly being incremental about everything you do, you’re never going to be able to tackle the big problems your customers face. If technology had grown incrementally, for example, rather than following Moore’s Law, where would we be today? Probably not that much further than where we were with the Model T.
Yet because of nonlinear technology growth, we’ve been freed up to do things very differently. This growth relied on people who thought about the use of technology in a nonlinear fashion. Uber and Airbnb have both completely disrupted the taxi and hotel businesses. Yet I believe we stick with linear thinking too often in IT organizations, and it’s merely incremental to what we did last year, which is a 10 percent improvement on what we did the year before.
Realizing the value shift
If you persist in thinking in an incremental, linear way, your organization will never realize the big value shift that nonlinear thinking can offer. But how do you get an organization to stop and step back? The classic way is to replace leadership teams with people who don’t know what can’t be done. Because they’re new to the organization, they have no choice but to think about it differently.
In my opinion, it may be a better long-term strategy to get an organization to push beyond its current comfort zone and ask new questions. How have I looked at this challenge myself? Here are five suggestions:
1. Set the tone early. When I’ve come into organizations, I like to have what I call the “This is not normal” speech with IT. This kind of expression can help IT to realize, “Well, the way we’re doing IT isn’t the way that other organizations do it – and that may be a problem for us.”
2. Take a team on the road. Another effective way to open people’s eyes is to take small teams to other companies, sometimes in entirely different industries, and have peer meetings to talk about how they do things. I still remember when I was at AT&T Wireless, taking a team to Alaska Airlines to see how they did things. It was impossible to come out of there with a linear mindset.
3. Engage with design thinking. When I was at DirecTV we used design thinking as a model for our field service technician experiences. We went on ridealongs to determine the pain points and figure out how we might do something completely different from scratch. We had a lot of conversations that ran along the lines of, “Wow. You’ve got to do all of that just to get this one thing done? And it’s in front of a customer? And it takes forever?” You can bring together radically better approaches very quickly from a customer experience standpoint if you know about these pain points.
4. Do quarterly startup reviews. This may sound offbeat (or nonlinear), but I’ve always found a lot of value in taking teams to Silicon Valley each quarter to do startup reviews. As a group we’ll look at 20 different startups and what they’re doing. This is always energizing because startups are either thinking about the same things in a different fashion, or thinking about brand-new things that make you realize, “Wow. I’ve been struggling with that for 20 years and somebody finally has figured out how to tackle it.”
5. Pilot a process, share the impact. In one recent example we cordoned off the city of San Diego as a trial location. We actually put some pretty strong technology architects there to work with the local market and the customer experience staff. They trialed a lot of different innovations and we measured to see if Net Promoter scores changed. If they went up, we upgraded our legacy system to support it. Unfortunately, companies often will key up a project on paper-based ROIs, spend $20 million implementing, and then say, “Dang. It didn’t do what we thought.”
Let’s face it: The ultimate goal for any CIO today is to be a chief customer experience officer. Why? Because the customer experience is most improved or lessened by the IT systems that drive them. When they are put together in a customer-friendly way, it’s often based on thinking that goes far beyond the incremental. When they aren’t, you shouldn’t be surprised to find “We’ve always done it that way” thinking standing squarely in your path.
Linear versus nonlinear thinking is also a question of how you’re measuring. If your IT group is all about measuring uptime, availability, and response time, you’d best look beyond the red-yellow-green status on projects and think about IT as part of a business process. Until you do that, and until you incent nonlinear thinking differently, you and your organization may never emerge from the linear, incremental way of doing things.
