3 ways to boost IT productivity: CIO tips

When I joined SAIC four years ago, the IT department was a department of “no.” If a request from the business wasn’t on a schedule or in a plan, the IT department didn’t do it. But because IT is responsible for finding ways to use technology to make the business more effective, I challenged our IT team to shift their thinking so we could become the department of “how.”

Change is never easy, but it’s necessary to grow. Today, our IT team has grown into a cohesive, productive group thanks to our renewed focus on change-oriented culture, making smart hires, and keeping work interesting. Here’s some insight into what has worked for us.

Drive change-oriented culture

Contrary to what we’re told, CIOs don’t need to focus on increasing the speed of delivery in development. What we really need to do is drive a change-oriented culture. Any product you launch takes 18 to 36 months for it to optimize because people are generally resistant to change. The way I approach change-management is more sociological: I prefer to discover what’s in it for the individual, then harmonize that to a corporate goal, rather than simply delivering a technology or product.

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For example, IT departments typically ask the business to define the technology that they need. But most of the time the business doesn’t know what it needs, and so IT stands idle until they’re given direction. However, this approach should be reversed. IT should research the technology. 

I challenged my team to be proactive and stop waiting for the business to give requirements. I want them to approach the business and say, “Technology can enable you in these ways and we think we should research these five areas. Pick one that works for you.” That’s a different kind of requirements-driven process that prevents you from collecting point solutions that only do one thing in the environment. They seldom scale and are usually very expensive solutions.

Make smart hires

Younger tech talent is extremely technologically savvy and motivated — but the challenge is discovering how to harness their energy effectively into a product or capability that makes sense to them and us. 

I’ve seen graduates of great programs with impressive degrees who are interested in help desk technician jobs but rather than solving difficult problems, they are answering questions like how to turn on a computer. We’ll lose this person quickly if we don’t have meaningful work for them to do.

We’ve also had recent graduates who studied cybersecurity and are excited about hacking. You drop them into this environment and they find out that their job is to review log after log and monitor processor after processor for anomalies. They’re disenfranchised and unhappy because they’re not using the skills that they expected to use.

We can’t have an entire IT staff that wants to build new stuff or chase shiny technology objects because we need some people who are good at fixing, maintaining, and operating internal business systems. Getting really good at the underpinning systems is an essential skill that we need for them to develop when they arrive.

This is why it’s really important to be open and honest about the corporate objective and to make sure that new hires know what they’re signing up for before they sign on the dotted line. Unhappy employees breed an unhappy workplace, and unhappy workplaces are unproductive.

Create challenges

How do you move people outside their comfort zone? In order for an organization to really innovate and be open to new ideas, you have to make it safe to do so.  If you never look outside what you know how to do (comfort zone) then adopting new ideas, technologies, and solutions becomes difficult to achieve.  One way to help is to create challenges for them: some may be research and development challenges, while some are just improvement performance challenges. They need to be concise, precise, and execute that challenge in a way that people can tangibly relate to.

One example: We launched a mobile time app that was wonderful and worked great — it was something that people could access on any device. The business thought that was the greatest thing, and it was a very low-cost solution. This application needed an independent password, which we fixed with single sign-on. That tweak enabled the speed of the network to go from moderately slow to blazingly fast overnight.

Hiring the right people for the right job, encouraging a change-oriented culture, and keeping employees happy by issuing challenges have helped us build a better IT team at SAIC.

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