CIOs are at various stages of trying to make their IT departments work better for their business. Advancing your organization’s IT department from order taker to trusted business enabler is no easy task, but there are some key steps you can take to make it easier.
1) Determine what your business will support today. Your organization may not be ready for an IT department that is driving innovation and leading the business, especially if your production services aren’t stable. So start by thinking about what your business will support today, then look at the gaps between your current execution and what it takes to get to a sustainable state.
This may involve simply becoming a trusted partner. It may involve cleaning up operations in your organization so that people aren’t focused on outages instead of the services you’re delivering to the organization. As an example, if you get production under control, you can then focus on becoming reliable at project delivery as an IT organization. Then you can legitimately make offers to your business partners and say, “If you bring us a project, we can get it done in a predictable amount of time at a predictable expense and have it reliable in production afterwards.” But it starts with defining what is possible today and then executing to get there.
2) Prep your business partners. Start having conversations with your business partners about what’s possible with IT and where the IT organization is going over time. Make sure you’re selling and preparing your business partners to think about their role in moving your enterprise up that chain of IT competency and IT maturity.
If you haven’t done that groundwork and you surprise your partners with a conversation they’re not ready for, such as, “Oh, by the way, we can renovate the order processing system for you and you can expect these results,” then you and your team are going to walk away disappointed. You must set in motion the thinking on your business partners' part to get them ready to come to you at a different level of engagement.
3) Figure out how to free up resources. You must be thinking about how you’re going to free up the resources to move out of maintenance mode. In most organizations you’re simply not going to have the resources to suddenly say, “Okay, let’s go move up the maturity chain.”
Now is the time to double down on all the work you did before to get your production to an acceptable state and actually start making production more efficient. I say “production” because typically 70 to 80 percent of IT resources go into production environments. So that’s where you’re going to typically have to grind out the efficiencies that free up money and people to go work on the next level of maturity as an IT organization.
4) Prep your people. In addition to getting your business partners ready for the dialogue, you need to get your people ready for the dialogue. If you’ve done your legwork, your people are becoming better systems administrators, and your processes are more efficient and reliable. That’s super, except now your people are heads down on those production and project tasks.
So you need to identify some people and start to train and motivate them to say “what business problems are we trying to solve” and “what are our opportunities to drive up revenue, drive down cost, move into a new business, etc.” — whatever your business objectives are going to be. You need to start incenting people, training people, giving them the freedom and the support to start to do those things.
5) Identify an achievable project to tackle. You probably don’t want to take a huge strategic business opportunity as your first business enablement project. So look for nuggets and opportunities to advance a part of the business where you have a competency and where you have a good relationship with your internal customer.
If you successfully tackle that first project, then it’s time to “rinse and repeat.” You can select a bigger project. You may start to do a pair of projects in parallel. Then, over time, you should be in a position where IT now has the capability to say to the business, “I’m making you an offer. We can in fact revamp the order processing system. We understand how it works. We understand your business objectives, and we’ll take the technology aspects of that off the table and go improve the solution.” And ideally you’ll do it all while driving out cost and driving up revenue.
Read "Here's why it can take four years to make your IT department work better for the business."
Lee Congdon is CIO of Red Hat. His role includes enabling Red Hat’s business through services, such as knowledge management, technology innovation, technology-enabled collaboration, and process improvement.
