“If Coca-Cola had a brand that was the equivalent of IT today, they would just kill it and start again.”
Blackstone Group CTO William Murphy minced no words in his keynote speech at Interop New York in September, not to mention he knows how to make a powerful statement.
He also underscores that while IT has always had its haters, anti-IT sentiment seems to be catching a new wave. After all, one call to a SaaS provider can generate a new departmental application and a couple of servers in a snap. Who needs the IT department?
Everyone needs IT, and it’s IT’s job to educate them on that concept. To reinforce IT’s role at Blackstone, Murphy says he renamed the department Innovations and Infrastructure and adopted a four-pronged approach to guide its work with customers within the investment company.
What else can CIOs do to convert naysayers into supporters?
- Communicate IT’s contributions, all the time. These days, everyone thinks they’re techies. “Employees are comfortable with technology, there’s no question about it,” says Larry Bonfante, CIO for the US Tennis Association and founder of CIO Bench Coach, an executive coaching practice. “But using an iPhone to download apps is a lot different from putting up an ERP system and making sure it’s secure and available to your partners.” Trouble is, Bonfante says, employees don’t see the difference: “They say, ‘this stuff seems so easy, why does it take IT so long?’” It’s the CIO’s job to educate the workplace on how IT has their backs. IT is complex and vital. “It’s all about how you communicate with people so they understand that running a system that does transactional processing” is a world away from tap-and-swipe, says Bonfante.
- Have a crackerjack team in place. That means a staff with the right mix of technology knowhow, people skills and the ability to learn quickly. You can’t be an effective leader and IT ambassador if you’re always putting out fires. Populate your staff with team members who both know hardware and software and can talk with your customers in the language that they understand – that is, business outcomes, not buzzwords and acronyms.
- Make peace with shadow IT. It’s here to stay. The practice of departments circumventing IT to acquire new hardware and software is challenging and downright prickly for CIOs, as a recent article from the EnterprisingCIO.com detailed.
But shadow IT isn’t going away. For one thing, grassroots pilots are everywhere in enterprises, with shadow efforts running through HR and finance as well.
For another, shadow IT isn’t necessarily a bad thing, says Helen Mumford Sole, a former CIO and CEO who now runs an executive coaching practice in New York.
While some CIOs fundamentally oppose any non-IT spends on technology, others welcome shadow IT for its spirit of experimentation, the fact that expenditures are off IT budgets, and the knowledge that successful efforts will likely be brought into IT development into a corporate standard.
“The key thing to ask is, why shouldn’t it be happening?” says Mumford Sole. “If shadow IT is going on, it indicates unmet demand.” Change it from a guerilla tactic and make it by design, so it’s no longer subversive and IT can reap the upside: someone else is paying for it and conducting the trial.
How do you promote IT’s successes within your organization? What has worked for you? Perhaps more important, what hasn’t?
