T H I N K I N G B E YO N D
BUSINESS OF IT
Does the IT Leadership Group Operate as a Team? As follow-on to the first question, how regularly does the IT leadership team meet and interact? Are the meetings just the CIO’s staff meeting that follows a meaningless agenda or are they real issues-based interactions? The second part of this question is how well the team’s skills complement each other and how well each leader’s traits and skills align with their assigned jobs. Is the leader assigned to manage and track the IT portfolio really a better innovator and planner? Are Any of the Top IT Support Issues Recurring? MIT’s CISR’s research shows that firms who don’t have a stable service platform can’t do much else well. So, have a look at the top 10 or 20 high priority service tickets over the last few month and see if there are any patterns in who is logging the issues, what kinds of issues they are, how long they take to resolve, etc. You will also learn a lot about the organization’s attitude toward service, process maturity, staff, etc. Can Business Sponsors Simply Describe Business Cases? Every company has a different approach to business cases. One grocery company I worked with was satisfied with a “we know it’s a good project” to justify an investment (not advocating that, BTW). Instead of getting into the specifics, just ask the business sponsors to explain what they are getting out of the projects. See how simply they state the objectives, if there are any business metrics attached and make sure you can actually measure them. With these five questions, you will learn about alignment, processes, projects, people, service and support and most importantly, business value. Let me know what you think and other ways you have seen CIOs get up to speed quickly.
46
CTO FORUM 21 MAY 2010
thectoforum.com
The Perfect Marriage
Business and IT alignment is the holy grail of strategic planning – at least for the CIO. IMAGINE a world in which each and every activity over the next three years guarantees that the organisation moves closer to its goals and objectives. To achieve this requires that the underlying people, processes and technologies take you in the right direction on every project – simple in concept, difficult in practice. The secret to achieving this is to have IT and the business drive enough detail into the strategic plan to enable the architects to respond with an appropriate business design. Many things get in our ways toward this goal, but I have three favourites. See if they sound familiar.
Clip-Art Strategy I know you’ve done this before. I’ve seen it innumerable times. You’ve documented your business strategy using a clip art diagram of puzzle pieces or the façade of a Greek temple – you couldn’t resist labelling those Doric columns with your goals, showing how they support your vision statement on the capital. Sometimes this is followed by a second slide that lists a jumble of other goals and objectives including items like “We will be the least cost producer in our industry”, “We will meet or exceed all compliance and regulatory commitment”, or “We will be number one in our market”. This clip art approach to documenting a strategy is a sign that not enough detail has been generated. IT has an impossible task in generating an aligned response to such a strategy.
Just Give Me a Web Site This barrier arises because IT has taught the business to use “IT speak”. Vendors are also part of the problem – promising simple solu-
tions to complex needs. Frustrated business users jump immediately from their high level strategy to technical solutions. Some of my favourites include, “All I need is Salesforce.com”, “Let’s use the cloud” and “Just give me a web site.” This approach totally misses out on answering the question “What business problem are we solving?”
Fire and Forget Invariably, projects get launched and six months later someone asks, “Why are we doing this project?” or “Remind me what I get when this project is completed”. These are difficult questions to answer when you jump from a clip-art strategy directly to a set of technical solutions. There just is not enough detail available to answer those questions. Our response to all three barriers is to ensure that the business strategy is defined in sufficient detail to enable IT to respond with technical solutions. IT can subsequently justify why those projects are important and sufficiently measure progress in business (not technical) terms. We use business “capabilities” to fill the gap between a clip-art strategy and the technical solution. This means that IT needs to learn “business speak”, to capture the strategy in business terms – the operational, organisational, product, and information capabilities needed to achieve the business strategy. Ultimately, driving the business strategy to the level of capabilities forces the business to answer the question “what business problem are we solving” and allows IT to respond with an appropriate solution. That’s alignment. —Guest post by Dave Baker, Diamond’s Chief Architect
“IT and business should drive enough detail into strategic plans to enable an appropriate business design.”