CIOs ready to leap boundaries in our omni-channel world

The ghost of Nick Clegg

The Lib Dems spent too much of their time trying

to keep the Conservative Party happy, and

too little on keeping voters happy

Expenses and other finance systems were seen as a good example of why IT is not regarded by so many firms as “part of the business”. The Lib Dems spent too much of their time in the recent UK coalition trying to keep the Conservative Party happy, and far too little on keeping voters happy.

IT departments are far too in the thrall to keeping finance happy, even though they are a small percentage of the firm, meaning that if finance come up with a system that’s as user friendly as a cornered rat, then IT take the fall for delivering it.

This gets worse as everyone notices that to get IT to do systems that the support of finance is important, which leads to a vicious circle of being blamed for bad things (tuition fees) but getting no credit for economic growth.

If you defend everything, you defend nothing

That lack of delivering goodies is one reason for shadow IT, a topic that pervades all our round tables, and as one IT exec put it clearly and bluntly:

“You have shadow IT because you have embraced and encouraged it, offering support, quality assurance and process, or you have shadow IT because you are shit. Too many IT systems are still being built by IT people, for IT people, and it does not win us any friends.”

A start in fixing this is to make sure all the people involved in delivery understand and separate those parts of a new system that users need and want to care about and stuff that they don’t.

The ITDMs wanted to make the users think they were making their lives easier, not just different. That means empathising with them, something you can only do with frequent contact at all levels of IT, not just business analysts.

The ITDMs were divided between those who saw BA’s as a barrier between users and IT pros (meaning information was lost), and those who hadn’t got enough user-facing staff to make contact viable. This is of course a Catch-22. Not only do many IT pros not value soft skills, if they don’t practice, then whatever talent they start off with in this vein withers.

In large enterprises, some fragmentation is inevitable and the trick is to reduce the number of satellite IT leaders who go native and see themselves as your adversaries, not delegated managers.

This is becoming more of an issue with data governance as privacy and personal data protection laws are getting some serious teeth. The consensus was that users need educating and culture, not just threats of huge (five per cent of global turnover) fines, a number that every ITDM seemed to have burned into their minds.

The ITDMs urged the right spinning of this issue so that IT isn’t seen as “they’ve come up with some law”, but as a positive message, albeit a velvet glove around an iron fist.

One way to upgrade culture is to treat information like money. You can’t just use the firm’s cash for projects as you see fit, there need to be controls, but not just on a "need to know" basis, but equally as an "ought to know", so that IT isn’t seen yet again as business prevention officers.

It is not enough to succeed, others must fail...

Users occasionally need to learn the hard way that quality control, project management, legal compliance and all the other boring stuff that “just wastes time” is actually necessary. We discussed how to make failed projects work for us.

At best the project should be visible, preferable to the louder end of the enterprise like sales and/or management and you should choose a task where you can deliver something demonstrably better.

As we were not naming names, the Machiavellian aspect of being an ITDM means making sure that when shadow and satellite IT do things against your policies, that they are made clearly accountable and lessons learned.

One aspect of this is increasing key man risk, with groups not ensuring that enough different staff know how to handle the systems they’ve bought in and cooked up. As Citizen Robespierre put it during the Terror of the French Revolution, “The graveyards are full of men once called indispensable”.

There is much political capital to be gained and lost sorting out these situations. The wiser end of the ITDMs are gently seeking out the various ticking black boxes dotted around their enterprises, where users have created things that can hit the fan at any time.