Enterprise Initiatives

In part 1 of this series I asked the question, "Are you running IT like it's your business?" Then I highlighted five barriers for preventing IT leaders from being able to transform their IT shop into a well oiled, cost effective machine?

• Resistance to change
• Lack of resources (time, money, and human capital)
  
• Lack of tools
• Lack of metrics
• Lack of process

In part 4, I will focus on Lack of Metrics.

Many IT shops are stuck in maintenance mode and live the life of fire fighting and working hard instead of working smart. These shops struggle to meet the demands of the business and spend most of their time and money keeping the lights on. The business is reluctant to release more funds to IT to fix their issues because they don't see the value that they are getting for their current spend in IT. Your CEO is telling you to do more with less and you are asking for more resources to stay afloat. What gives?

I have heard the grumbling within IT wondering why the business "doesn't get it" or why "they can't see that we need resources". The business has a full time job and expects IT to do their job. They don't have the time to sympathize with IT because they have their own battles to fight. What you have to do to get their attention is to tell a meaningful story that is based on facts (metrics) and discussed in business terms (dollars). So before spending another day complaining about the current state of affairs, start brainstorming about what metrics you should be collecting to allow yourself to paint a picture for the business.

Metrics can be used a couple of ways. First of all, I am not a big fan of coming up with metrics to try to measure the productivity of developers (function points, lines of code, etc.). These types of measurements do more harm then good. I am not looking for metrics that show a distrust in your teams ability to do their jobs. I am looking for metrics that can capture opportunities to make improvements in the enterprise. Tracking where time is being spent can be a valuable exercise. You should know how much time you are spending on product support and maintenance and put plans in place to reduce these numbers by some percentage each year. You should also measure defect types and severity by application so you can put task forces in motion to improve the problem areas. If you ever want to get out of support hell, you must be proactive.

If the business does not think that IT is providing value, you can use metrics to show them otherwise. Metrics about availability and uptime, SLAs, change requests implemented, money saved due to process or performance improvements, and many others can highlight the things that IT brings to the table. Create executive level dashboards that sell the value of IT real time. One of IT's biggest faults is that IT rarely celebrates its success stories. IT falls victim to the "what have you done for me lately" routine. If you got it, flaunt it!

Once you have your metrics in place, you can start the long journey of continuous improvement. Attack your top problem areas and tie your metrics to dollars. The business listens and understands money. They typically don't listen to or understand technology. When you do need to go to the well to ask for resources, you should have plenty of facts that you can tie to dollars to sell your story. Despite some of the griping within the gallows of IT, the business is not blind. IT has just never provided them with enough data to see the light.

I had written a few articles about Web 2.0 and how the younger generations have a tremendous influence on the technologies we use to communicate on the web (here and here). One of my main points was about ease of use. As IT professionals we should take lessons from the web and apply them to work. As I was drafting part two of my five part article "Are you running IT like it's your business?", my 8 year old daughter wandered in my office and asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing a Blog and she asked me if she could write one. I created her an ID on Blogger and sent her on her way. A few minutes later she comes into my office and says, "Check out my Blog, Daddy". I typed in her blog, which was innocently named, "theseareaboutmycat.blogspot.com" and I stared at my monitor with my mouth wide open. With no instructions and no help from me she had a cute little blog about cats and dogs.

So why can't we build applications this easy for our users? Do we try to anticipate our users' every need and over design our applications? Are we making things too complex? Hmm, I see a few more articles on this topic brewing in the near future.

In the mean time, I have showed her how to add video and Site Meter to her site. I can't wait to see what she creates next!

There are several good articles about running IT like a business (here and here). I would like to ask the question, "Are you running IT like it's your business?" What are some of the barriers for preventing IT leaders from being able to transform their IT shop into a well oiled, cost effective machine?

• Resistance to change
• Lack of resources (time, money, and human capital)
  
• Lack of tools
• Lack of metrics
• Lack of process

If you owned your own business would you let those obstacles get in the way of making your business more profitable? I didn't think so. So why should your shareholders tolerate it? In today's world of IT, there is a lot of pressure on CIOs to cut costs, pursue outsourcing, improve delivery, and enable the business to grow. If your shop is spending most of its efforts "keeping the lights on" are you really just managing a cost center?

Let's discuss the five barriers to success that I listed above. First is resistance to change. According to Prosci, the experts on change management, the top reasons for resistance to change are:

• Lack of understanding around the vision and need for change.
• Comfort with the status quo and fear of the unknown.
• Corporate history and culture.
• Opposition to the new technologies, requirements and processes introduced by the change.
• Fear of job loss.

In order to overcome these obstacles you must manage both the human and business aspects of change. To manage the human side of change you must define WIIFM (what's in it for me) for people at all levels. That equates to having distinct communication plans for Sr. management, mid level management, and non management personnel. You also must constantly reinforce and adjust your communication plan throughout the duration of your change initiative. It only takes one respected person to doubt the initiative and the whole house of cards can come tumbling down.

So define a clear vision, get executive level buy-in, communicate early and often, manage resistance, and measure your progress. I also recommend that you find a partner to help you foster change. Why learn everything the hard way? Accelerate the learning curve and secure a change management partner to guide you to a successful implementation of change.

In part 2, I will discuss the next barrier to success, Lack of Resources.

Stay tuned.

Nick Carr created one of the longest running questions I have ever seen when he wrote his book Does IT Matter back in 2004. There has been so much discussion arguing for both sides of the answer including this article from Harvard's Andrew McAfee. I believe that a key differentiator for a company is the business processes. For IT to Matter, IT must create an architecture that supports the business's need to dynamically change and customize their processes. This allows the business to be more self sufficient and agile, which leads to a better user experience and faster time to market.

This is why the BPMS and SOA vendors are cashing in right now. Many IT executives are starting to understand that IT needs to be more of a partner to the business then a cost of doing business. BPMS solutions allow IT to provide tools for the business to rapidly deploy new systems that can have a huge impact on the bottom line by:

• reducing costs through process reengineering
• identifying bottlenecks and providing what-if analytics for ongoing process improvement
• providing robust, AJAX & web enabled user interfaces
  
• providing visibility into performance metrics with built in business intelligence tools
• providing self service capabilities for the end users, thus reducing the dependency on IT resources

The smart IT executives are leveraging SOA to allow the BPMS tools to talk to the existing legacy systems by providing a service layer that acts as a bridge between the user interface and the backend systems. This allows IT to rapidly deploy new systems without having to throw away the huge investments made over the years on their existing systems.

So to make a long story short. Does IT Matter? It can matter if IT recognizes that "Process is King" and that the business and IT need to work hand in hand to provide solutions that create a competitive advantage.