How It Gets That Way
Today's IS/IT departments are generally cost-driven. Top
management allocates a budget, and then says, "Give us e-mail (for example), and do
it within this budget." The poor technologist has neither the motivation nor
the experience to look beyond these minimal solutions and select higher-cost options that
would produce true results for the organization as a whole. They're focused on cost
reduction, not on maximum bang-for-the-buck.
When the choice is left to technologists, they're naturally
going to select products that make their lives easier...even if that means the
organization as-a-whole suffers from a lack of functionality in the products. Worse,
many of these technologists haven't sufficient line-of-business management experience to
know what they don't know about organizational true needs. Given a very
sophisticated product that gains user ease-of-use by putting more demands on the
technology community, it not hard to see why the technologists object. Since they
don't benefit from the sophistication, they see no reason to take on more work load.
No where is this more evident than in the selection of
something as simple as an e-mail system: If it's the first one, and the decision is
left to technologists alone, you can bet they'll pick a simple product that provides just
e-mail. But it probably lacks the complex and sophisticated features for mobile
executives who need to get their mail from hotel rooms without tinkering. And it
probably won't scale well when you try to build that strategic partnership with a company
that has a different mail system. Further, it probably won't have the features
necessary for group calendaring and scheduling, or many of the other features that
companies are using to gain competitive leverage. In this case, they've fulfilled
their management mandate ("install e-mail, stay within costs"), and they may've
undermined the ability for the organization to exploit, say, knowledge management, or
distance learning, or comprehensive workflow, or relationship selling support.
All too often, corporate management abrogates their
responsibility to technologists who, themselves, have never had to meet a payroll or
produce a profit. It's essential that the IS/IT organization be populated
especially at the highest
levelswith people who've
spent years out in the field, on the factory floor, or on the service
lines. Intel's new CIO, for instance, has spent most of his career in Field Sales
management; you can expect the quality of decisions to different from those of an IS/IT
group headed by a promoted programmer. And, if the respected technologists don't
have that experience base, make sure that the organizational
technology choices are made by senior non-technical management, guided by the
technologists' views and experience, of course. But don't let the technologists make
the decisions alone.
