There was a recent article in CIO magazine that caught my eye. At the bottom of page 24, Thomas Wailgum has a piece titled, "A New Face for IT?". It's mainly around Forrester Research's CEO George Colony who has a quest, as I do, to transform "information technology" to "business technology". George, and his team of analysts at Forrester, think that it's as simple as a name change that will help power this transformation. Just changing a name won't do it, there needs to be a vision and then solid execution from the CIO all the way down to the most junior server admin. Now I'm not naive enough to think that the high school graduate that was just hired to patch systems day in and day out would have any desire to understand why "the business" is important. With that said, most shops that I've been into the staff has always been "heads down" and the IT organization has been content to just be the providers to the business. We are working in a whole new world of business here folks, and if IT wants a seat at the strategic table you and the whole IT organization have to figure out how to speak the language of business. There is a flip side to that statement; "business needs to understand IT as well. By giving the business a glimpse into IT, this would hopefully show the business how IT is understaffed, under-budgeted, under pressure to keep the lights on AND be innovative." I agree.
So what it comes down to as I mentioned above was vision and execution. But I need to understand something first, "How much of an understanding do you and your management have on how your company makes money thereby having a staff that knows where the money comes from and where it goes?" Not much I would guess. What do you gain by having this understanding? Well by doing this you accomplish the task of having an IT organization that knows how to see opportunities to differentiate the company from the competition. The key here is to get beyond the old cliché of Information Technology to Business Technology. The old way of "IT-Business alignment" implies that IT is separate from the business, whereas Business Technology is the effort to integrate, to a higher degree, IT into the business decision process. To accomplish that integration, everyone in IT has to learn how the business makes money and how to use that information to generate new innovations and revenue opportunities. Doing so will help you to increase IT's value to the organization.
As I stated before, I've been speaking about ways to accomplish IT-Business integration, or Business Technology, for a very long time now. In engagement/project kickoff meetings I state that in order to achieve this Utopian vision of IT, you have to think like the CEO and CFO. I will guarantee you that at the top of every CEO's and CFO's mind is the fact that for every dollar coming in the front door, a portion is going out the back in the form of costs. If you take time and study that equation you can discover ways to save and generate revenue. During client meetings I advise people to think ahead, and ask themselves not just how IT contributes to today's business model, but how that will change in the future. This really gets folks thinking on a different level; strategically instead of tactically.
One example that I can give, which was part of a larger engagement, involved the helpdesk. I saw a huge disconnect between business and IT. This company relied heavily on IT to produce its products; customer-facing applications are tightly integrated with the ERP and manufacturing systems. During my time sitting on the help desk they didn't understand how all of the systems and manufacturing machines were integrated to scan and manufacture this product- which was a highly intricate process.
I made a note when a business user called in with a problem, the help desk didn't necessarily know which part of the process was not working. The same would be true for the system administrator who would see working machines, but no problem with a file transfer application being able to find the right file.
In my review of the day I decided that the solution to better IT support and create a less stressed-out helpdesk manager lay in fostering a more integrated view of business processes and IT operations. In my final report to executive management I suggested, as a start, they send as many employees as possible out to the manufacturing sites to learn about the equipment and systems they were servicing from the user's point of view and to document that business-centric view.
Part of this engagement I worked with the management staff to map out the company's business processes to each application and the machines they run on and show how each was connected to the others. This map was a powerful illustration of how the employees who create and service each system contribute to their company's top line. It also worked as a tool to show which systems impact revenue the most and which processes needed infrastructure improvements. Today, I'm pretty sure they still use the map as a training tool for new employees in IT to help understand high-level business process and systems flow.
By building an understanding of the relationship between how the business makes money and the work it does everyday, helps the everyone appreciate the purpose behind their jobs and have a perspective and an appreciation of the business users' requests. This in turn will help you create better partnerships with the business users and further the movement to Business Technology.