willingness to learn and adapt is vital to building and running a world-class IT Department. In the next chapter, we'll look at what sets an IT Department head and shoulders above the rest.
Note
1 1. Robert Austin (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016), The Adventures of an IT Leader, Updated ed.
2 An Amazing IT Department? What's That?
Stacey Renfro, the award-winning CEO of mDesign Home Décor, understands the importance of a strong IT Department to any business's success—especially a digital-first company. Here is Stacey's advice to CIOs:
1 Speak our language, not yours. We don't need to know how you do your work.
2 Know the business. Don't sit behind your computer and expect to make a difference.
3 Communicate. Let your business partners know what you're doing. If you don't share, you may not know all the impacts of a change.
Amazing IT Departments are a competitive advantage for their company. Amazing IT Departments continually exceed expectations by providing reliable and secure systems. They have friendly, prompt, and competent support teams. Amazing IT Departments complete their projects on time, on budget, and with a high degree of customer satisfaction. Amazing IT Departments are agile, working in small iterations and adapting on the fly. Amazing IT Departments write things down and keep good records without being buried by needless paperwork and bureaucracy. Amazing IT Departments provide transparency by communicating status, honestly, and in plain language. Amazing IT Departments are a terrific value, providing cost-effective services while delivering high return-on-investment (ROI) capabilities. Amazing IT Departments openly learn from their mistakes and successes, taking the time to look back on every initiative. Amazing IT Departments provide a fertile ground for innovation. They build flexible platforms, which allow for rapid prototyping. They have a culture that allows for innovation, and they inspire and reward creativity.
If you work in an Amazing IT Department, your work is aligned with the company's goals. You know you are making a difference. You also understand what you need to do to be successful. You have a clearly defined career path based on your personal goals. The work is rewarding because people are supportive and collaborative, and everyone on the team is pulling their weight. You can't imagine working anywhere else, and when the phone rings, you tell the recruiter you have no interest in exploring other opportunities.
Attributes of an Amazing IT Department
Helps the company accomplish its goals
Drives and inspires innovation
Is an enabler, not a blocker
Delivers cost-effective results
Provides career growth opportunities for the team
Is a fun and rewarding place to work
For the most part, these qualities are all attainable, although some require more awareness and commitment than others. In the next chapter, we'll examine some of the common problems that make it more difficult to build and sustain such a team.
3 Conventional Wisdom Is Wrong
If you're a sitting CIO right now, how are you doing? Use Table 3.1 to assess yourself. Answer honestly; nobody's looking. By the way, you can write in this book. You bought it.
Table 3.1: CIO Self-Assessment
| Question | Yes/No/Don't know |
|---|---|
| Are your systems reliable, with 99.9% uptime? | |
| Do you score over 90% on an internal customer satisfaction survey? | |
| Does your board of directors (board) consider IT a competitive advantage? | |
| Does IT provide value, continually delivering new capabilities? | |
| Do the CEO and CFO brag about IT in public presentations? | |
| Are you providing cost-effective services? | |
| Are you invited to informal executive conversations because the CEO values your input? | |
| Do your company employees find it easy to use their tools to get work done? Are their files in the cloud and easily accessible? | |
| Do other department heads treat you as an equal? | |
| Is IT turnover lower than the company average? | |
| Is your team fully engaged? Do they over-deliver? | |
| If I asked everyone on your team to list the top three IT priorities, would they all give the same answers? | |
| If I asked all the VPs in your company to list the top three IT priorities, would they all give the same answers? | |
| Is IT leading the way on innovation in your company? |
If you answered yes to most of these questions, call me—I'd like to feature you in my next book. The rest of us have some work to do.
Compared to our executive peers, our profession is still in its infancy and only recently gaining respectability. Two of the first people to have the CIO title were Al Zipf of Bank of America, and Max Hopper of Bank of America and American Airlines. “Management's Newest Star: Meet the Chief Information Officer,” declared Business Week magazine in a headline in 19862. Just 17 years later, The Harvard Business Review declared the profession dead, in the article “IT Doesn't Matter.”3
Showing our worth has been a tough sell. We don't bring in revenue, mistakes can be extremely harmful, and what we do seems to take forever. Have you ever taken an introductory programming class, and the goal at the end is to get the words “Hello World” to pop up on the screen? The amount of effort necessary to make this happen is incomprehensible to our non-technical peers. One of the biggest challenges is that what we do is esoteric and more challenging than it looks.
A Tale of Two Projects
Imagine the case where a company is doing well, so it adds hundreds of people to its staff. The company's growth has created two problems: it needs a more robust people-management solution, and it needs additional parking. The decision is made to build a parking garage and implement new cloud-based human resources (HR) software. Both projects coincidentally cost around $3 million to complete.
The company performs a rigorous ROI process before software projects are approved. The chief people officer (CPO) is adamant that she needs tools for talent acquisition, compensation management, payroll, and employee development. As we know, it's hard to associate a revenue increase with this software. Costs will go up compared to their current business processes using spreadsheets and email as their primary tools. The parking garage doesn't go through the ROI process. Nobody likes to park a mile away and ride a