Behind The Anxiety

How disconnected are

you?



It’s not a rhetorical question. This section explores the extent
of the disconnect at your organization. The most harmful part of

the disconnect is that it remained hidden for so long.

I’ll list the most common symptoms

of misalignment between business and IT managers. As you go through

the list, you will no doubt recognize symptoms that have created

difficulties for your  organization. Other symptoms will not

apply. Every organization exhibits the symptoms differently, but

every organization exhibits some symptoms.

Again, lack of alignment between business

and IT in an organization is not a technology problem. It’s a business

problem. Manipulating the IT department will not, by itself, eliminate

the disconnect. Replacing individuals will not, by itself, eliminate

the disconnect. The disconnect is a symptom of a systemic malady

and nothing less than a systemic approach will bear fruit. A rational

business foundation must drive realignment and this sensible foundation

must be sensibly arrived at with the participation of both business

and technical management.

Gauging the extent of

the disconnect: Before such

a foundation can be mutually developed, it is useful to determine

just how much damage the disconnect has done. It makes sense to

gauge the extent of the disconnect between corporate management

and IT because the solution to the problem must be pegged to its

scope within each organization.

Working together, representatives of

corporate and technical management should come to some level of

understanding about where, specifically, the disconnect has impacted

the organization. They should not be afraid to answer the question:

What have been the specific consequences of the disconnect? It is

vital that everyone in corporate and technical management list all

the misunderstandings, wasted revenue, lost opportunities and unnecessary

expenditures left in its wake. The point is not to assign blame.

Blaming is just another symptom of the disconnect because it causes

participants to cover themselves and snipe at each other instead

of working together for the common good.

How does an organization gauge the

extent of the disconnect? Fortunately or unfortunately, there are

a number of well-established symptoms of organizational disconnect.

Signs that IT is not organizationally aligned with the business

are:



Complaints about Information Technology? Get in line. The more pronounced
the disconnect, the shriller the expressions of dissatisfaction.

Some of the complaints, generally from the end-users theoretically

served by IT, are over deliverables: delays in delivering applications,

the lack of quality or fit of systems and excessive chargeback costs.

Other complaints, generally from senior management, are generic:

Are we getting sufficient return from the costly investment we’re

making in IT?

Senior Management:

What’s the Use? The silence of resignation is deafening. I much

prefer outraged shouting over acquiescence to an intolerable situation.

I have seen too many organizations in which the disconnect is so

complete that no one questions it anymore. In this situation, IT

has won the honor of bringing all planning and implementation of

systems in-house. The role of the browbeaten and resigned senior

management is restricted to signing checks. The technology people

think they have won, but what is it exactly that they have won?

They may, indeed, be the masters of all they survey, but their horizons,

as well as their long-terms prospects, are limited.

Why Worry? I’m Here

for the Paycheck: The greater

the disconnect, the higher the turnover rate in the IT organization.

IT professionals, like every other member of an organization, want

to participate in charting the enterprise-wide goals of the organization.

To the extent they perceive the disconnect has abolished this opportunity,

they feel disconnected. It is not surprising that most IT groups

display turnover rates in the range of 18 to 33% per year. The enterprise

suffers directly and indirectly: The direct costs of turnover are

expenses associated with recruitment and training. The indirect

costs are less measurable but probably more profound; in companies

with high turnover, people tend toward a destructively short-term

attitude. What are the consequences of decisions made by people

who have a passing through mentality?

Moreover, in IT organizations with

high turnover, the only way to retain good people is to promote

them quickly. Data centers that promote early may arguably be good

for the promote, but from the corporate perspective, late promotion

is a sign of health. Besides low turnover, it means that managers

are well seasoned, can draw on a robust well of institutional memory

and can find precedent for favoring the long-term perspective.

Who’s in Charge Here?

Persistent and heated conflicts

between the traditional IT function and end-user departments over

roles and responsibilities indicate the existence of a fundamental

disconnect. One common pattern in these cases is that a growing

number of end-user departments elect to liberate themselves from

the IT function, preferring to fill their information needs internally

or through contracting with services outside the organization. Another

widespread symptom of ongoing internal conflict is the persistent

attraction that outsourcing part or all of the IT function has among

the organization’s senior managers.

You Go Your Way, I’ll

Go Mine: Where is the enterprise-wide

vision? In this case, the disconnect has led to the dispersal of

IT to the business units (which may possibly be good), but without

the requisite, high-level coordination (which is indubitably bad).

While the business units in isolation may exhibit a high degree

of IT effectiveness and may prospect from their self-reliance, an

appropriate cross-functional vision and IT architecture do not exist.

An inevitable result of isolation is islands of automation, such

that the systems and applications of one group can neither share

common data nor exchange information with another. Without coordination

at the enterprise level, the outcome is the balkanization of IT

resources, resulting in the inability of the organization to respond

to enterprise-level opportunities.

Department of Redundancy

Department: Duplication of

effort is another dimension of a lack of enterprise-wide vision.

When multiple groups in an organization embark on IT projects, it

is inevitable that they will independently reproduce similar applications.

The results are unfortunate for two reasons. First, the systems

will almost certainly be incompatible, developed on different hardware

platforms using different architectures. The unnecessary cost of

redundancy can be considerable, the scant reuse of information wasteful.

But more considerable are the opportunity costs of the precious

time squandered by all that parallel development, time that a more

aligned competitor, no doubt, has used to its advantage.

How Can They Do That?

We Couldn't! One consequence

of the disconnect is that the organization is unable to focus the

appropriate business and IT resources in a relevant time frame.

And its aligned competitors can. When business unit managers see

their competitors leapfrog over them through the Innovative use

of IT, the disconnect is usually a considerable factor in the equation.

Organizations that align IT with corporate

goals consistently deliver more competitive products and services.

They are quick to market, have lower costs and make the right decisions

most of the time. Relative to disconnected companies, aligned organizations

also:

• Spend less on consultants.
• Outsource less often.
• Are faster to market.
• Stay more responsive to changing
  
  conditions.

Well Positioned on the

Bleeding Edge: If you prepared

a skill-set inventory of the technical professionals in the IT resource

(not a bad idea in any event), what would you find? You would find

a staff positioned and yearning to exploit the latest technologies

and architectures, presumably distributed computing, local area

networks, client-server solutions, and object-oriented programming

techniques, rather than focusing on the needs of the business. The

organization would occupy a well-publicized position on the bleeding

edge of technology, and the IT people would be celebrated as pioneers.

The requirements of the business would take a back seat to a pattern

of technology for technology’s sake.

Excerpted from Techno

Vision II



By CHARLES WANG


Published by McGraw-Hill


Courtesy: Computer Associates