There is a lot of important work in IT that isn’t getting done.

Replying to the 8 Things We Hate About IT blog entry, a reader named Paul shared his frustrations with IT and what he believes the IT role should be: “My biggest frustration with IT is that they tend to consider themselves IT (in a reactive mode) rather than embrace the business proactively, and they stifle the creative entrepreneurialism that is critical to advancing the state of the business…IT should not just carry out specific needs, it should creatively partner to explore what SHOULD be done.”

Take a poll and you’ll find that most every IT professional across the globe agrees.

Problem is, as we’ve discussed, IT is so busy managing the trees, they can’t afford to even think about the forest. IT spends 75% of its time managing lights-on activities and the remainder of its time fielding enhancement and project requests that overwhelm the department. On average, the IT backlog (what other business function has backlogs?) is between 1-3 years, a preposterous number for a technology world that works in, at most, 6-month cycles.

We’ve already talked about how some of the tactical chores can be eliminated (Reduce IT Demand By 50%) and how others can be taken out of IT’s purview and put into the hands of business units themselves (As Good As IT Gets).

Breaking out of its tactical shackles is critical so that IT can free itself to help the business strategically. Let’s return to our list of 8 Things We Hate About IT and to identify the work that IT should be doing drive innovation and business change:

To break through the...	...Make sure IT is focused on...
Limited authority	Equipping business partners with the “rules and tools” of their technology so that they can safely satisfy day-to-day IT needs on their own. For example, many companies have placed document management and business intelligence tools and guidelines directly in the hands of their business partners, thereby reducing the need to request these services from IT or having IT worry about whether policies are being followed.
Missing adult supervision	Closing the capability gap between the CIO and the rest of the IT leadership team. Business partners want to work with more seasoned technology leaders to collaborate on IT-enabled strategies. Unfortunately, typically there is a huge gap between CIOs and their direct reports, as illustrated by that an estimated 60% of CIO positions are filled externally.
Financial Extortion	Delivering year-over-year reductions in price/unit for IT services through simplification, standardization, and automation. Organizations that have tackled a disciplined cost management program have reduced lights-on costs by as much as 50%.
Never-ending projects	Investing in technology that allows for quick assembly and a learn-by-doing adoption process. Salesforce.com, a software-as-a-services (Saas) provider, is a great example of this strategy.
Helpless Help Desks	Incorporating self-service capabilities in every technology deployed. Case-in-point, single sign-on capabilities combined with user-oriented password management tools, can reduce help desk calls by as much as 30%.
Abdication Outsourcing	Becoming best in class at managing external providers. Outsourcing is a powerful sourcing option, but over 50% of outsourcing deals fail due to an inability to effectively define and manage the contracts and relationships.You must ensure seamless process integration across the services ecosystem.
Out-of-date Geeks	Giving motivated IT staff space and time to learn new technologies. It's only if IT has the time to learn new technology that they can then share insights on how the technology can be applied to business performance. See Google’s 20% time initiative for inspiration.
Lack of Good News	Developing approaches that ensure tangible value is realized from IT-enabled business investments. Research indicates that IT Increases shareholder value for those organizations that manage it well.

By assuming responsibility for fulfilling their day-to-day IT needs, the business will create something IT desperately needs: free time. That time can be then used to focus on the above strategies that truly serve the enterprise. In short, IT can consider the forest.

Take a moment to share your views of what you are doing to take control over the technology that runs your business and how you are improving collaboration with IT and the rest of the business.

Last week, I had a conversation with a CEO who described his CIO as being too solicitous of his business partners.

Think this is a good problem? Think again.

Over the past decade, IT organizations have worked hard to improve services and in turn increase IT’s impact on the business. But in the quest to deliver great service, IT actually may have been disabling rather than enabling the enterprise.

How? In two ways. First, continual hand-holding leads to a loss of precious time that could be devoted to more important activities. Second, helping others who can help themselves circumvents learning. It lets them off the hook and alleviates their sense of responsibility. And ultimately it slows down progress as communication is constantly being run through an intermediary. In delegation lingo, this is called taking on someone else’s monkey.

My last blog entry, As Good As IT Gets, recommends that business unit leaders take direct control over the management of their IT assets in order to increase innovation capacity. That means managers at all levels would fulfill day-to-day IT needs on their own, including managing projects and change, performing business process and data analysis, and troubleshooting systems issues.

Many business leaders will take pause at this. As reader Judy did in her response to the Eight Things We Hate About IT blog, “…isn’t that the purpose of having a dedicated staff of IT?” Doesn’t IT exist to do exactly what I’m now saying business leaders should do? You know, manage IT.

No. The purpose of having a dedicated IT staff is to ensure that information technology is applied in direct support of the business strategy – to help the business compete and grow profitably. IT should make sure that IT is done well, but not try to do it all. Trying to do it all on behalf of business partners results in a tactically focused IT organization too busy managing transactions to rise above the fray and resolve the complex issues described in the Why We Love/Hate IT blog entries.

As a result of IT giving the business fish, rather than teaching it to fish, much important work in IT isn’t getting done. By taking direct control over the IT assets that support your business, you can ensure that IT is focused on the work that serves enterprise interests, such as:

• Reducing IT costs, particularly the “lights on” component that eats up 75 cents of each IT dollar spent
• Shaping and informing business strategy to ensure that IT is used to drive business performance
• Creating approaches to innovation that allow IT and the other parts of the business to “learn while doing”

Let me say it again: Pleasing business partners shouldn't be IT’s ultimate goal. Rather, IT’s ultimate goal is to ensure the success of the business. Help IT serve you and the business by making sure that IT isn’t doing anything for you that you can, and should, do for yourself.

In the next blog, we will explore the important work that isn’t getting done in IT. Take a moment to share your views of how you are taking control of your business’s technology future and the important work that IT should be doing, but isn’t.

Without a doubt, some good IT organizations exist, as illustrated by this McKinsey interview with Marina Levinson, the CIO of NetApp. This organization, like many others, has IT focused on the right principles. I’ve pulled some highlights from the interview as evidence:

Organizational Component	Organizational Principle	Levinson's case-in-point quote
Vision	IT as a business enabler	“Never want IT to show up in a quarterly report as the reason the company didn’t meet its revenue numbers”
Decision Rights	Business leaders held accountable for getting value from IT	“Business to justify its IT investments and to present a tangible return on investment for all projects”
Processes	Fast-cycle innovation tied to long-term interests	“Deliver tangible business value within 90-day increments” “Build quickly while also looking at least two or three years ahead”
Staffing/Skills	Business people are smart about IT and IT people are smart about business	“IT leaders who challenge [the business]” “Each cross functional process has a sponsor at the senior or executive VP level…with operational leader whose responsibility includes that business process”
Motivators/Values	Top-line and customer focused	“Any system that allows us to get closer to our customers and partners...”

This is good, but it isn’t nearly as good as IT can get. That’s because Levinson’s model is still based on the current IT operating framework, which has two inherent flaws, which she herself acknowledges:

1. Governance slows down innovation. (Levinson: “Folks in the lower levels of the organization occasionally criticize the process as painful and time consuming.”)
2. Delivery of services remains within the domain of IT. (Levinson: “Don’t worry about how we are going to get there”)

As a result of these flaws, passionate professionals looking for IT approval and resources are forced to wait in line before they can test and implement their great ideas. In turn, the business’ overall capacity to innovate is diminished.

Improving on this flawed model is a good idea, but it’s not the end goal.

The end goal is to manage IT as an organizational asset, not an organizational structure. Achieving this goal requires tools that allow everybody in the business - across, up and down the organization – to modify their “applications” and underlying infrastructure. What Excel was to innovation in the 90’s and business intelligence to the ‘00’s, tools can be developed (such as the ideas embodied in business process management) that encourage IT self-sufficiency and reduce the need to funnel all IT requests through IT.

Of course, reaching that goal won’t happen overnight – maybe not even in the next decade. But there is much that you can do to bring the future forward:

• Accept that managing IT assets is your responsibility, just as managing financial or human resources assets is. That means you fix your IT “systems” just as you would fix your budget problems or employee problems.
• When IT asks you to expand your role leading IT-enabled business change, don’t assume that IT is trying to shirk their responsibilities. Agree to share the responsibility.
• Get smart about IT through education, hands on interaction and problem solving with your current systems and consumer technologies.
• Refuse to promote ideas that don’t include commitments to realize tangible value (process measures are a great way to define and manage value).
• When defining system requirements, insist on functionality that will “externalize the logic” so that much of the enhancement and maintenance can be done by your team without involvement from IT.
• Learn how to manage projects and change, perform business process and data analysis, and start complying with IT standards and processes. Doing so will earn you the right to manage internal and external IT resources yourself rather than through IT.

The truth is business leaders have always wanted direct control over information technology, as evidenced by their willingness to create “shadow” IT organizations, select technologies without involving IT, and contract directly with vendors.

Governance clamps down on these IT “end runs” but it harms the innovative process. It’s time to start moving to a new model that enables both innovation and distributed control over IT. To start, leaders need to get smarter about IT and assume control over the IT assets that fuel their business.

Share your views – how are your business leaders getting smarter about IT?

The last blog discussed why we all hate dealing with IT – not the people, of course, but the crazy system that results in the IT paradox of spending too much to create too little, too late. No doubt the current operating model is ripe for an overhaul. Unfortunately, we’re stuck with it for the foreseeable future. We can't undo all we've built overnight, and even if we could, we dont' have a new system yet. To borrow from a great CSN&Y song, we have to “love the one we’re with.”

Most of what we hate about IT is based in the unpleasant reality that the system is designed to protect ourselves from ourselves. It delivers complex IT services to a relatively unsophisticated and demanding “customer” who expects IT to serve their individual needs without regard for the benefit and risks to the enterprise. They say “Make it work for me now!” and we have to build around that.

Building around that customer creates all kinds of negative effects. It depletes cash, perpetuates information silos, fragments processes. Sometimes it even causes laws to be broken. (See Sarbanes-Oxley and its causes).

I anticipate some of you don’t buy this and think I’m being over the top. For the doubters, check out this research about how the narrow pursuit of IT-business alignment negatively impacts business performance.

But too often we confuse hating the system with the people who work in it. We should love the people in IT who are doing their best to make the best of a bad situation. Let’s look at the 8 Things We Hate About IT from my last post from the perspective of IT. Here’s why they deserve love, along with a little insight into what they think about you:

We can hate the...	But we have to love that IT...
1. Limited Authority	Creates governance that allocates resources to reasonably balance value and risk. Ensures systems are designed and delivered in a way that promotes usability, integration, reliability, and compliance.
2. Missing Adult Supervision	Dedicates senior managers to strengthen relationships with lines of business and help make better IT decisions.
3. Financial Extortion	Bears the brunt of defending the ongoing costs of IT-enabled investments in spite of the fact that corporate management isn’t held accountable for deriving value to pay for these costs.
4. Projects Never End	Tackles difficult projects and figures out how to (ultimately) deliver (most of them) without adequate resources and involvement from the other parts of the business.
5. Helpless Help Desks	Provides OTJ training to an ungrateful user community even though much of this tedious work could be eliminated if they mastered the basics of the systems that support their business.
6. Outsourcers Who Run Amok	Fights hard against unnecessary outsourcing - many times to the point of putting their careers at risk.
7. Out of Date Geeks	Works long hours supporting old technologies that the company can’t afford to upgrade.
8. Absence of Good News	Increases shareholder value for those organizations who manage it well.

Many in IT understand that current practices will cause the current IT system to collapse under the weight of future complexities (poignantly articulated by the question posed in Tim Gray’s comment to the last blog post, “What if this is as good as it gets?”). They also know that the key to a better future is to dramatically increase corporate management’s IT IQ (thanks to Vaidya Nathan for sharing his story and posing these questions, “Don't you think it is a bigger risk that something so important to you is opaque to you, both at knowledge level and management level?” and “Don't you think you need to take concrete steps to reduce the opacity?”)

The challenge in front of us is to create a future where the capacity to innovate isn’t limited by the size or shape of the IT organization. Next time, we’ll address the question, “If we could build a new IT operating model from scratch, what would it look like?”

I would love it if you would take a moment out of your busy day and share why you love IT, and your view of its future.

You may think that hate is too strong of a word for feelings toward a corporate department. I don't. Yesterday, I was interviewing an executive on his perceptions of IT and he couldn’t spit his frustration out fast enough. He said, “In the quest of getting things organized, they are introducing a bunch of bureaucracy and, in the process, they're abdicating their responsibility for making sure the right things get done.” This is completely typical of management's frustration - no, management's hatred - of IT.

It's hard to remember the time when criticizing IT was controversial. Now, it's ceased to be even interesting. The now-classic HBR article "IT Doesn’t Matter” resonated so clearly because it underscored the pervasive belief that IT mediocrity is the norm. And how bad is an industry's reputation when a major outsourcer, Keane, can get away with insulting its target market with the slogan, “We Do IT Right”?

It’s not personal – nobody hates the people in IT – it’s the system that’s broken. And here’s the rub: IT doesn’t like it either. One global Fortune 200 CIO describes leading IT as “a sucking vortex."

So let's do something about it. In the spirit of confronting brutal facts honestly, and then developing deeper insights that will allow us to chart a new path - here’s my take on what we all hate about IT.

1. IT Limits Managers' Authority You bring in 10% of the company’s revenue but can’t authorize a $100,000 project if it requires IT. Furthermore, IT's bureaucratic governance process rivals the tax code in complexity and inhibits rather than promotes innovation.
2. They're Missing Adult Supervision The CIO is impressive, but totally unavailable. So the next best option is your IT “relationship manager" who's a few clicks down the evolutionary scale and doesn’t have the breadth of expertise to truly act as a trusted IT advisor to senior business executives.
3. They're Financial Extortionists When was the last time there wasn't some emergency in IT (e.g. Y2K, SOX, HIPAA) that requires a zillion dollars? Compound this with the lack of visibility into how IT spends non-project dollars and it makes you want to become a technology vendor to cash in on the booty.
4. Their Projects Never End In-process projects are always 90% done. "Completed" projects don’t have agreed to functionality, and the team that promises to deliver missing functionality in future phases are always mysteriously missing-in-action.
5. The Help Desk is Helpless When glitches emerge, you are become a technology pauper, going door-to-door begging for help while functional specialists defend the reliability of their piece of the byzantine infrastructure.
6. They Let Outsourcers Run Amok You know that outsourcing wasn’t really IT’s idea, but you blame them when you're trying to communicate with external “service” providers that lack even a basic understanding of your business. It's like trying to teach calculus to a 4 year old.
7. IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks It's not good when you learn about social networking from your 12-year old at home while IT is still trying to cope with email. Then, when you try to brainstorm with IT about how to apply new technology, you get paternalistic responses akin to the look that parents give their children when they play dress up.
8. IT Never Has Good News No matter how much you spend and how hard you work, you never have anything to celebrate and little to look forward to as the promise of technology seems perpetually beyond your reach.

Of course, there’s yin to go with this yang and my next post will turn the tables to reveal IT's point of view on corporate management.

In the meantime, tell me what I got wrong (and right) – what do you hate (and possibly, love) about IT?

P.S. To all my IT friends who hate that I wrote this – read this and take some solace that IT’s not the only one in the management doghouse.

One of my favorite Druckerisms is, “I have no interest in someone who plays the minute waltz in 56 seconds.” Drucker goes on to explain that, “In terms of technology, we have people trying to play it in 56 seconds when it shouldn't be played at all. Very little of our computing capacity is well used.”

When it comes to IT, this quote hits home, big time. Do a random sample of the typical IT request queue and at least 50% of the requests there would bore Mr. Drucker senseless. In my experience, 30% of the IT requests aren’t worth the effort and 20%-30% can be accommodated by leveraging existing systems.

The problem with the bad, 56-second type, IT requests is that they slow down the good ones.

Imagine a road with a tollgate. The tollgate represents the IT investment governance process (including logging, defining, estimating, justifying, and evaluating). All requests must go through the tollgate before entering the road on their way to their final destination (or delivery, in our case). The bad ideas slow down the good ones by competing for governance airtime and creating congestion that slows down delivery overall. It doesn’t matter how well tuned the IT supply processes are; too much IT demand has the same impact on progress and innovation as quitting time does on my ability to get home when I’m driving in Los Angeles traffic.

Many a senior executive team has tried, and failed, to reduce IT demand. Problem is, there are too many requests requiring too much detailed knowledge to manage IT demand from above. IT congestion can be reduced -- but only if every driver does their part:

1) Evaluate the idea with the cold, cruel eye of a VC. Ask if the idea directly supports the business strategy and creates tangible business value (e.g., speed up orders, improve customer retention rate, etc.). If the answer to either of these questions is no, make the idea more interesting by tying it to the multiplier in your business.

2) Check to see if the capability already exists. Only about 20% of systems' functionality is frequently used (and an estimated 45% is never used), so it’s highly likely that the systems can do more than you think they can. It may be necessary to develop some new skills -- for example, using the data extract and reporting tools -- or modify your business process, but it’s much faster and cheaper to do it yourself than wait in the IT request queue.

3) Ensure that you are ready to devote the necessary resources. A project manager and analytical expertise will need to be assigned -- from your organization -- to define requirements, redesign processes, perform testing, and manage change.

4) Verify that the idea is as good as you think. Test or pilot the concept using the available tools (e.g., using a combination of current systems supplemented with Excel and some manual effort). This will not only validate the business value, but highlight any people and process issues that need to be addressed.

McKinsey was right to say, “The problem is that IT governance systems have become a substitute for real leadership." Leaders at all levels should perform the bulk of IT prioritization on their own -- before the formal governance process kicks in.