There's many reason it survives. First of all, it's mostly fixed - the majority of the IT budget is required to keep the lights on. Also, other parts of the business influence IT budget growth, so to cut it back, you have to affect the behavior of the entire leadership team, not just those who reside in IT.

Third, there isn't much chaff to separate from the wheat. IT costs have been under tight scrutiny in response to the runaway IT spending of the late 90's. Data centers and call centers have been consolidated, contracts have been renegotiated, and services have been off-shored.

Finally and most importantly, reducing IT costs has the perverse effect of increasing IT demand and thereby costs. Many budget cuts hinge on implementing process changes and thereby, require systems changes.

Some eager IT staffers are probably ready to print out and distribute this blog entry to their bosses to show why they shouldn't suffer budget cuts during this downturn. Not so fast. It may be difficult to cut the IT budget, but as they said in the days the California gold rush, "there's still lots of gold in them-there hills."

The key to further, smart, cost reductions is to recognize the fact that, in general, companies spend too much on IT because they are unwilling to say "no" to IT-related requests. The path of least resistance seems to rule the day: Too many projects are funded, too many die a slow death, too much technology is procured, too many quality defects are tolerated, and users require too much hand holding.

As you work this round of IT-related budget cuts, engage senior business and IT leadership in managing these truths that drive up IT costs and institute policy changes that will result in lowering costs and increasing returns (Click hereto download this chart):

Managing the truths will require more finesse and courage than ever before. It takes wisdom to decide what needs to be done and courage to stick to decisions in spite of the whining that will ensue. The good news is that the disciplines developed during the tough times will pay off in a big way during the good. You may have started this management process because of a downturn, but making better investments and leveraging invested capital never goes out of style.

Usually it goes something like this: The manager knows that the key to justifying projects is demonstrating the link between your proposed projects and the overall enterprise strategy. Unfortunately, research indicates that "most companies have a formal strategic planning processing but don't use it to make their most important decisions." In other words, they don't really have a meaningful enterprise strategy.

So what do managers do? They use a watered-down surrogate: a list of IT initiatives that survive the annual financial planning process. The list does not impress the IT investment board. They demand to understand the strategic and financial justification for each line item.

So it's back to the drawing board for the chagrined IT manager and his increasingly impatient "business partner." They need to come up with something more appealing to the powers that be. Usually, that's a prettied up list, in the form of a Power Point presentation. It dutifully lays out issues, objectives, recommendations, and a prioritized list of projects appended with benefit statements such as, "increased customer retention", "better decision making", or "increase sales productivity."

Unfortunately, nowhere on these pretty pages can anyone ascertain how these projects will increase value, agility, cost performance, or growth.

It's a strategic stalemate. What happens next? Usually, in an attempt to appease all involved, organizations adopt the "deck of cards" approach to decision making, dealing out project approvals based on politics and back room deals to favored players until the cards run out and funding is depleted.

Unfortunately, the resulting list of approved IT projects has as much to do with making IT matter as a series of home improvements do on creating a pleasing and functional décor.

All this because, as we pointed out before, there's no meaningful enterprise strategy.

But actually that's not quite true. What we really mean to say is there's no meaningful enterprise strategy written down.

Strategy may be an iterative, messy process consisting of relationships, hallway conversations, and decisions made with one part analytics and three parts instinct, but the strategy is there. It exists.

What distinguishes leaders from managers is the ability to develop strategic context for their organizations and initiatives in spite of the absence of an actual strategy document and formal processes. If you find yourself waiting for strategy to come down from above, get over it. The book The New CIO Leader provides some great ideas for how to derive the strategic context necessary to identify and justify IT-enabled initiatives that matter to the success of the business. The following is a slightly modified version of those ideas. A 5-step program that has worked well for my clients (Click here to download the chart):

You can accelerate progress by doing the first step (understanding the fundamentals) as background research and convening a planning workshop to validate the findings and work through the next steps.

Remember, making strategy is a group sport, so partner up with your team, stakeholders, and IT counterparts to work through this process and ensure that when the cards are dealt, you'll have fostered the support necessary to have the winning hand.

Leaders who have worked in these roles do so with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. On the positive side, the prospect of charting new territories is incredibly stimulating. On the negative, it's also frustrating - navigating IT can be like traveling in a foreign country without an interpreter or a guidebook.

It doesn't have to feel this way. IT is just like any other business function - challenged with developing and delivering products and services to demanding "customers" in the context of constrained resources and changing competitive, organizational and technological landscapes.

As a business, the key to success is to understand the lay of the land in order to make smart decisions about how to get the right people working collaboratively on meaningful objectives in a way that delivers against short and long term needs.

Of course, to get the lay of the IT land, you need to ask the right questions. The following is a short assessment worksheet that's useful in understanding current IT capabilities and identifying opportunities for improvement.

The assessment is organized by "the four key IT imperatives", each with a set of questions about the supporting behaviors that contribute to stronger performance. You can download a copy of the worksheet here: IT Assessment Worksheet.doc

Don't try to answer these questions on your own. Cozy up with your IT counterparts and benefit from their expertise. For each question, collectively make a best guess as to performance and impact. Then brainstorm how to address the low performing/high impact behaviors.

By getting the lay of the land as a first step in tackling an IT role, you will be able to work smarter, not harder, and in the process improve IT relationships and contribute to the greater good by making progress against the four key IT imperatives.

But what you learned at the workshop has changed how you view IT. Strategically, your company is transforming the nature of collaboration with customers and trying to adapt to a rapidly evolving marketplace. You now know that supply chain partners and information technology are essential to ensuring fast response to marketplace changes and customer needs.

You've realized that every organization has the IT capability they deserve. And you’ve decided that your organization deserves better.

You are now flying back from the workshop, reviewing your notes, and decide to draft an email to your boss about what you learned and the implications for you and your team.

First you summarize what you learned...

“Companies that are smart about managing IT outperform those that aren’t. Underperforming companies make bad investments, ignore inherent risks of developing and deploying technology, and spend too much time and money operating fragmented systems using informal, undocumented processes. For these underperformers, there is no correlation between IT spending and financial outcomes.”

Next, you reflect on the state of IT management at your company…

"To be perfectly frank, we treat IT as some sort of servant-genie – expecting to get our wishes granted and frustrated when the genie asks for information and resources that impinge on our “real work.” If I'm being honest, line managers have responded to IT’s pleas for increased engagement with passive-aggressive behavior. We assign junior resources and treat project sponsorship as temporary, minor job that consists primarily of showing up at IT steering committee meetings.”

And then you move to recommendations on how to improve IT management practices…

”From now on, we need a tighter relationship with IT with the right people part of the dialogue about how to leverage IT in support of strategic goals. We can kick start this dialogue with cross-education, create IT-smart business leaders and business-smart IT leaders. Without that, we don't have a prayer of translating strategies to successful execution. Our dialogue with our IT counterparts needs to center around the four key IT imperatives:

1. How do we increase the value realized from our IT investments?
2. How do we improve the success of projects and change initiatives?
3. How do we ensure coherent architectures to enable flexibility and agility?
4. How do we reduce our lights-on costs to increase innovation capacity?"

You want to close the email with specific commitments. But what? You try to channel your inner Gandhi and “be the change you want the world to be”, but are stuck as to how a middle level business leader, like yourself, can begin to make a difference.

While shifting in your coach seat, you see someone across the aisle reading the book, “Good to Great” and it hits you…

”My team will meet with our IT counterparts to confront the brutal facts regarding the four IT imperatives outlined above. Based on the results of these discussions, we will work together and outline an approach to better manage IT in support of the company’s strategic goals.”

You save the email and plan to send it as soon as you land, with a new understanding that IT is part of your "real job."

The end.

We all need to do our part to improve how IT is managed - please take a moment and share your thoughts on what you can do to lead by example and “be the change.”

It’s possible to break through this binary thinking by approaching organizational design differently. Instead of starting by deciding on a structure, you can start by deciding who gets to make what IT decisions. If done right, you can get the best of both worlds: In effect, decentralized centralization.

Let’s use a real-world example to illustrate. Reader Brent shared in his post that he is “in the process of a leading a major organization change program to create a centralized IT function in an organization that currently has a decentralized IT function.” Brent’s story is prototypical. The decision to centralize was spurred by “no sharing of best practices, no centralized view of spend, patchy commercial relationships with vendors, and a high rate of failed projects.”

But Brent’s company doesn’t have to throw the whole IT organization into a blender to address these issues, because the issues he lists aren’t actually structural issues. They’re issues that arise from a missing or incorrect decision rights.

Decisions rights define who makes what decisions about IT. In allocating rights, a loose rule of thumb is that line managers should have authority over what services are delivered and IT should have authority over how the services are delivered.

What Brent really wants is a centralized view of spend but decentralized accountability for that spending. He can do this by creating a financial coordinator position that implements processes and tools that allow a single view into accounting (how services are delivered) while leaving the investment decision in the hands of line managers (what services are delivered) and the cost management in the hands of the local IT managers (how services are delivered).

And the beautiful thing about starting with decisions rights instead of blowing up org charts is that Brent can mix the centralized and decentralized decision rights without having to enter the complex and costly process of revamping the company’s structure.

This works because processes impact organizational behavior more than structure. Who people work with is more important than who they work for. And changing the latter doesn’t necessarily change the former.

If structural changes are made at all, they should be applied with a light hand as a finishing touch to the revamping of decisions rights. Those structure changes should be made to serve three goals: strengthen decision rights, streamline processes and gain efficiencies, and accelerate skill development.

Most IT organizations have decided to centralize decision rights related to infrastructure services in order to capture economies of scale. But while the decision rights are centralized, the IT resources don’t have to be. For example, a company may have a single decision making point for investing and building out its call center, but the call center organization may still consist of decentralized personnel working from their homes and having decision rights over maintaining their systems.

Furthermore, IT solutions delivery (e.g., relationship management and applications delivery) organizations should mirror the structure of the business. Therefore, if it reflects how his business is organized, Brent may want leave solutions delivery resources decentralized but centralize reporting relationships to reinforce desired changes in practices.

However he approaches it, I hope Brent can convince his company that it’s time to kill off this centralized versus decentralized IT debate. No longer should we ask, “Should we centralize or decentralize IT?”, but rather, “How do we decentralize IT in a centralized manner?”

For more on decision rights see:

• Put the Right Decisions in the Right Hands (HMU Article)
• Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance (HBR Article)
• IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results (Book)

Problem is, you’re not done.

There is a fascinating article in this month’s Harvard Business Review entitled Investing in the IT That Makes A Competitive Difference that discusses how “internet and enterprise IT are now accelerating competition.” As processes become more digitized within enterprise IT, they can be propagated more quickly across the organization. Companies that select the right operating model to digitize, embody the processes within enterprise IT, deploy the solution consistently throughout the enterprise, and then continuously leverage the platform for further innovation and propagation will lead their industries.

For years, in the quest to move to common data and horizontal-process integration, the enterprise systems mantra has been along the lines of, “you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” This approach works well to clean up issues from years of decentralized and uncoordinated decision making, but falls flat when the competitive mantra changes to “deploy, innovate, and propagate” where innovation is fueled by the insights, passions, and risk taking of individuals and small teams throughout an organization.

The article concludes that standardized enterprise-wide IT platforms are a necessary, but not sufficient condition for competitive success. The very platforms developed for consistency need to be leveraged for innovation and used to rollout new ideas quickly.

You can support your company’s competitive imperative by becoming a key agent in your company’s innovation engine. You don’t need to be a technologist, but you do need to be an expert on your business processes, data, and technology systems that run your business. To do so, make sure that you:

• Understand your company’s operating model and the processes that need to be consistent across the enterprise to drive competitive success (e.g., market to sell, lead to order, quote to cash, etc.)

• Commit to relying on your enterprise systems to get what you need (rather than demanding customizations or building stand alone systems)

• Know the configuration options inherent in the enterprise systems that can be leveraged for experimentation (e.g., report writers, data extract, process scripts, screen “painters”, table driven logic)

• Champion experimentation with full transparency and discipline regarding success measurements

Alternatively, IT needs to foster the capability of “consistent innovation” by:

• Working with the business to identify the operating model and the implications regarding process, data and technology

• Ensuring that “tight but loose” decision rights are rigorously defined to ensure consistency but prescribe where innovation can occur within the defined boundaries

• Architecting and delivering technology that ensures consistency AND promotes innovation and change. It’s relatively easy to build systems to perform tasks in a prescribed manner by people in static roles. But it’s much more difficult to design and deliver systems that are configurable in terms of inputs, process, and outputs and where the authority to access and make modifications are encoded in logic that ensures compliance to enterprise decision rights (e.g., a system that allows vendors to be hired at the local level and held to common quality standards may need to support a mix of national and local vendors and market based quality measures at some time in the future.)

In spite of the significant investments your company has made in enterprise technologies, not only are you not “done” – there is no “done”. With increasingly competitive markets, companies who fail to develop the capabilities to quickly innovate and obsolete their current practices will be overcome by companies that do.

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:

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.

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.

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?

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:

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.

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.

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.

So far, you’ve figured out that IT is organized centrally into three major functions – business solutions (applications maintenance and development), infrastructure services (operations and services, such as the help desk and education), and some strange beast called the office of the CIO.

But organization charts don’t describe how work gets done. You decide to take a break and grab a sandwich and sit down across from a tired looking guy you’ve seen in some IT meetings. On a whim, you ask, “Are you in IT?” He nods and says, “What’s up?”, and you share the frustrations you are having in trying to work with IT.

The next thing you know, he launches in to IT Organization 101 and, in the process, writes this up:

After all this, you are still confused. “But where do I start?” you ask. He laughs sympathetically, “The best thing you can do is to become best friends with the IT managers running your systems and the people in the office of the CIO, particularly the project management office”. And he gives you the names of the IT people you need to know.

You leave the office with a sense that you have won a battle, but further reflection makes you wonder if it’s all in vain. After all, can IT ever become a strategic asset when organization structures and processes limit versus liberate the use of IT?

Do you understand how your IT group is organized?

Don’t let the numbers get you down. To get your way, you just need to out-smart your competition for limited IT resources by having friends in all the right places.

Getting projects approved requires working through the IT governance and prioritization processes. Running this system are human beings who are tired of trying to address infinite demand with limited supply – but will go to great lengths to make the system work for those who treat them with respect. You can let the system run you or you can run the system: it all depends on who you know – and how they feel about you.

Take the lead from Robert Cialdini, who identified six influence principles relating to basic human needs that, when put to action, will help ensure that your projects and requests get noticed and expedited.

Fundamental to persuasion is adopting the philosophy, “Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping to pick them up.” Let others complain about IT and get caught up in the bureaucracy. As a business partner within this crazy system, you’ll get farther, faster by learning how to play the game.

And speaking of affairs....

Dealing with the typical IT department is like trying to date someone difficult. There’s the promise of something life changing, but the day-to-day realities are painful – always too little, too late, for too much. It would be great to take a vow of IT celibacy - but in today’s information intense, connected world, that’s the modern day equivalent of living on bread and water.

Some have tried to bypass IT and create relationships with vendors, consultants, and outsourcers, but over time, found that while the vendors words said, “partner,” they were really only interested in one thing -- taking your money. Others have tried to bully IT into giving them what they want, only to find that the smart folks in IT tied them up in knots with passive-aggressive-looking plays involving governance, architecture, and process. And since few organizations have any rational system for allocating scarce IT resources you have little leverage at your disposal.

There is no way out. You are stuck with figuring out how build productive relationships with IT.

We’ll be talking a lot more about overcoming the challenges of working with IT in coming posts, but here’s a good place to start: Step back and learn a little something about the people you’ll be working with – and what makes them tick.

For example:

1. IT types are incurable optimists - it’s love at first sight with new technology and pretty much any new idea. While their mouths say, “let’s take it slow,” their minds are living in a “happily ever after” future, which their technology solutions can fix all your problems.

2. IT doesn’t really understand your needs -- so don't expect them to. While IT has become smarter about the business, they never can know as much as you do and are dependent on your insights of how you use information and what you want to do with your processes. Unfortunately, as Drucker said, “The basic problem with the computer in business is not that computer technicians do not understand the managers' needs. It is that the managers do not take the time and trouble to think through their needs and to communicate them to the computer people…To expect the computer people to define the information needs of the managers is abdication.” This mismatch of knowledge results in the blind leading the blind and IT delivering far less than what their “business partners” hoped or expected.

3. In the process of planning the path to the new and improved future, IT often ignores the unpleasant realities of making change in today’s frenetic organizations – namely, business priorities are a moving target, the “best” resources are never available, and new processes are more important than new technologies. The result are project durations that exceed the organizational attention span, timelines that assume resources that will never be available, solutions that place more emphasis on introducing technologies than changing behaviors, and estimates that include the direct project costs but ignore the “post implementation” effort incurred by the business to refine processes and retrain or replace personnel.

4. There is a lack of a rational system to allocate scarce IT resources and since the price of IT is zero, demand is infinite. Considering this and the factors above, it’s no wonder that IT projects often exceed original time and budget estimates by 50%. Corner any IT person over a drink (not a difficult task, under any circumstances) and you will discover that they are over-scheduled and well aware of the optimistic assumptions reflected in their project plans. Problem is, you aren’t asking the tough “what if” questions and they, in the spirit of “IT-business alignment,” have no interest in being the messenger killed with the message.

Interested in developing productive relationships with IT? Stop acting like a customer and start acting like a business partner.

• Invite your IT contacts over and make them comfortable. Discuss technology and your business and, together, dream about the possibilities.
• Relieve some of the demand overload by picking your battles carefully and contributing leadership and resources to ensure the work gets done well.
• Focus on opportunities that benefit the external customer and bottom line.
• Once you have zeroed in on an opportunity and have secured resources, hold their feet on the ground by keeping projects focused on measurable outcomes and developing plans that deliver capability every 90 days.
• Ensure your people are computer literate and don’t whine about standards.

And through it all, take heart that it’s possible to develop a satisfying longterm relationship with IT. Although on the surface they seem difficult, they just want to settle down, have some fun, and do great work.

This is no small challenge but it can be achieved. I’ll be offering my specific thoughts on how to have your way with IT with my posts. And I hope you’ll jump in with your experiences ideas right away.