Jeff Stamps and I have a new piece out in Cutter IT Journal--"Communicate, Collaborate, Coordinate, Decide: How IT Achieves Strategic Leadership"--where we talk about how and why IT leaders might claim their seats at the executive table. We're of the opinion that IT deserves a place right beside the other C-level functions, not just as a service organization reporting into some other group, as it often does (in one organization we know well, IT reports to Finance; in another, it reports to the COO). Here we lay out our reasoning and suggest what moves IT leaders need to make to rightfully claim an armchair at the roundtable. Please email me if you'd like more information about the piece: <jessica [dot] lipnack [@] netage [dot] com> - (hate those bots).
Here's the intro to the article:
FOUR ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES
IT has its unique wisdom to contribute to the strategic conversation of organizations. But what gives IT real strategic leadership is its ability to tap and extend the wisdom of the organization as a whole.
As creator and sustainer of the digital apparatus that powers the Information Age, IT is in a privileged position to understand the organization’s “big picture.” More significantly, IT’s infrastructure touches everyone many times daily (and nightly). It provides universal tools that scale from each small individual to the whole organization and beyond to its external relationships. IT’s potential is huge, but it has much to do to realize its full strategic leadership.
If IT’s ultimate role is to co-lead the organization, the services it delivers need to map to a model of organizational leadership that includes everyone. We believe that IT can lead large-scale organizations in achieving world-class performance by providing the foundation for four capabilities that together generate the “wisdom of the whole.” IT’s role at the senior table is to promote and deliver such key strategic capabilities, ones that reach across the organization. By doing so, IT enables the other operating and service components to be more efficient and effective in meeting their goals and achieving a synergy of shared organizational purpose. The four strategic capabilities needed today are:
1. Communication. Everyone communicates. This continuously changing competency — enhanced by new technology — is the foundation of a 21st-century, data-wise, knowledge-based learning organization. But it is only the foundation.
2. Collaboration. The ability to collaborate, to work together with others, is finally on every CIO’s list of hot topics. Why? Because in the blink of an eye, collaboration has gone virtual. There is wide demand now, across organizations of all kinds, for better tools to help people manage and work more effectively in teams and communities across distance and time. This virtual collaborative capability continues to accelerate thanks to increasingly costly and hassle-ridden travel. The good news is that once people master new tools and behaviors, they can function in virtual teams at higher levels of performance than they could in traditional face-to-face teams functioning without the benefit of much technology. Two major reasons are the anywhere/anytime abilities to grow a persisting shared team memory and to involve more — and more diverse — people in the team’s work, which enables more innovation.1
3. Coordination. Communication and collaboration are not sufficient for today’s large-scale challenge of coordinating. Today executives must lead multilevel organizations of hundreds to thousands of people in proliferating networks of relationships far outside their visual range. To lead large-scale virtual organizations, where outcomes rely on far-flung chains of responsibility and networks of interdependencies, leaders must understand how to coordinate initiatives and guide suborganizations that they often do not control. IT can provide maps to this invisible organizational territory, help management to navigate it, and initiate improvements in organizational design at all levels. A common map that makes organizational elements and the links between them transparent enables everyone in the network to coordinate more effectively in line with the overall strategy.
4. Decision making. In the traditional hierarchy, data, information, and knowledge flow up and feed the processes that allow managers at every level to decide. With final judgments made and directions agreed, “orders” and guidance flow back down to the organization. In the end, however, the many local decisions made in all the interconnected small teams working at all levels come together to make up the decision-making whole. Thus, the smarter everyone is about the larger context of their work, the better they will be in making good local, front-line, tactical decisions supported by enhanced executive strategic decision making. The overall result is likely to be higher organizational performance.
Conventional IT, meaning the way IT departments regard their core purpose, traditionally focuses on the first of these four capabilities. Albeit astonishingly successful as an enabler of communication, IT will have to extend its mission. To be truly strategic, IT needs to make it easy for leaders throughout the organization to also collaborate, coordinate, and decide.
