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.
