This blog will start a three part series that could be a great help to you. I am writing this to help everyone that wants to have a new picture in their minds as to how technology works in an organization, and how to optimize it. Get ready for some new ideas, and vocabulary, and I hope this becomes something you can really use to win!
A constant piece of the consulting work I do is helping companies with their general IT needs. At an increasing rate, technology is making an impact on whether an organization prospers – or flounders. This is causing many executives who did not grow up steeped in tech to call for help from someone that has both business and technology acumen. The cool thing about them calling me is that I get to see the pain they are in over and over across different industries, and sizes of operation. After the 10th client or so, I would have had to be an idiot not to notice the patterns. After the 20th, I have been able to build processes and systems to rectify many of the issues. At this point, I am deep into applying these models over and over in order to help clients smooth things out. At this point, I am really excited about the fact that I can help them to step forward into a whole new way of viewing how technology gets done in order to set them up to win for years to come. With that said, let me share the problems with you that need to be universally addressed:
1. The users of technology do not understand the big picture of the overall organizational digital plumbing – so they make bad decisions on software buys, the tools they use, and how they use them. This is generally caused by the fact that technologists in the organization have not architected the overall picture well, and rarely communicate it to the field. The result is that data and information does not flow well.
2. IT departments are often stuck in triage mode where they spend 96% of their time struggling to do break fix, help desk, or keep their heads above water on new software projects. Because of this, they are reduced to being tactical and not strategic in nature. They literally cannot “stop mopping long enough to turn off the spigot” so to speak. Because of this they do not spend time architecting the digital plumbing holistically, nor are they given enough control over the standards. The result is a mish mash of software applications and horrible data flow
3. The leaders of the organization do not understand technology architecture, design, or standards so they are no help in guiding the company towards robust and effective plumbing. They outsource all decisions to IT staff and vendors with generally average to poor results.
There are other problems of course, but let’s stop with those three big ones for a moment, and begin to address some ideas for fixing these…
Let’s start with the top of the pyramid of solutions and over the next couple of blogs we will work our way from the big picture to the more detailed. The first thing that needs to happen in an organization that is going to re-engineer how they do technology is to have the executive team study and grade the organizations ability to match technology to the business side needs. Technology is just a tool and the better we can apply this tool to the business needs, the more successful we will be. In addition, the leaders must get clear on how technology can be applied to give the organization a distinct advantage in their market – and focus on this. Technology is not just plumbing, it can also be a weapon to use to beat the competition in the market. To accomplish this, I have leaders answer the following three questions:
1. On a scale of 1-10, how well do you think the company leverages technology as a tool. Not compared to competitors mind you, but if 10 was the perfect use of tech, where do they stand now.
2. What 5 areas of technology can the company not afford to lose at against the competition? For example, we must have the best customers data, we must have the best ability to analyze trends, or we must have the best uses of technology to facilitate transactions.
3. What 5 aspects of technology are unique to us that our competition does not have? These of course must be used in the market to gain an advantage, and must be protected. If you don’t have any, you are in danger.
Answering these three questions will begin to set the framework for how an organizations digital plumbing should be re-constructed. It will also begin to close the gap between the business side leaders and the IT people that build and support this plumbing.
Our next blog will cover the areas of technology that a company must be proficient in and how to score those so you have a metric for improvement…
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com