It takes a particular skill to step back from something that has been done a certain way for years, and reimagine a better way. It can even be difficult to evaluate the efficiency of a process that you have been doing for decades. Once it works pretty well, that fact becomes the enemy of excellent. Such a situation exists with how we build and apply digital plumbing to organizations. We believe because technology brings many productivity gains that we must be doing it right for the most part – we give ourselves a B+ or A- in many cases when we are barely rocking a C.

There is not a generally accepted grading system to measure how well companies utilize technology. Organizations can point to gains, but they would have a hard time measuring what the delta is between their current state and the perfect state. For this reason, I have been spending a lot of time lately building a holistic model for measuring IT effectiveness, and assembling a model of best practices to apply that measurement system against. People get excited about various things in life, and I get jazzed when I can figure out how to bring definition and structure to something that is undefined and unstructured for the most part – such as grading the effectiveness of digital plumbing.
Allow me to share some early foundations of the work we are doing. Imagine a model for organizing and measuring technology effectiveness as a pyramid, and let’s start at the top. The first thing we need to be concerned about is how well the digital plumbing supports the business strategy of the organization. This is the seminal question because the more technology enables and facilitates reaching the business goals, the higher the ROI will be – ergo, the more successful it is as a tool. Scoring how well technology is supporting the business is not easy because leaders often have little reference as to how good it could be – they just know what they have. They convince themselves that it would be too expensive to have better digital plumbing or that what they have is good enough. Every executive team should now learn how to answer this question; what is the delta between how well technology supports my business goals, and what we currently have in place. If that delta is large, you have lots of upside potential. This is great news – and lots of work.

Once the connection between business needs and technology solutions is scored, you can move onto the next level of the pyramid – grading how an organization deals with a handful of core aspects of IT. We have created a list of all the major areas of IT that must be done well. For example, you must be able to automate transactions, store data, move data, analyze data, normalize data. If you struggle with any of these, it shows up in your IT’s value to the organization (and possibly wasted expense.) This is easier to score because it is less subjective in many ways. Still, someone that has a great vision of how technology should be done in the best case must do the grading, or the grade will be incorrectly high in most cases. The great thing about grading out technology implementation in this way is the bringing together of leaders in an organization to a like minded viewpoint of what is done well, and what needs to be improved. This is far better than what we have in most cases today, which is a vague feeling by many that IT is not being done well, or as well as it could be.

For too long, the application of technology in organizations has been a black hole. The business side of the house does not understand how it gets built, when it will be done, or how to get functionality that would seem to make sense into their hands quickly. They often look at technologists with hope and disdain. Instead of being like mythical elves that build the digital plumbing at night when no one is looking, technology people must have structure, accountability, and reward systems so that they architect digital plumbing that has a huge positive impact on the organization reaching it’s business goals. Instead of just keeping the servers up and running and helping to implement whatever software they grudgingly accept to install or build.

I will finish the overview of the pyramid and grading system in the next blog.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com