In part one my interview with Ade McCormack, I talked with Ade about the need to “entwine” IT and business strategy and the future changes we’ll seen in the organizational structure (or lack thereof) in the “IT department”. What follows is the second and final part of the interview with Ade where we talk about how IT can gain a seat at the table to help drive business strategy and Ade ends with advice for CIOs focused on better integrating with their business customers.

Holloway: You are a proponent of taking away budget control from IT. To that end, can a savvy CIO that is looking to gain a seat a the table to define business strategy use their budgets as leverage to “buy-in”? Will business see it as a sign of weakness or strength that IT departments are willing to cede control of their budgets?

McCormack: The CEO needs to keep the management team small. He therefore needs a multi-discipline team. Being the IT voice on the board is not enough. Thus CIOs need to develop broader business skills. Ceding control of their budget and running IT as a business will show the CEO that the CIO is willing to face the cold realities of commerce. As such they will learn skills such as financial control, sales, marketing, service delivery and the art of politics. These are all valuable skills to bring to the boardroom.

Holloway: There is a class of IT professionals that are deep technical experts in database technologies, programming languages or software integration tools. For those people, what is the best course of action to ready themselves for the “IT person as a business process specialist” era that you think is coming? How can deeply technical people make an effective transition to the IT as a service organization model?

McCormack: There will always be a place for deep technologists. Though the number of places will diminish, particularly if we gravitate to web services and utility based computing. Thus we are likely to see less of these people in end-user organisations. I would encourage technologists to get as close to the user frontline as possible, and to develop their business knowledge. Should off shoring for example really gain traction then the IT roles that are last to leave the ‘West’ will be those that require actual face to face contact with the users. Whilst not necessarily something attractive to technologists, there will be opportunities in respect of supplier management and in project management. In the case of the latter those that have experience of managing multi-cultural projects where the teams are based on different continents will be very much in demand.  

Holloway: If you are a mid-level IT manager in an organization that doesn’t understand the IT service organization concept, what should you do? What’s the best course of action for someone that wants to stay with their company and work on IT-related initiatives but finds themselves in an IT organization that hasn’t achieved (or recognized the need for) entwinement.

McCormack: As mentioned, moving to where IT and your skills are valued is the easiest option. If you insist on staying, explaining the link between IT entwinement and good corporate governance should resonate with the leadership. Mention WorldCom, Enron and prison to emphasize the point. Focusing on security and reputation management, which whilst similarly negative should drive home the case for entwinement. Probably the most powerful approach is to explain that if the organisation doesn’t embrace IT it will fall behind competitors that through better entwinement are using new technologies as a source of innovation. These approaches require the CIO in question to have excellent influencing and evangelical skills.

Holloway: You cite the lack of business-specific knowledge (e.g. HR, manufacturing process, supply chain) that hampers the IT department consistently as they try to provide business solutions. What is the best way for an IT organization to go about getting this knowledge? Should IT be actively “hiring out” their people to the management and oversight of the business units to learn these functions or is there a better way?

McCormack: IT functions by their very nature work with the business units and so over time should develop real business knowledge. So there is no need to second them beyond the IT department periphery. The problem arises when having spent a year working on say cash management systems, where the technologists have become expert in the associated business processes ands issues, they are then moved onto a retail banking project. So just at the point where the technologist moves onto a higher value plane, they are shipped off to start the learning curve again. One might argue that over time that person will be a well rounded banking technologists. However the majority of technologists are employed to address specific business processes and this model of shipping them from project to project regardless of the business focus ensures that they are never in a position to become process advisers.

Encouraging the technologists to sit with the users has to be a good thing. However some CIOs are worried about their staff going native. In my own experience as a technologist, heavy users of IT would bring me in ‘below the radar’ of their IT function, which they regarded as too slow to meet their tactical requirements. Having their own ‘pet’ technologists allowed them to use IT in a more dynamic way. There are downsides to an approach that keeps the IT function out of the loop, as any CIO will tell you.

Holloway: Last question- if you could get every CIO that you meet to do one thing differently in their company, what would it be? What is the one thing that they could begin doing that might help to spur the change that’s needed to entwine the efforts of business and IT?

McCormack: I encourage CIOs to focus less on management and more on leadership. As a true IT leader they will fight IT’s corner for a place on the board and thus inspire their staff to raise their game. Technologists under weak IT leadership feel undervalued by the business and thus lose the will to adopt a user-centric approach. In essence weak IT leadership leads to demotivated staff that results in poor value perception by the business, which further strengthens the perception that IT people are not team players. This in turn makes thoughts of entwinement a romantic notion. Unfortunately the sustainability of businesses will be determined by the degree to which they gravitate to a more entwined future.