According to Computer Weekly's CIO Index, 33% of IT
directors do not feel sufficiently empowered by their boards, and
24% said the board did not understand the importance of IT to the
business. These are worrying figures.
IT directors who find themselves in these significant minorities
need to learn to become businessmen. Bridging the gap between the
board and IT should be an aspiration for every IT director and it
is an achievable one, if you break the task into a four-stage
journey and develop your business skills.
Firstly, you have to achieve operational excellence - however
your business defines it. That may mean 24/7 system availability or
no more than two hours outage a year. You need to be able to
deliver IT to a set of service levels that satisfies the demand of
your business.
The next stage is project credibility. You have to demonstrate
to your business colleagues that you can consistently deliver
projects to budget, schedule and quality in a structured way and
have a methodology to do that.
If you are still fighting fires on the operational side your
focus on project delivery will inevitably slip.
At my last company I embedded Prince2, the project management
methodology, into the IT unit to ensure project credibility.
Project managers learnt and applied Prince2 at each stage of a
project's development. This built up a community of IT managers who
spoke the same language and used the same approach.
If you have completed these two stages you have gained the right
to sit with the business and contribute to corporate strategy,
enabling it and influencing it.
Taking the step of strategically aligning IT to the business is
very difficult if you are not delivering at an operational level
and projects are off track.
The third stage is to develop as a business person and pull away
from day-to-day technical issues. You need to equip yourself with
the business acumen and put in place the right management team with
the right blend of technical and customer facing skills.
If there is a void in your management team, particularly a
technical gap, you will get drawn into technical problems and you
will lose the opportunity to operate at a business level.
With these building blocks in place you can achieve the fourth
stage of progressing IT driven business innovation. Successful
operational and project delivery followed by active involvement
with business strategy creates the platform to begin-IT driven
business innovation.
It is great when you have ideas about how technology can improve
the business operation or create a new service. However, if you are
saying, "I would like £100,000 for a speculative project" you are
more likely to get a favourable hearing if you have successfully
negotiated the other three stages and earned the credibility and
trust of your business colleagues.
● Myron Hrycyk is IT director of NYK Logistics