lingua franca

In a non-manufacturing company, the company is only as profitable as the effectiveness of IT, but CIO's have an abysmal time communicating what they actually do. The executive team is intimately knowledgable of what's going on in Sales and Finance, but IT can be a black hole. For such a huge cost center, that's not acceptable.

Ultimately, the CIO must get away from an operational mindset. Things like network and email should be high value, low cost, low visibility and effort. You're not in the IT business, you're in the retail business or the airline industry or consumer product goods, and that's where the bulk of your visibility should be. There should never be a business strategy and an IT strategy -- just one strategy -- one vision and direction for the company. IT needs to be at the table with the business, focusing efforts on reaching corporate objectives.

Within the corporation, it seems everyone speaks the same language, except for IT. In order to reach the other decision makers within the company, the CIO needs to get away from focusing on metrics which only matter to IT, and instead work on building specific strategic business recommendations. Data is only valuable when it is interpreted, compared against external sources, and a story created. What is the vision we are driving toward, or the terror we are working against? When Rebecca Blalock, the CIO of Southern Company, talked of getting 26 calls a second during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she stopped to analyze the best way to convey that number. The story she developed focused on the 55,000 employees which would have been required, had the company not instituted an advanced automated phone system. Same data, much more tangible story.

It's tempting to talk of a lingua franca, but even the CEO and CFO speak different languages, and have different priorities. You have to listen to the CEO for strategy, and then work numbers for the CFO. Ultimately, everything becomes maintenance, an operations issue, but there are things we can do to keep that from growing into a black hole.

When business justification is developed, as a business case or ROI model, that model is not often revisited. In many companies, once approval to begin an initiative is begun, that's the end of modeling. What a company should strive for is a state where the model is revisited throughout implementation, to ensure that the project will attain the desired goals. When the project is put into maintenance, the goals for the project need to be retained and periodically revisited. Are further projects minimizing the effectiveness of what's been developed? Are there additional investments which need to be made to preserve what's been achieved? Hardware and infrastructure upgrades should be tied to a corporate goal. If we are upgrading hardware to keep an old initiative up-to-date, this should trigger a review of these goals to see if they are still relevant to the corporation, given new market realities.

So simplify the language, create a business focus, and tie operational activities to corporate objectives. If this were simple, everyone would be doing it, instead of whining about how this is a common problem.