Really hard important questions

When filling in my Linked­In pro­file back in 2006 or so, I posed the ques­tion: why are most En­ter­prise IT or­gan­iz­a­tions so dys­func­tion­al?

I haven’t answered that ques­tion yet. Nor have I changed my pro­file. Go­ing back to look at, it turns out I ac­tu­ally wrote: “As a com­puter sci­ent­ist work­ing in a CIO role, I find my­self con­tinu­ally ask­ing why En­ter­prise IT so con­sist­ently un­der-per­forms and un­der-de­liv­ers across so many in­dus­tries.”

But, let’s face it, that’s a man­age­ment-speaky way of ask­ing why “the IT de­part­ment” and “sucks” are of­ten used in the same sen­tence.

Hav­ing been at the helm of an or­gan­iz­a­tion that has demon­strably im­proved, has changed sig­ni­fic­antly over sev­er­al years, and still has many areas where “sucks” is a gen­er­ous rep­res­ent­a­tion of the qual­ity of IT for our end-user com­munity (sigh), I’m be­gin­ning to feel that I have a the­ory that I can ar­tic­u­late – at least in part – about why En­ter­prise IT struggles so much.

There are many dif­fer­ent com­pon­ents of that the­ory. One of the most im­port­ant is how – and IF – the IT or­gan­iz­a­tion an­swers these ques­tions:

  • How do we un­der­stand our im­pact?
  • How do we stay con­nec­ted to our end-users?
  • As an or­gan­iz­a­tion, how do we learn?

I think of these as the “Really Hard, Im­port­ant Ques­tions”.

(RHQs. (Si­lent “I”.))

These are the ones that drive wheth­er or not we’re do­ing the most im­port­ant things in the best pos­sible way.

I don’t know if the list is com­plete or not. I sus­pect there are one or two more ques­tions I’d put on it if I were pay­ing at­ten­tion in class at the right time… if you have things you’d add, let me know.

(I also keep a “Hard, Im­port­ant Ques­tions” list, which is pretty long. It has things like “How do we pri­or­it­ize?”, “Do titles mat­ter?”, “Are we too pro­cess-ori­ented or not pro­cess-ori­ented enough?”, and “How do we get se­cur­ity right, without over­do­ing it?”)

For NIBR IT today, I don’t know the an­swers to the RHQs. I know what the an­swers used to be, but we’re dif­fer­ent today than we were five years ago. We must an­swer them. If we don’t an­swer them de­lib­er­ately, then the an­swer to each of them will im­pli­citly be­come “we don’t”. We don’t un­der­stand, we don’t con­nect, we don’t learn.

At the most re­cent face-to-face work­shop of the NIBR IT Seni­or Lead­er­ship team, we star­ted dig­ging in­to the first two ques­tions (with the 3rd, and per­haps oth­ers, to be ad­dressed at the next). What do we be­lieve about un­der­stand­ing our im­pact and our con­nec­tions to the rest of NIBR? What can we do dif­fer­ently and bet­ter? What’s our strategy? The dis­cus­sion was great, with many sug­ges­tions.

We don’t have com­plete an­swers, but we do have a num­ber of spe­cif­ic ac­tions we in­tend to take to im­prove our un­der­stand­ing and im­prove our con­nec­tion. It’s the first step in an­swer­ing those ques­tions for this phase of our or­gan­iz­a­tion.

In fu­ture blogs, I’ll give a sketch of those an­swers and ask for your sug­ges­tions.