What makes IT work

Ever wonder what separates successful IT departments from the ones that generate nothing but gripes?

Not what separates star-performing IT from “the pack,” but what separates the competent from the rest?

150 factors make the difference, but they aren’t all created equal. Squint at the list hard and 18 float to the top. (Why 18? Because that’s how many actually floated to the top. I didn’t start with a number in mind.)

Some background: Back in the last century when I wrote the  IS Survival Guide I organized the factors needed for IT to work into four buckets. Over time these evolved into the framework I use today: Business integration, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance.

The 150 factors on my list of what makes the difference come from drilling down into these four categories. Selecting the 18 “critical success factors” from that list was less than scientific but more than arbitrary — it was the result of experience and lots of correspondence over the years.

This week’s column defines the big four and their overall scope. Starting next week we’ll dig into the critical success factors and what to do about them if your organization comes up short. So without further ado:

Business Integration

Business integration covers everything about how IT fits into the enterprise as a whole. It happens at three levels: strategic (meaning enterprise-scale), tactical (divisional), and business-infrastructural (overall “lifestyle” technologies) integration. And yes, I’m abusing the language using it this way. Live with it.

Those are the whats of business integration. The hows are governance and the business/IT relationship.

Process Maturity

Process … more accurately, processes and practices … are how an organization does its work. IT’s processes and practices fall into five broad categories:

• Delivery management: Primarily on the applications side of IT, how the organization makes sure IT actually does deliver what it’s supposed to deliver. Delivery management breaks down into three levels: Program management, initiative management, and project management.
• Application support: This includes everything having to do with designing or selecting; building or installing, configuring and integrating; enhancing; maintaining; and (when the time comes) retiring business applications.
• Information management: Making sure all structured databases and unstructured data repositories contain what they’re supposed to contain, and are organized so as to maximize their maintainability, integrity, and value.
• IT Operations: If the systems are down, nothing else matters. If they’re sluggish, something else matters but not much. IT Operations is where IT makes sure the value it’s already delivered is there, ready to use when it’s needed.
• Personal technologies: The ERP suite is strategic and runs the company. The CRM suite is strategic and drives revenue. But employees live their lives on their PCs, smartphones and tablets, using the office suite, email system, and telephones. Handle these well and employees will forgive a lot. Handle them badly and your reputation is shot.

Technical Architecture

Yes, IT might be “about the business,” but in the end, someone has to make sure the company has the right technologies in place, organized well, and put together to facilitate the company’s next step instead of acting as a barrier or bottleneck. Notwithstanding all that’s written about shadow IT, non-IT IT and so on, when it comes to the stuff that can’t just be a standalone “island of automation,” that someone is IT.

Technical architecture encompasses the applications portfolio, the company’s structured and unstructured data repositories, and all the platforms and technical infrastructure they reside and run on. And how they all fit together.

Human Performance

IT might be “about the business,” and its job might be to provide the technology the company needs (and by the way, its job is now bigger than that, but that’s a different topic for a different column).

IT might get its work done through well-organized processes and practices, but in the end it’s the people who work in IT who make the difference between success and failure.

Human performance isn’t about whether the people who work in IT perform. It’s about everything that has to come together so IT has great people working in it, with as few barriers as possible standing between them and success.

These four factors — business integration, process maturity, technical architecture and human performance — are what IT has to be good at if it’s going to be considered competent.

How does IT become good at them? That’s what the list of critical success factors is for. We’ll start digging into it next week.