All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Organizational Effectiveness|Last Updated:

In case you missed the bizarro story of the year, not one of the three Jeopardy contestants knew the missing word from the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, which art in heaven, This be thy name.”

Speaking of missing links …

We’ve been discussing what it takes for IT to be an effective organization. Depending how you slice and dice such things it takes business integration, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance. A couple of weeks ago we dug into business integration, concluding that being good at this calls for strategy and direction; changes to culture, governance, and how they inter-relate; councils in place of most committees; and formulating projects in terms of intentional business change, not IT product delivery.

Nothing about this formulation is wrong. It’s just incomplete (I don’t, after all, like exhausting a topic too quickly!).

What I left out wasn’t “hallowed.” It was the two most important pieces of the business integration puzzle – the business/IT relationship and IT governance. That is, how the business/IT relationship is defined and how well it’s managed; and how strategic IT decisions are made and by whom.

The column in question did mention what’s most important in getting IT governance right. First and foremost it’s that governance – the formal rules, practices, and organizational structures through which important IT decisions are made should be thought of as IT’s decision-making guardrails.

IT’s metaphorical decision lane-markers should be controlled by management culture, defined as “how we do things around here.”

IT governance, that is, should be the outcome of shared assumptions, habits, and priorities. That it should be so is fortunate and convenient because that’s how IT’s most important decisions will be made whether IT management likes it or not.

That doesn’t mean the governance-guardrails don’t matter. Far from it, knowing who is accountable for making decisions; even more important who is accountable for making sure decisions get made; and also for articulating IT’s standards and priorities … on top of everything else this information is essential for engineering and fostering IT’s management culture.

It’s just that the culture matters more.

That leaves the business/IT relationship – how it’s defined; how it’s managed.

How it’s defined is a subject we’ve beaten to death in KJR, so I’ll make it quick:

The wrong definition is that IT is a supplier to internal customers. The right definition is that IT and the rest of the business are peers and collaborators in achieving intentional business change and in creating value for, real, paying, external customers.

That leaves the question of how IT can and should manage its relationships with the various parts of the business. Doing this well is essential, because IT’s ability to succeed is constrained by the level of trust business managers have in IT management’s understanding of their problems and circumstances.

The most important influences on the business/IT relationship are every IT employee’s day-to-day interactions with the business managers and staff they work with.

‘Nuff said.

Some CIOs create “relationship manager” positions within IT, whose occupants serve as liaisons.

It’s a good idea so far as it goes, but it has one serious limitation: Relationship managers have little ability to turn their insights into actions. They can listen and empathize all they want, but that doesn’t give them any authority over IT’s priorities.

Bob’s last word: The most important element of a well-managed business/IT relationship is embracing the wise words of the KJR Manifesto: “Before you can be strategic you have to be competent.”

Which is to say the business/IT relationship exists in one of two feedback states: It’s either a vicious or virtuous cycle. It’s a virtuous cycle when IT demonstrates competence in everything it does, so its business collaborators are confident it can deliver on their jointly developed strategies and plans.

In this virtuous cycle, each success creates the expectation of more success.

The alternative is a vicious cycle in which every IT failure creates the expectation that working with IT is a losing proposition. This leads to its business collaborators refusing to collaborate because really, what would be the point? Engaging an outside services firm would seem to be a more promising alternative.

Now on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The surefire way to waste money on IT consultants.” What it’s about: Politics is an inescapable part of most consulting engagements. Don’t fall for it; don’t let your consultants fall for it either.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

It’s Independence Day, and I took the day off. I’m not sure why this re-run seemed like a perfect fit for the occasion, and whether the answer is that it’s just my rationalization or there’s some meta-property the holiday and column share, I don’t know.

I don’t entirely care, either, so long as you give it a read. Whatever else I have to say about it, I like it better than the KJR I was going to write instead.

So enjoy it, and enjoy the occasion, too.

– Bob

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In the late 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz invented calculus more or less concurrently. The question of who published first raged for decades.

In the 1800s, Sir Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both figured out how new species could arise from existing ones through the force of natural selection. Aware of each other’s work, in 1858 they presented their work together to the Linnaean Society.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray submitted patent applications for the telephone within hours of each other.

But in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart, who passed away recently, presented his live demonstration of a computing system that included the use of a mouse, videoconferencing, word processing, cut-and-paste, hypertext, revision control, and collaborative editing, he was the only person in the world who had put it all together (thanks to Randy Cunningham’s Honorary Unsubscribe for providing, not only the details, but a link to a video of the presentation).

Not the only person in the world to have each of the ideas separately, though … Ted Nelson, for example, had been writing about hypertext since 1963.

We celebrate those who invent something important first. We celebrate those who make important scientific discoveries first. And yet, there’s a certain inevitability to all this. From the inside, these inventions and discoveries are more like races, in which the only question is who will cross the finish line first, than they are like the actions of lone explorers, boldly going where no one has gone before.

Maybe this is why we lionize great leaders more than great scientists and inventors: Without Washington, England probably would have defeated the colonists in the Revolutionary War; without Lincoln, and Grant, the Confederacy probably would have succeeded in seceding; without Roosevelt and Churchill the outcome of World War II would almost certainly have been very different.

Those specific, unique leaders were required. It’s doubtful that, with different leaders, we would have ended up with similar results. Take Lincoln: Had Stephen Douglas won the 1860 election the Confederacy might never have formed and slavery might still be legal. Or, more likely, a very different Civil War might have been fought at a very different time and in a very different way.

This is not true of the great scientists. Take Einstein: Had he never published, the current state of physics would be unaltered.

It’s a hard thought to swallow. Collectively, it’s the scientists of the world who have made our modern world possible. Just look around you and start subtracting everything you depend on that wouldn’t exist had the community of scientists never figured out the laws of thermodynamics, the aforementioned calculus, information theory, and another few dozens or hundreds of disciplines. It’s their byproducts that allow the world to operate with more than 7 billion inhabitants.

The secret is that scientists form communities, and it’s these communities that collectively deserve credit for what we as a species collectively know. The individual scientists who get the most credit are the ones who are just a bit smarter, just a bit quicker, and who work just a bit harder than the rest.

And, to be fair, in some cases are better politicians: Modern physics, for example, is a very expensive discipline; in order to make the big discoveries you first have to gain access to the big equipment.

Understand, I have nothing but respect for the great scientists, and you should too. While there’s no doubt many were and are driven by a sense of competition, they are far more driven by the desire to understand the universe just a bit better than anyone has understood it before.

Just as the great inventors, like Douglas Engelbart, were driven by the desire to make the world just a bit more capable than it was before.

The world of business has more in common with scientists and inventors than with the great political leaders: Should a company fail, while it’s hard on its employees and shareholders, otherwise it doesn’t matter a bit. If a department store closes its doors, shoppers will just buy the same merchandise from someone else; the same is true of just about anyone or any business in the market for goods or services.

Perhaps that’s why the self-importance of some CEOs is so amusing. Even those who help their companies win are, for the most part, simply shifting revenue from another company’s coffers to their own.

It’s just a race. What matters isn’t who wins it. What matters is that enough people are willing to run.

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