Pity the poor CIO.

Your average CIO has a lot in common with a child who is surrounded by cool toys but has too much homework to play with them.

The cool toys are the heaps of nifty new technologies IT can bring to bear on company strategies and tactics – everything from generative AI to no-code / low-code development environments, to automating any gadget they glance at by way of the Internet of Things, to … make your own list. It will be a long one.

The CIO’s homework? It’s making sure the IT organization is organized and tuned for success. This means ensuring the IT organization:

• Is properly integrated into the business as a whole.
• Operates through well-defined and maturely managed processes and practices.
• Establishes and continually evolves a well-engineered technical architecture.
• Leads and manages IT staff so as to maximize human performance.

This week’s homework assignment is business integration – the combination of factors that make sure the IT organization goes beyond “alignment,” and that the actual information technology IT provides is built into the business instead of just being bolted on.

Presumably, the value of IT going beyond alignment to integration is obvious enough that no additional explanation is needed.

How to achieve it? That’s another story. Here are some tips and techniques IT leaders can use to get started.

Setting Strategy and Direction. Whatever strategies, tactics, and overall direction a CIO might set, they either advance better business/IT integration or they don’t.

And if they don’t, prudent … no, make that minimally competent … CIOs will adjust IT’s plans so they do.

Most change starts with culture. “Culture” is how we do things around here. Most often, IT and business management share a culture that positions the IT organization as a supplier of information technology to its “internal customers.” Here in KJR-land we’ve beat the internal-customer fallacy to death already (for example, in this piece, which ran in InfoWorld in 1996).

With strong business integration, business and IT management think of each other as peers and collaborators in creating value for Real Paying (External) Customers.

Culture provides lane markers. Governance provides guardrails. Governance matters – no doubt about it. It establishes processes and practices that help prevent major errors in judgment.

But overemphasizing the role governance plays in setting IT’s direction and priorities can turn the IT organization into a stifling, choking bureaucracy.

Councils over committees: IT needs decisions, on multiple topics and multiple levels, and it can’t and shouldn’t make them unilaterally.

The usual solution is to form steering committees to make them with full business involvement.

But better than the usual solution are to form councils rather than committees. The difference? Committee members join in order to represent their part of the business and make sure they get their fair share of things.

Council members join as leaders of the whole enterprise. They bring special knowledge of areas they lead or have led, but aren’t there to represent their interests.

There’s no such thing as an IT project. IT projects are how IT-as-supplier delivers working information technology … its product … to its internal customers. But as IT isn’t a supplier to internal customers, it shouldn’t have IT projects at all. The projects IT gets involved in aren’t about delivering technology. They’re about intentional business change.

Bob’s last word: It’s worth pointing out that the intentional business change IT gets involved in comes in three flavors: (1) Business process improvement; (2) decision support; and (3) a better customer experience … that is, external paying customer experience … when interacting with the company.

What, not a better user experience?

Well, sure, except that the point of a better customer experience is to make the company’s virtual cash register go “ching!” so it’s important that external customers enjoy, or at least aren’t excessively irritated by the company’s customer interface.

The point of a better user experience is that it lets them do their work more effectively when they interact with the applications that support the work they do.

Bob’s sales pitch: Want to help out the cause here in KJR-land? Write an Amazon.com review for your favorite KJR title.

Or even your least-favorite title. Even a negative review about one of my books helps out the cause. That’s because a large total number of reviews helps establish a book as being real.

Now on CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The surefire way to waste money on IT consultants.” What it’s about: Politics are an inescapable part of most consulting engagements. Just don’t make politics the point.

Call them “speculative character flaws.” They’re flaws in the character of people we don’t like but can’t explain why. The only actual evidence of the flaw is that we need justification for disliking the tribe’s members.

Such is the case of IT and the “shiny ball syndrome,” which we in IT are supposedly afflicted with.

Only we in IT just don’t get distracted by technical shiny balls all that often. We don’t have time for the distraction, because right now we’re busy recovering from an outage on the part of one of our cloud providers, data loss from a recently departed employee who’s access privileges were inadvertently left in place, or some other occurrence of similar urgency.

The IT trade press? That’s a whole different matter. Industry journalists are constantly plagued with weekly deadlines, limits on their areas of expertise, and constraints on their enthusiasm given how many articles they’ve already written about those areas of expertise. So please forgive them for having latched onto the ransomware, workforce shortage, or generative AI shiny balls, to name three of recent vintage.

Which is why IT leaders, constantly challenged with keeping track of what’s new and exciting in our shared business domain, need to be cautious in inferring importance from publishing frequency.

Take the aforementioned generative AI. It’s dominated IT trade-press headlines for months. And yet, CIOs need to balance pressure from the CEO who wants to know what IT is doing about it with pressure from the Enterprise Architecture team to give them enough funding to populate an accurate applications inventory.

And pressure from IT Operations to modernize their ITSM toolkit.

And pressure from InfoSec to research and invest in anti-malware deep-learning AI technology.

Not to mention pressure from …

You get the idea. What needs the most attention from the IT management team isn’t the latest IT trade press shiny ball. It’s support for the prosaic, boring, and in many ways tedious IT fundamentals.

How to set IT’s priorities? Here’s one way:

Start with the IT Effectiveness Framework introduced in this space 10 years ago (“What makes IT work,” March 19, 2013). It divides the factors that result in an effective IT organization into four subject areas: Business Integration, Process Maturity, Technical Architecture, and Human Performance.

Next, look at the overall IT labor time budget – how many total hours are worked in IT. With your management team, decide on how big a slice you want to carve out and invest in improving IT’s abilities in these four subject areas.

Now comes the hardest parts: Making the carve-outs real, and figuring out how to invest the time and effort you’ve just carved out.

Bob’s last word: You’ve undoubtedly read lots of material talking about organizational resistance to change and what to do about it (including, of course, Bare Bones Change Management). But the importance of organizational change resistance pales in comparison to the difficulties associated with finding the time and effort an organization needs to define a change, and organizing the tasks needed to accomplish it.

Now in CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The surefire way to waste money on IT consultants.” What it’s about: Politics are an inescapable part of most consulting engagements. Just don’t make politics the point.