Industry Commentary – Page 132 – IS Survivor Publishing

When providing technology leadership, don’t push it

One of IT’s important roles in the organization is providing technology leadership.

Start with the well-established SWOT approach to strategic planning (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, although it really should be TOWS).

Technology leadership means taking responsibility for identifying technology-driven threats and opportunities and knowing how to productively bring them to the organization’s attention.

It’s the essence of a CIO’s strategic role. With that in mind, two pieces of advice: (1) consider the Segway, and (2) don’t push it.

Segway lessons

As the Segway was being developed, various professional visionaries, including its inventor, Dean Kamen and Steve Jobs, touted it as an impending civilization-transforming breakthrough.

Civilization, though, remains unbrokenthrough, due, I’m sure, to its failings and not that of the Segway.

Or not. Visionaries see the amazing potential something new and surprising has. It’s what they do; while there are certainly exceptions, for the most part visionaries decide early that if they pursue that potential hard enough they’ll overcome all of the unforeseen barriers to success.

That these barriers were unforeseen was not due to their obscurity: Such right-in-front-of-your-face challenges as curbs, pedestrians, and other forms of motorized traffic that make Segway riding dangerous to both the rider and those being ridden among were really quite difficult to miss. As it were.

No, the unforeseen barriers were unforeseen because few visionaries have any interest in foreseeing them. It isn’t what they do.

Fair enough. But if you want to make a career out of being a visionary, you probably shouldn’t try to do so from your CIO (or even CTO) chair. As a visionary you should write a business plan, sell it to some venture capitalists, and try to make it happen (or at least to build a convincing enough company that you and the venture capitalists can sell it for enough money that you can retire to a life of luxury).

As a CIO, it isn’t enough to see amazing potential. You’re also responsible for foreseeing all of the foreseeable barriers to success. Spotting the barriers is nowhere near as much fun (although you can improve things a bit through the use of “pre-mortem analysis“). But if you don’t engage in barrier-spotting, the barriers will turn up anyway and when they do, the CEO will quite rightfully ask you, “How did you manage to miss this?”

Applying this insight to, say, cloud computing won’t, I trust, be a strain.

Don’t push it

Once you adopt the role of technology-driven threats-and-opportunities spotter, you’ve put yourself and the business you work in in danger. The danger? That you’ll find strategic threats and opportunities where none exist.

Some innovations matter. The personal computer, local area network, and Internet were three that collectively transformed the world of business. CIOs who ignored them, or, even worst, tried to prevent their entry into the enterprise, acted as anti-strategic planners … the business equivalent of Hogan’s Heroes‘ Sergeant Schultz, saying “I see nothink!” over and over again while bad things (from Colonel Klink’s perspective) happened all around him.

But on the other end of the scale were the CIOs who, when Accenture (to pick an easy target) claimed that in the future there would be just two types of company … those who had fully embraced services oriented architecture and those that were out of business … sold the executive team on the need to invest heavily in SOA Right Now! without doing more than a view-from-100,000 feet effort to connect the dots between SOA and actual external threats and opportunities.

“Big Data” is a big trend right now. It might represent a big opportunity for your company, if your business generates big data, and if analyzing it well can provide a competitive advantage (or prevent a competitive disadvantage).

Or it might not. Your business might not generate that much data. Or, if it does generate it, there might not be anything to learn from it that matters very much.

Or, for that matter, the executive team might not have a culture of honest inquiry, at which point no evidence or analysis will make any difference, because they don’t trust evidence and analysis anyway — they only trust their guts.

And that … what will actually work in the company as it is … is something else technology leaders need to factor in when deciding what to bring to the company’s attention.

Recruiting enters the sixth dimension

In business, no idea is real until it reappears, under an approved author’s byline, in the Wall Street Journal or Harvard Business Review.

Okay, I’m whining. But still. Nick Corcodilos and I have both written repeatedly about the fallacy of skill-to-task matching—the practice, common among internal recruiters, of carefully listing every skill a position might require, as if a perfect match between skills required and skills acquired does even a half-decent job of predicting a candidate’s performance once hired.

If you need convincing, two points should do the job, made over-and-over again in this space, in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World (under the headline “hire people, not resumes”), and by Nick on www.asktheheadhunter.com. The first: Employees who are stretching are frequently superior to employees who are happy to do what they’ve been doing. (But not always—”pinball players,” who do a great job so they get to play again, are nothing to sneeze at either, assuming you’re the sort of business leader who sneezes at employees.)

Skill-to-task matching favors applicants who are coasting over those who are stretching. That’s the first point. The second:

Especially in knowledge work, but really, in just about every kind of position in the company, the best predictors of success for any employee are:

Habit of success: Loving what success feels like, and knowing that’s needed to feel it again.

Love of achievement: An employee who takes pride in producing something important will (I trust “Q.E.D.” is all the proof you’ll need for this one) work hard to produce results they can take pride in.

Not always recognized—employees who work well in teams consider helping their team succeed to be a worthwhile achievement—it’s part of the love of achievement, not separate from it.

Intellectual integrity: Faced with reliable evidence, employees with intellectual integrity adjust their opinions, rather than insisting their “opinions” (the correct term is now “biases”) must still be right.

If you’re never convinced until you read it in HBR or the Wall Street Journal, check out David Wessel’s review of Peter Cappelli’s, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (“Software Raises Bar for Hiring,” WSJ, 5/30/2012 and well worth reading in spite of my regrettable need to say “I told you so”).

Cappelli blames the problem on the increased use of automated resume screening software, which he considers to be a response to the completely understandable desire to minimize cost while increasing the ability to wade through the very large piles of resumes that flood in for every open position in a time of underemployment.

Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running will respond, “No, it isn’t completely understandable! It’s assuming instead!” They’ll ask, that is, the most important question about any business function, which is how the six optimization parameters (fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence) rank.

According to Cappelli, the top two are incremental cost and throughput. He’s almost certainly right that this is the fact. Understandable? Not so much.

This is how companies attract and select the people who will do the company’s work. What are the proper priorities for this, the most important responsibility business leaders have?

Excellence comes first—recognizing who will truly succeed the best in each position, even if that choice is unconventional.

Next, I’d put quality—the absence of defects. While skill-to-task-matching is a losing proposition, goodness of fit to what a position actually requires is not. Beyond that, conforming to the relevant laws and regulations, especially with respect to all forms of discrimination, really does matter.

Throughput, also known as capacity, comes third. Companies are faced with a flood of resumes for many open positions, and do need ways of coping with it. Not ways that reduce excellence or quality, though. Quite the opposite—companies need ways to spot the needles of great applicants in the haystack of all the rest.

That leaves cycle time (filling positions quickly), fixed cost (the cost of turning on the lights every day), and incremental cost (the cost of processing each applicant) to float — to be whatever they need to be so that companies make great hires.

Think recruiting would look as it does if companies were explicit about how the six dimensions rank in importance?

Not me. Not Nick, either. And, fortunately, it appears the world of mainstream business thinking might finally be coming around as well.

* * *

If anyone from WSJ or HBR is reading this … call me. We should talk.