Spotting a dysfunctional IT organization is pretty simple. End-users talk about the “helpless desk” and the “local area not-work.” Managers gripe that simple requests disappear into the prioritization black hole. Executives tell horror stories about multi-million dollar project fiascoes. And inside IT you find a shell-shocked inability to do anything more than flail away at things without accomplishing anything useful.

A complacent IT organization — one that’s “good enough” — is harder to recognize. So hard that several correspondents challenged the whole idea. In response to last week’s column on the subject, they asserted that “raising the bar” is just more executive abuse — an insistence that if IT was a car, it should accelerate instantaneously, stop on a dime, corner as if it ran on rails, deliver a hundred miles per gallon, never need an oil change, and cost $25 bucks plus tax.

Yes, some executives are unreasonable and yes, they do use the phrase “raise the bar” to justify back-breaking workloads. So what?

It doesn’t make all IT organizations equally effective, and it doesn’t justify complacency. It certainly doesn’t mean the nagging feeling that information technology shouldn’t cost so much, take so long, and be so overall hard to accomplish — that it could be much, much better — isn’t sometimes justified.

You’re the CIO, caught in the middle. You need criteria, not complaints, defensiveness, or vague feelings. To help you out, here are the seven warning signs of a complacent IT organization … or at least, seven of the warning signs:

1. It’s a ghost town at 5pm.

IT staff members should feel a sense of urgency about problems that crop up, an intensity about finishing tasks by their deadlines, and personal pride in the quality of the work they deliver. If, no matter what’s going on, everyone feels comfortable that it will wait until tomorrow, you’re running a complacent organization.

That doesn’t, by the way, mean you should hope for the obverse. If everyone works late hours and six or seven day weeks all the time, it suggests a very different problem: Desperation. It comes from strong motivation — usually fear — coupled with severe ineffectiveness. Complacency is a matter of attitude and culture; ineffectiveness is a matter of process and training.

2. ” ‘They’ don’t use the software they way they’re supposed to.” Complacent IT’s job is finished when projects deliver software that meets specifications and end-users receive training in how to operate it. Being beyond blame is the goal.

In an effective IT organization the job isn’t finished until the business has changed as planned. That means understanding the context behind the specifications. And it means training end-users in how to do their jobs with the new software — quite different from learning how, where, and when to move the mouse pointer and click the buttons.

3. Fixing the same problems, over and over again. It’s an unmistakable sign: If your e-mail server (or what have you) crashes so often that your department has achieved excellence in restoring it quickly, it’s time to shake things up.

4. More allegiance to the profession than to the business. Allegiance to a profession is a worthy dimension in any corporate culture. It establishes high standards and a shared set of ethical guidelines. When the IT staff has more allegiance to their profession than their employer, though, they’ve lost their sense of what defines value — a context-free set of abstract criteria replaces business horse-sense as the measure.

5. Metrics. No, you won’t be able to spot complacency in the graphs that show how well IT meets or exceeds service levels. If those don’t show that everything is just fine, it means the IT staff is so inept or demoralized that nobody bothers to game the system.

Complacency is hidden in how metrics are defined in the first place, or in their absence. It’s in the agreement as to what constitutes a reasonable set of targets: Reasonable, of course, means easily achieved.

6. “That’s how we do things around here.” This, and the closely related, “We’re different,” tells you nobody is looking for a better way of doing things. They’ve become complacent.

7. “We’re working our tails off and nobody appreciates our efforts.” If there’s one constant in the universe of business, it’s that the employees who complain the loudest about how hard they’re working are the ones who show up late, leave early, and produce the least while they’re there.

“Better,” said Voltaire, “is the enemy of good.” That’s a healthy attitude. Complacent organizations get it backward: Good enough is the enemy of better.

Sorry for the delay — next week’s column will provide solutions. I promise!

How do you raise the bar?

When you take over a thoroughly ineffective organization, everyone recognizes the need for change. They might resist each specific change (“I’m doing fine, but the rest of these losers need to be taught a lesson,” is a very common attitude in problem departments) but the overall need for change is clear.

But how about an organization that’s just good enough, and has been just good enough for enough years that being just good enough is ingrained in the culture? Of all the tasks a new leader faces, this is the most daunting.

IT organizations can become complacent in a variety of situations, but they all seem to boil down to a parent company that succeeds in spite of itself. Sometimes this is because it’s a regulated monopoly, or a company in a heavily regulated industry where gaining or losing customers is hard to do. Sometimes it’s too much venture money. Family-owned businesses seem especially prone to the problem, possibly because the owners think of employees as their extended family; often because family members hold executive posts through nepotism rather than merit.

I’ve seen it in government agencies, too. Not all of them, despite the ever-popular Business-Is-Great/Government-and-Academics-are-Stupid (BIG/GAS) theory. But those that are currently faddish are often bestowed with bloated budgets by an ever-willing-to-pander legislature, and a bloated budget is an invitation to increase staff whether or not there’s anything for the additional staff to do.

Regardless of the specifics, the root cause seems to be a lack of clear connection between organizational action and success, however an organization defines success. When that connection is unknown, it’s difficult for anyone in the company to understand how it is that their own efforts make much of a difference. Human psychology being what it is, few employees sit in the lunchroom, commiserating about this lack of clarity and their own unimportance.

Instead, most employees, in IT at least, develop independent criteria for what really matters. Their allegiance might be to a technology, a methodology, or a Big Honkin’ Project. It might even be to “making our internal customers happy.” Whatever it is, it has transferred from the company’s success to the success of their chosen priority.

And in you come, ready to clean house. Except that no matter what you say and what you do, employees have two comments in response: (1) “The new CIO just doesn’t understand how things work around here,” and (2) “The new CIO just doesn’t understand the importance of …” followed by each employee’s personal hot button.

Changing those two comments to, “I guess we have some things to learn,” isn’t easy. It can be done, but it isn’t easy.

Sometimes it’s worse than that. Sometimes a CIO who’s been in place a little too long wakes up in the early hours, when dark and monstrous creatures seem all too possible, and starts to sweat at the thought that maybe … just maybe … there’s a better way to run IT and all the complaining that goes on in the company is more than just the normal griping all CIOs get. Longstanding CIOs who try to shake things up don’t get comments #1 and #2. They get, “It’s just one of those management fads. If we keep our heads down for awhile it will all blow over.”

Changing that to “I guess we have some things to learn,” is even harder, because known quantities aren’t supposed to suddenly change into unknown quantities.

Start with diagnosis: Develop your organizational listening channels, inside and outside IT; look for patterns; peel the onion and look for likely root causes. Figure out what about the organization most needs changing, as opposed to what might be unfortunate but isn’t significant enough to deserve your personal attention.

Next, package the changes you need to make into a small number of initiatives — no more than three — which, when accomplished, will address your organization’s most pressing issues.

After that … well, after that comes a devil of a lot of pushing, pulling, sweating, and pick-and-shovel work to make them happen.

The specifics of which will be the subject of next week’s column.

(Truth in publishing: My consulting company, IT Catalysts, Inc., helps CIOs through this process. More truth in publishing: We won’t object at all if you contact us to see if it makes sense for your organization. Really.)