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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Between real innovation and lots of marketing, the IT world is awash with newer, better solutions—for a specific business need or part of the organization.  This is a great time for software entrepreneurs and people with specific itches that need scratching.  Your business colleagues are finding amazing, innovative solutions they believe they can easily implement on their own. Whether it’s a SaaS tool, a mobile app, or an Excel plug-in, IT’s friends in the business think they can pull together a solution without involving the IT organization. We have arrived in the Golden Age of Shadow IT.

This column has talked about Shadow IT (aka “rogue IT,” aka “DIY IT,” many times before , and this particular blog post probably won’t be the last. What we Professionals need to do is change our way of thinking about this, and embrace the change, starting here, with a shiny new title. From here on in, “CIO” stands for Chief Integration Officer.

Well, what in the ham sandwich does this mean?  It means that our job has always been to focus the organization we lead on the hardest IT problems. And integration, my friends, is, of all IT’s responsibilities, front and center as the hardest. It’s harder than Operations (let me know if I need to address this in a future post). It’s harder than coding new functionality. And it’s harder than configuring COTS solutions (commercial, off-the-shelf solutions) to support how the business works.

What makes integration so hard is that, as someone once said, software is just an opinion. Integration means reconciling differences of these opinions – as hard to do with software as with human beings who disagree about political points of view.

I don’t mean to pooh-pooh all of the other priorities that you are also juggling. Security gives us all night terrors, legacy systems might stop “keeping the joint running” (sorry), and user support or hardware takes up a lot of time.

But integration matters more. To understand why, explore what happens when you don’t have it: “swivel-chairing” becomes the norm for creating a unified view of business data; manual re-keying becomes the norm for data synchronization; and when a business manager asks a question of two different databases they get conflicting answers.

Meanwhile, vendors are churning out useful solutions to vexing business problems, and at a pace internal IT can’t hope to match. Which is why addressing the need for integration by trying to stomp out DIY IT is like King Canute ordering the tide to stay away – a hopeless strategy. It’s why IT must master the fine art of Integration Engineering to meet these challenges. And it’s why CIOs must become Chief Integration Officers.

This change in perspective shouldn’t trigger our territorial instincts. That vendors are providing great solutions to vexing problems, and business users can deploy them without impinging on IT’s bandwidth, means everyone benefits. We’re merely changing our focus to where we’re needed the most—ensuring there is a clean, safe, complete architecture that meets the organization’s goals – especially its integration goals.

Over the years at the company I work for, we have found that the more we build integration into how we work with our clients’ teams, the more our clients trust us to deliver what they need the most, building friends along the way. We are seen as allies, slaying dragons together, as dragon-slaying entails managing the complex, multidimensional challenges of data models, asynchronous system event timing, creating a common operating picture, and creating fused information products that propel data-driven decisions.   Embracing integrations as a principal competency of our work helps eliminate the classic “Business vs. IT” nonsense that drives all parties crazy.

If you’re a CIO, this column is meant to convince you that your job title is changing. If you work in IT’s trenches it’s meant to help you prepare for what’s coming.

The next few columns will be about some of the practical considerations, and more importantly, how to have conversations about these considerations.

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Bob watch: Currently appearing in CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: Managing CEO expectations is this year’s Priority No. 1.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Over the years, KJR documented and referred to The Eight Dimensions of IT Leadership.  Eight (yes, 8) is still the number.

By KJR’s definition they all require the individual leader to demonstrate Leadership.

What they don’t all require is Popularity. We may want to be liked by those we lead, but we may not always get that luxury. Some of our calls to action are going to ruffle feathers or make somebody’s day take an unexpected turn. Even when we follow the advice of “Avoiding de-motivating employees”, we might have to make a choice that staff may not be in love with (that is my midwestern way of saying “I just made somebody angry”).

Most of us are not completely solitary reptiles, so how do we cope with this?

It is unseemly to go on social media to complain about how those who report to us might be angry at us, and your boss probably isn’t going to sign up to be your therapist either.

You don’t want to take it out on your family or kick the dog—but we all sometimes need somebody who understands our situation, and better yet, can go beyond mere empathy to offer coaching and advice.

In short, you need to be a Professional in a Profession.

In shorter … you need a Community.

You need to have people you can talk to who understand the lingo, abide by a written or unwritten code of ethics, and have passed through some sort of rite of passage that tells the other members that you are a legitimate practitioner of the leadership trade.

It is through being a Professional in a Community that we will have the support of others who understand the tradeoffs and challenges we face in exercising the Eight Tasks effectively. You can return the favor by supporting others when they have their own difficult choices, AND, by expanding the body of knowledge for the Community by sharing your own outcomes and experiences.  Better yet, your kids and your dog will thank you for not bringing your work life home to them.

It seems we can build Community relatively well virtually these days. Technology does help us stay in touch, through webinars, conferences, and social media.

Example: One of my favorite musicians in the world , Tim Burgess, started a virtual yet real-time album listening party in 2020. It showed us how far you can go to build a virtual community.  If you wanted to take part, you cued up the album, and then commented on Twitter with other fans in real time. It was great. But it still had limits.

So, just like there is nothing to compare to seeing Tim Burgess singing in front of The Charlatans live, in a crowded, real life club in Phoenix a few weeks ago, I propose that KJR readers should meet face to face with a lot of other like-minded, fun people at a conference in October of this year, in the Phoenix area.

How will we do this?

In Bob’s The Cognitive Enterprise he suggests replacing the old “People, Process, Technology” formulation with “Customers, Communities, Capabilities.

At OSI we’ve embraced this formulation, which is why we’re now sponsoring KJR.

And, it’s why, for a number of years, we’ve been steadily building up a community of like-minded practitioners .

As you’re a member of the KJR Community I’m inviting you to our 2024 event.  We are currently setting up the exact dates and other details. For now I’ll ask you to reserve the dates of October 29th – 30th.

In return, a promise: This won’t be a promotional event. Nobody will try to sell you OSI’s services – the point is to build community, not revenue.

So plan on meeting at a great venue 20 minutes from Phoenix’s SkyHarbor airport. To whet your appetite, here is a trailer from our event last year.

What do you say?  Are you up for helping grow your Profession, having fun, and hanging out with the new-found colleagues you’ve been needing in your professional life but didn’t know how to connect with them?

In the next week or so, we’ll have our website up with more details.

Stand by for more information!

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