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What should you do yourself and what should you delegate?

A few weeks back, Chad Dickerson and I disagreed in print about the importance of 802.11. Finding something we disagreed about took quite a bit of work, too — I hope you appreciate the effort.

We didn’t, by the way, disagree about whether 802.11 works. (I’m using it right now as I write this column on my deck. It’s downright nifty.) What we disagreed about is what’s worthy of a CIO or CTO’s time and attention. 802.11 is infrastructure, and when you’re leading IT, infrastructure is, in my view, something best delegated while you focus on strategic and tactical matters.

Chad didn’t disagree with this point. He disagreed with my definitions, stating that, “… anything that contributes to the profitability of an enterprise should be considered strategic.”

Military planning recognizes three complementary disciplines: strategy, tactics and logistics. To oversimplify a bit, strategy is about which battles to fight; tactics is about how to fight them; logistics covers procurement, maintenance, and transportation. These are military concepts. Their business usage is metaphorical, not exact, even if we agree that business is war.

At least as I apply this vocabulary in business situations, strategy describes the broad principles through which a company defines its choices, usually in terms of how it must change to meet the demands of the future. Tactics has two meanings — the specific actions through which a company plans to achieve its strategy, and its short-term plans for winning on today’s business battlegrounds. They’re complementary uses in that today’s wins should be structured to move the company into the future, as well as helping it survive until the future arrives.

I personally prefer the term “infrastructure” to “logistics” when talking about business planning for a simple reason: In business terms, infrastructure seems to say it better.

So why, when you lead IT, should you delegate infrastructure? Let’s go back to the military metaphor for guidance. As we all know, armies travel on their stomachs, so logistics is clearly important for winning wars. That doesn’t mean the great generals focused their time and energy on the details of bringing in grub, tents, and the other minutiae of logistics. From Khan to Napoleon to Rommel and Patton, winning military leaders left, and still leave that to others.

Winning generals focus on which battles to fight, and how to fight them.

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The Standish Group, noted for its “Chaos Study” of software project failure rates, lists ten factors that done right, drive project success and done wrong, create failure.

None of the ten is labeled “bad vendor,” yet that’s the most frequently cited cause of IT problems. IS Survivalist Andrew Bramlett recently suggested that I could make serious money by packaging this into a “Delivery Accountability Service.” IT Catalysts could charge $10,000 per substandard deliverable, $20,000 per absent deliverable, $100,000 per failed ERP implementation, and an even $1 million for a missed earnings estimate (actual involvement in a project is optional, and charged separately). When you think of the career alternatives this is dirt cheap.

I’ve been around vendor-associated successes, vendor-associated failures, and results called both by different participants. I’ve been there on both sides of the table, too. Here are a few tips I’ve gathered along the way:

  • Manage vendors the same way you lead employees. When it’s time to get the job done, it’s people who are doing the work. Praise in public, criticize in private. Be direct but not belligerent. Respect reporting relationships. For that matter, show respect, plain and simple. And understand that compensation is at best a minor motivator for consultants (as opposed to consulting companies) just as it is for employees. The sense of having accomplished something significant is far more important.
  • Don’t over-negotiate. Also, don’t under-negotiate. Starve your vendor and you’ll get the junk you’re paying for. Overfeed and you’ll get flabby results. There’s no formula you can use to arrive at the right price, either. That’s what experience and good judgment are for.
  • The relationship outlives the transaction. If you find yourself pulling out the contract every time you meet with the vendor’s account manager, something is seriously wrong with the relationship. If you go shopping every time you launch a new project, something is seriously wrong with the relationship, too. Create an atmosphere in which the account manager wins bigger by always doing what’s best for your company and the account manager will make sure you get enough value for your money.

Blaming a vendor is about as credible as blaming employees. In either case, you’re there to make sure your company has the right people in the right places, working on the right tasks in the right way.

That’s why they pay you the big bucks, isn’t it?

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