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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Etymology isn’t identity. Where words come from is a matter of historical interest, not proper usage.

So I hope you enjoyed your Memorial Day, even though it’s become little more than a day off and an opportunity for retailers to offer sale prices.

Not that Memorial Day is something to be cynical about. I think about the sacrifices men and women in uniform have made for us and I’m reminded of the Passover tradition, where parents explain to their children that God brought them out of slavery — them personally, not just their ancestors.

Most of those who made the ultimate sacrifice probably weren’t thinking of us at the time. More likely they were thinking of getting the job done, of their buddies, and of their families. And yet, they sacrificed themselves for each of us, personally, and we shouldn’t forget it.

Which has what to do with running an IT department?

Just this: Too often, business leaders cast the need to get the job done in moral terms. There’s a project with milestones and deadlines — employees who don’t meet them are letting the company down, aren’t taking responsibility, won’t “give 200%” (and can we please start respecting the field of mathematics by jettisoning this tired cliché?).

They’re bad people, even though the milestones, and deadlines, and staffing to accomplish them, were adjusted to the point of absurdity through optimism bias and political necessity.

Please remember — the success of a business project lacks the moral imperative of liberating Dachau’s prisoners, not to mention France.

What’s hard is that this isn’t binary. You have more alternatives than just death marches and clock-watching.

In business, a sense of urgency is a valuable dimension of the corporate culture. It’s just that more isn’t better. Even more urgent is equal to frantic — an unproductive state in which employees divert their energy and attention from getting things done to worrying about how they’ll ever manage to get things done, while managers divert their time and energy from making sure things get done to making sure employees look busy every minute of every hour of every day.

There’s a dimension of oddity to this, too. The best executive leaders project an air of relaxed confidence. They’re able to act with urgency without ever looking rushed and harried.

But many of these same leaders interpret an aura of relaxed confidence in their employees as apathy and lack of commitment.

Go figure.

Getting back to deadlines and making them, you want this to matter to everyone. You want this to be a matter of professional pride. You want to make sure “This deadline was never realistic” isn’t the team’s default conclusion when the deadline becomes challenging, even as you conclude it’s time to change the deadline because it was never realistic.

Which brings us to a broader topic.

In some situations, the point of stability is where you want to be. That’s when leadership is easy. None come to mind at the moment, but I’m sure there are situations like this.

Leadership is hard when the stable places are the extremes, because that’s where staying in the healthy middle takes constant attention, a great deal of energy, and constant vigilance.

Maintaining a balance in the healthy middle that bisects the line that has apathy on one end and frantic flailing on the other is just one example. Maintaining a healthy balance between the stable cultural characteristics of chaos and bureaucracy is another.

If you’re a metrics-oriented sort, ask yourself how you’ll measure this sort of thing. Take CMMI (Capability Maturity Model integration), which in many respects is an admirable approach to process maturity. CMMI doesn’t, of course, advocate bureaucracy as it promotes increasing sophistication in process management.

The problem: It doesn’t recognize the near-inevitability of an encroaching culture of bureaucracy as organizations become more process-mature, and incorporate strong management practices to prevent it.

For that matter, and it’s a related matter, CMMI, like most maturity models, has a strong focus on metrics, but tends to hand-wave over the difficulty of making sure the metrics used to measure a process are the right metrics.

Here’s what I’ve never seen: A multidimensional maturity model that makes too much just as immature as too little.

But this is exactly what mature business leaders have to do.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

In the absence of a new idea, a new name for an old one will have to do.

Which is about the only justification I can imagine for ITaaS — IT as a service.

No, ITaaS isn’t a new technology that serves up everything a traditional IT department does, only over the Internet and into your browser. It’s the twentieth-century model of IT service delivery, where the IT department envisions itself as a supplier to the rest of the business, selling various forms of information technology to its internal customers, who pay for it through a system of chargeback.

As regular readers have surely figured out by now, this isn’t a model I usually endorse — in most circumstances, integrating IT into the business leads to superior results.

But instead of piling on more criticism (or even drearier, repeating the same old ones) let’s figure out how to make it work, because there are situations — centralized IT supporting more-or-less autonomous business units, for example — where ITaaS is the only practical alternative.

Where to start? The same place real businesses start: by choosing their basic business model, “business model” meaning the buttons and levers the business can push and pull to turn its actions into profitable revenue.

Somewhere in my IT Catalysts detritus I have a list of twenty or so business models, which successfully describe every business I’ve ever run across (not all of them are good models, just as not all businesses know how to sustainable make a profit). And while there are a lot of them, three are dominant:

  • Product innovation, filling known or newly discovered needs, wants and desires with ever-increasingly wonderful goods and services (services being, in this context, just another type of product — you charge for services, different from providing good service).
  • Customer intimacy, where you know your customers so well, and take care of them so well, that taking their business elsewhere is almost unimaginable.
  • Operational excellence, where you’re so efficient that you can offer your admittedly less interesting products to whoever happens to show up, at such a low price that the savings outweigh all other concerns.

By the way: while every well-run business has one business model that’s its lead story, that doesn’t mean business leaders get to ignore the others. Product innovators still have to operate efficiently, just not with relentless efficiency; likewise they shouldn’t treat their customers like dirt, even though they can’t offer them custom-tailored solutions the way a customer-intimacy company does.

And so on.

Ready for the punch line?

IT that’s integrated into the business is close kin to the customer-intimacy business model — so much so that the rest of the business doesn’t think like a customer at all and IT stops thinking like a supplier. In this model they and we become peers and partners.

ITaaS? IT’s CEO (the CIO, but we’re modeling IT as a separate and independent business) has a choice to make. IT can be a product/service innovator or it can be what, in pre-cloud days, was called an information utility — a purveyor of inexpensive commodity solutions.

It can be finer-grained than this. For example, IT infrastructure services can have a different model from application services, with the former focusing on hyper-standardization in support of operational excellence while the latter provides technology leadership to the rest of the enterprise in the guise of product innovation.

Don’t like these business models as a framework? Come up with a different one. That’s fine — these simply illustrate the more fundamental point: With ITaaS the whole nature of IT strategy and governance undergo profound changes.

With IT as an integral part of the business, its strategy is a consequence of the overall business strategy. As an independent business its strategy is derived independently … although, like any good business, it has to guide its strategy with its understanding of marketplace (or, as it’s all metaphorical, “marketplace”) trends.

This, by the say, is one place many ITaaS proponents miss the mark. They start by defining an IT services catalog. It isn’t that having an IT services catalog is a mistake. It’s that without a business strategy behind it, an IT services catalog is just a list of stuff we do.

Strategy precedes product.

Governance? With integrated IT, governance is how the business makes sure IT’s project portfolio optimally supports business priorities. With ITaaS, revenue is revenue — IT governance is mostly a matter of which business units have the budget to do what.

Which might explain the appeal of the ITaaS relationship model: It results in a lot less arguing.

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