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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Is IT leadership the toughest job in the world?

It better be, because Leading IT: (Still) the Toughest Job in the World just hit the shelves. I’m calling it a second edition because it includes everything from the original, and I didn’t want to mislead anyone who already owns it.

But it contains as much new material as old — if you own the first edition and decide to read this one too, you won’t be disappointed. It is, perhaps, a second first edition.

But is IT leadership really the toughest job in the world, or am I just pandering?

The answer is, while I’m not entirely above pandering, running an IT organization probably is more difficult than any other leadership role in the world of commerce, because IT leaders face a uniquely difficult set of challenges.

Challenge #1: Smarts

High on the list is a point made by InfoWorld’s Eric Knorr in the foreword he was kind enough to write for the new edition: Technical professionals mostly figure they’re smarter than the managers they report to. Not only does this generality hold up pretty well, but the better the IT manager, the better it holds up.

This doesn’t make IT unique, of course … it’s true for any department staffed by engineers. Leadership is getting others to follow, and when the people who are supposed to follow you all figure they’re smarter than you are, leading them is a whole lot more interesting.

Challenge #2: Product Complexity

Imagine you had to create a detailed view of your company’s technical architecture. Not just a functional view that shows the building blocks and their interconnections, but a blueprint-level specification that shows everything and describes how the parts interact.

Now imagine you run out of Prozac.

It is, I suppose, possible that complex products like planes, trains and automobiles might have more and more complex moving parts.

But I doubt it, because the engineers who design these products have a huge advantage: They get to specify components that are designed to fit together. IT, in contrast, buys functional building blocks and has to make them work together in spite of their design inconsistencies.

And IT leaders have to run organizations capable of implementing, maintaining, and operating all of this complexity.

Challenge #3: Foxes vs Hedgehogs

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus said, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Jim Collins turned into one of his Good-to-Great principles, even though, based on what I learned about animal behavior and neurobiology back in my sociobiology days, I’m pretty sure the biggest thing hedgehogs know is, “Curl into a ball and stick out your spines when a fox is trying to eat you.”

Not that arguing the accuracy of ancient Greek poetry with Jim Collins is a good use of time.

Anyway … when you run a whole business, not only can you focus on one big thing, focusing the company on one big thing is your job.

When you run IT, you don’t get to delegate all the nasty complexities. At least, not entirely. All those smart people, who are responsible for all of those moving parts that were never designed to interoperate? You have to be able to communicate with all of them on their terms. In IT, hedgehog = empty suit.

Challenge #4: The difference between ignorance and apathy

It’s “I don’t know and I don’t care,” which, sadly, describes the attitude of far too many business executives about information technology. The same people who willingly invest millions in focus groups and taste tests to find out how to improve the company’s products, and more millions to understand how customers are responding to an advertising campaign, want you and your organization to figure out the information technology the company needs on your own.

Not in principle. In principle they want to be heavily involved. But in practice they can’t spare the time. They also can’t spare much staff time either. Except, that is, for the one or two people whose time they can cheerfully spare because they’re known to be worthless.

Meanwhile, there are investments you need to make whose costs will be quite tangible, but whose benefits will be invisible … investments in the IT equivalent of preventive maintenance.

Try to explain their importance and everyone’s eyes glaze over. Make them anyway and you’re accused of buying technology for technology’s sake. Fail to make them and you suffer the usual litany of outages, slowdowns, and costly overdue upgrades.

Is leading IT the toughest job in the world? Maybe, maybe not.

It’s certainly tough enough.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

IT governance is a bread-and-butter topic for consultants like me. Relatively few companies are happy with how they go about deciding:

  • How much to invest in information technology.
  • Where to invest it … what, that is, IT ought to be working on.
  • How much financial benefit its investments return.

More often than not, the process (if you can dignify it with that name) is contentious, confusing, and surrounded by complaints that have all the subtlety and emotional maturity of “Mom likes you best” expressions of victimhood.

The solutions are rarely difficult to design. That isn’t where the challenges lie. For example, the answer to how much a company should invest in information technology is pretty simple: Nothing. What companies should invest in is revenue enhancement, cost reduction, and risk management. While these investments often require new or modified information technology, that’s a different matter.

Companies that recognize the distinction between investments in information technology and investments in revenue, cost, and risk that require information technology can have just as much contention, confusion, and complaining, but at least the arguments are about the right subject.

It’s a start. Next comes the hard part: Getting the execs beyond their own silos so they think like leaders of the whole company.

Go back to the how-much-to-invest question. The answer is straightforward in concept if hard to calculate: Enough to use up all of the company’s capacity to absorb change and not a penny more.

Or less.

Imagine a company perfects this approach. Its decisions are about revenue, cost, and risk. It expends the right amount of effort and money in them. It has optimized its investment in the future, making it a fine, rare beastie.

And it’s still missing a critical piece of the puzzle, because if this is as far as “IT governance” (actually, business planning) goes, it leaves out one of IT’s most important but too-often ignored responsibilities — providing technology leadership, something that’s easy to recommend but hard to accomplish.

The principle isn’t complicated. My major premise is that new technologies can represent threats or opportunities — the two reasons businesses have to be different tomorrow than they were yesterday. My minor premise is that the company’s best expertise in information technology resides in the IT organization (I hope, and if not, what’s up with that?).

My syllogistically inescapable conclusion: IT is responsible for recognizing technology-driven opportunities and threats to the company’s business model and bringing them forward into the company’s business planning process.

Sounds neat and tidy in theory, doesn’t it? If only it were neat and tidy in practice. Sadly, as is so often the case when the subject is the future, neatness and tidiness … and even more, predictability … aren’t going to be part of the picture.

But before we get to why it’s going to be messy, let’s put a spotlight on something that might have escaped your attention: IT’s job isn’t to highlight threats and opportunities to make sure someone knows and decides to do something about them. It won’t work, because it can’t: As already mentioned, if you take this approach the company will completely saturate its capacity to absorb change before anyone starts looking at the threats and opportunities you’re bringing to their attention.

Decisions commit or deny time, staff and money — otherwise they’re nothing but empty talk. And as there won’t be any time, staff or money left to commit, the threats no matter how dire, and opportunities no matter how attractive, will just have to wait around gathering dust until the company’s next planning cycle begins.

Which is why IT’s job isn’t to merely highlight threats and opportunities. It’s to bring them into the company’s business planning process so decision-makers can integrate them into the company’s strategic and tactical plans.

Now we’re ready for the messy part, as if it weren’t messy enough already: You have to be in a position to recognize technology-driven threats when they’re small enough to be manageable, and opportunities before they’re apparent and obvious to your competitors.

Which is why you and everyone else in the IT organization has to understand how the business works and where it’s headed; need insight into your suppliers, competitors and business partners, how they work and where they’re headed; and have to stay aware of new industry developments.

Have to understand, that is, at a deeper level than vague, generic words like “the cloud” and “tablets,” digging to the level of specific new capabilities that can make a difference to your specific business.

Because threats and opportunities are never in general. It’s always the specifics that tell the tale.

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For this week’s ManagementSpeak, click here.

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