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|In: Organizational Design|Last Updated:

Ever wonder what separates successful IT departments from the ones that generate nothing but gripes?

Not what separates star-performing IT from “the pack,” but what separates the competent from the rest?

150 factors make the difference, but they aren’t all created equal. Squint at the list hard and 18 float to the top. (Why 18? Because that’s how many actually floated to the top. I didn’t start with a number in mind.)

Some background: Back in the last century when I wrote the  IS Survival Guide I organized the factors needed for IT to work into four buckets. Over time these evolved into the framework I use today: Business integration, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance.

The 150 factors on my list of what makes the difference come from drilling down into these four categories. Selecting the 18 “critical success factors” from that list was less than scientific but more than arbitrary — it was the result of experience and lots of correspondence over the years.

This week’s column defines the big four and their overall scope. Starting next week we’ll dig into the critical success factors and what to do about them if your organization comes up short. So without further ado:

Business Integration

Business integration covers everything about how IT fits into the enterprise as a whole. It happens at three levels: strategic (meaning enterprise-scale), tactical (divisional), and business-infrastructural (overall “lifestyle” technologies) integration. And yes, I’m abusing the language using it this way. Live with it.

Those are the whats of business integration. The hows are governance and the business/IT relationship.

Process Maturity

Process … more accurately, processes and practices … are how an organization does its work. IT’s processes and practices fall into five broad categories:

  • Delivery management: Primarily on the applications side of IT, how the organization makes sure IT actually does deliver what it’s supposed to deliver. Delivery management breaks down into three levels: Program management, initiative management, and project management.
  • Application support: This includes everything having to do with designing or selecting; building or installing, configuring and integrating; enhancing; maintaining; and (when the time comes) retiring business applications.
  • Information management: Making sure all structured databases and unstructured data repositories contain what they’re supposed to contain, and are organized so as to maximize their maintainability, integrity, and value.
  • IT Operations: If the systems are down, nothing else matters. If they’re sluggish, something else matters but not much. IT Operations is where IT makes sure the value it’s already delivered is there, ready to use when it’s needed.
  • Personal technologies: The ERP suite is strategic and runs the company. The CRM suite is strategic and drives revenue. But employees live their lives on their PCs, smartphones and tablets, using the office suite, email system, and telephones. Handle these well and employees will forgive a lot. Handle them badly and your reputation is shot.

Technical Architecture

Yes, IT might be “about the business,” but in the end, someone has to make sure the company has the right technologies in place, organized well, and put together to facilitate the company’s next step instead of acting as a barrier or bottleneck. Notwithstanding all that’s written about shadow IT, non-IT IT and so on, when it comes to the stuff that can’t just be a standalone “island of automation,” that someone is IT.

Technical architecture encompasses the applications portfolio, the company’s structured and unstructured data repositories, and all the platforms and technical infrastructure they reside and run on. And how they all fit together.

Human Performance

IT might be “about the business,” and its job might be to provide the technology the company needs (and by the way, its job is now bigger than that, but that’s a different topic for a different column).

IT might get its work done through well-organized processes and practices, but in the end it’s the people who work in IT who make the difference between success and failure.

Human performance isn’t about whether the people who work in IT perform. It’s about everything that has to come together so IT has great people working in it, with as few barriers as possible standing between them and success.

These four factors — business integration, process maturity, technical architecture and human performance — are what IT has to be good at if it’s going to be considered competent.

How does IT become good at them? That’s what the list of critical success factors is for. We’ll start digging into it next week.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Hot on the heels of her breakthrough concept for Yahoo! … redesign the home page! … Marissa Mayer made headlines by eliminating telework as her next Big Idea. Best Buy quickly followed suit, leading opinionators from around the country to share their brilliant insights on the topic.

Just in case you’re the sort who requires a 😉 to identify sarcasm, I’m being sarcastic.

Most of these commentators know little or nothing about the subject. You can tell by how many of them talk about telework as if it’s something benevolent employers bestow on lucky employees.

It’s an interesting notion: When an employer gets the same benefits for lower costs, it’s benevolent. And all these years I’ve been using benevolent as a synonym for generous. Now that I know, I’ll reform the rest of my vocabulary too. From now on up means “toward the center of the earth,” dark means “the experience you get looking directly into the sun,” and outside means “working in a corporate cubicle.”

Suggestion: Maybe these opinionators should pay attention to what’s happened in successful turnarounds, rather than in turnarounds-in-progress.

At a minimum, they should have some knowledge about what is and isn’t working well within the halls of Yahoo! and Best Buy.

Me, I have no idea whether Mayer is right or wrong about what Yahoo! needs to do. I don’t have any idea whether Best Buy’s Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE, and was that the best they could come up with?) was a success or a bust.

What I do know is that there’s nothing to be learned from these decisions. At least, not yet.

Here’s what we do know about telework (and forgive me for repeating myself):

  • Managing teleworkers calls for specific techniques and skills beyond what’s needed to manage employees face-to-face.
  • In particular, without managers who know how to lead remote employees, teleworkers risk becoming second-class corporate citizens.
  • Telework tends to be a better fit for responsibilities assigned to individual contributors than those assigned to teams.
  • When teleworkers are supposed to work as a team, they need support in the form of tools — especially web conferencing tools — techniques, and coaching.
  • Good employees perform better in a telework environment than they do in an office environment. Mediocre-to-poor employees perform worse in a telework environment than they do in an office environment.

Whatever else there is to be said about Marissa Mayer’s decision, she was right about one piece of the puzzle: Before they’re anything else, organizations are collections of relationships, and establishing and maintaining relationships is more difficult for teleworkers than for on-site employees. So if she sees a lot of friction and silos-of-one among employees at all levels at Yahoo!, there’s logic to her action.

And, whatever else there is to be said about her decision, she got one thing excruciatingly wrong (and lots of other commentators have talked about this one, so forgive me for piling on):

In its chapter on motivation, Leading IT identifies three outstanding ways to demotivate employees: Arrogance, disrespect, and unfairness.

When Mayer announced she was eliminating telework, it came out that at the same time she was building a nursery next to her office. That’s supposedly okay because she did it at her own expense.

To which, before getting back to the main point, may I just ask, and you fell for that?

Mayer is only building it at her own expense if she pays rent to Yahoo! every month at the going rates for the square footage her nursery occupies. Thus far I’ve yet to read that this is the case.

So back to the three demotivators. Arrogance? No, this decision wasn’t arrogant, whatever else it was. Disrespect? Not really. Mayer didn’t accuse teleworkers of slacking. She said she wants everyone face-to-face to provide the sparks of creativity that happen better that way.

But unfairness? Bingo. Anatole France put it nicely a long time ago: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

Even if Mayer allowed every employee to build out nurseries next to their cubicles, with Yahoo! providing the space, she still wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Her enormous personal wealth and compensation see that.

But she doesn’t, so she’s just another example of privilege, which as Terry Pratchett pointed out in one of his fine Discworld books, literally means “private law.”

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