The Anasazi of Chaco Canyon thrived for a thousand years. Their economy depended on wood harvested from the extensive forests that grew in the canyon and the surrounding hillsides.

The population grew, they cleared, first the local forests, then an expanding radius. The soil, without trees to hold it in place, eroded. Chaco Canyon became a desert, and the Anasazi were gone.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse is about sustainability, and about societies whose customs and habits — the behaviors that seemed to be the sources of their success — were, without their knowing it, creating damage that accumulated until it became irreparable. It led me to wonder what practices CIOs commonly engage in that might, in some analogous fashion, make their IT organizations unsustainable. To categorize the possibilities, I turned to IT Catalysts’ IT Effectiveness Framework, which divides the factors needed to sustain IT organizations into business alignment, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance. In order:

Business Alignment

IT aligns with its business collaborators through both formal governance and informal relationships. Correct governance is the centerpiece of IT sustainability, because that’s where the company decides its investments in information technology. Whether IT governance results in sustainability or decline depends on a key decision: Whether each project approval also approves the staffing increase needed to maintain the newly implemented functionality.

It’s a simple equation: Build or integrate a new application and you need staff to maintain it. If the CIO can’t hire them, IT will experience increased demand without increasing supply. And as even first-year students in economics know, the only possible outcomes are price increases or shortages, and price increases are politically unpalatable at best.

Eventually it does become clear that IT is seriously understaffed. By then, the staff increases needed to recover exceed what the business can afford, because businesses won’t stash these savings. They’ll spend the money that should be added to the IT budget elsewhere.

IT’s network of informal relationships can also result in unsustainable decisions — mostly by creating a governance bypass channel that approves favored projects while ignoring the requirements of good governance.

Process Maturity

Too little process breeds Chaos. It’s fun and imposes very little overhead, so it can create the impression of very high productivity. Among its many drawbacks is that when work becomes idiosyncratic, the loss of a single employee can be crippling. Another, very popular one is that with chaos generally comes poor testing and worse change control, leading to occasionally serious business disruption.

The damage from chaos, though, is generally small in scale — it isn’t wonderful, but is sustainable. Even better, chaos usually leads to overstaffing, creating an opportunity to compensate for bad governance by instituting stronger processes.

Too much process breeds the opposite of chaos — stifling, choking bureaucracy. Bureaucracy reproduces mitotically — once you have any, you’ll inevitably end up with more. It can turn IT into an environment where productive employees have to wade through a vastly larger population of approvers and reviewers whose sole purpose is to prevent anything creative from ever taking place. Too much process quickly leads to unsustainable IT.

Technical Architecture

Bad architecture is easily achieved and difficult to repair. It can include reliance on obsolete platforms, undisciplined data design that doesn’t clearly establish a single “source of truth,” and a failure to decommission old applications following implementation of their replacements … so now you have two of them.

The single biggest architectural cause of unsustainability, though, is bad integration — the sloppy creation of ad hoc interfaces between overlapping applications and databases. The result: Not a mere spiderweb, but (as one client described it) a hairball. Once you’ve built a hairball you have to maintain it, leading to an ever-decreasing portion of project effort going to anything useful.

Human Performance

Put the right people with the right skills and the right attitudes in the right roles. Give them flexible processes to help get their work done when they fit the situation, and to ignore or improve when they don’t. Make decisions quickly and remove whatever barriers management has accidentally imposed. The results: Amazing. Also, rare.

More often, non-performers accumulate, mediocre managers hire worse supervisors, training counts as expense rather than investment, and employees are locked away in “job jail,” where they either Retire In Place or leave for better opportunities. Ineffective employees and bad habits accumulate, and your best employees depart. The results: Crippling.

Collapse is always the story of chain reactions — of bad situations making themselves worse at an accelerating pace. Smart CIOs are constantly on the lookout for the factors that lead to it, for the same reason as your loyal author:

They’re the enemy of our shared goal — to keep the joint running.

Some days you get to be a grand visionary. This being October, you’re more likely to be busy preparing your budget.

Budgeting is a problem. It’s a time-consuming, annoying, expensive process, almost always implemented as stupid game-playing (the game is Pin the Tail on the Donkey), and the only thing worse is not doing it.

One difference between budgeting and other games, like bridge or Scrabble, is that you can choose to not play bridge and Scrabble. If you want to be in management, you have to learn how to play the budget game to win, or failing that to play it to not lose. It isn’t easy, since the other side holds most of the good cards.

(Sidebar: A group called the “Beyond Budgeting Roundtable” is trying hard to replace the budgeting game with a more rational approach, built on two major pillars — continuous, adaptive planning and decentralized decision-making. I wish them well. If your company hasn’t adopted Beyond Budgeting, though, I don’t recommend that you be the first to say, to the CEO and CFO, “You know that our budgeting process is a stupid game that promotes unethical behavior. Why don’t we adopt this promising alternative?” Unless, that is, you’re seriously interested in committing career suicide.)

There is no single, magic formula for preparing and successfully defending next year’s IT budget. Here are some techniques that should help you survive the experience, and even to have intelligent conversations on the subject:

  • Separate spending for value maintenance from spending that enables new business value. Value maintenance is “non-discretionary” — curtailing it isn’t a realistic choice. So long as the company is in business you will run day-to-day operations, modify the accounting software to accommodate changes in the tax code, and implement new labor contracts in the payroll system.Value enablement, in contrast, is “discretionary”: The business has a choice about each proposed software enhancement and major project, and about business expansion that drives the need to invest in additional infrastructure — for example, opening new branch offices.
  • Base spending for value maintenance on ratios. The cost of maintaining already-delivered value is the result of some basic drivers, such as the number of servers each sysadmin can support and the cost per seat for software licenses. Build your budget on these ratios, so you can defend the need to increase non-discretionary spending if the business situation calls for it.If you can, add another layer of sophistication by going beyond ratios, to break down costs into fixed and variable components.
  • Build continuous improvement into spending ratios. When you can, of course: You can’t build continuous improvement into per-seat software license costs. You can, in contrast, take steps to increase the server/sysadmin ratio, and you should, if for no other reason than to prevent complacency from seeping into your organization. Improving these ratios is how you shift spending from value maintenance to value enablement without reducing the value you maintain in the process.
  • Decide whether value-enabling spending is driven by capacity or demand. If you’re capacity driven, it means governance decisions are purely about allocating the staff you have available to work on software enhancements, major projects, and business expansion. The budget decision is about how much staff you have available to allocate.If your spending is driven by demand, it means the company decides what it will take on and you provide the right mix of employees and outside resources to take care of it. That, in turn, means you can’t budget without the company’s plan. It also means you have to be very good at the discipline of project cost estimation.
  • Apply the “walkaway rule” to your budget negotiations. For better or for worse, in most companies budgeting is a negotiation, not a collaboration (okay, I lied; it’s almost always for worse). One of the most basic rules of negotiation is that whoever is in a better position to walk away from the deal wins.In practical terms, this means agreeing to whatever cuts in your budget are proposed by the other side, making two points clear in the process: (1) the business will have to do without something as a result of the cut; and (2) you won’t be the one in the headlights — the standard governance process will be the mechanism through which the company decides exactly what the business will have to do without. That’s what it’s for.

The only thing worse than having to play stupid games is losing stupid games you’re forced to play. You might as well play to win.