Before continuing our search for ways IT can do more with less, some business:

• My new book, Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World is ready for purchase. For the time being, you can only buy it from IS Survivor Publishing (www.issurvivor.com). You’ll find a discount from the $13.95 list price that won’t be available from the commercial booksellers.

• Participants in our recent seminars — on IT leadership and how to identify and address organizational performance issues — gave us very favorable comments. If you’d like to bring either seminar in-house for your IT leadership team, let us know.

• Market research: We based the organizational performance seminar on a model we use in our consulting business that includes 137 factors and their inter-relationships. Because several participants asked to license the course materials for their in-house use we’re exploring ways to make the model available to a wider audience. Among the options: (1) Provide the course materials in PDF format for a license fee; (2) package the model as a set of visual diagrams linked to a navigable Access database; and (3) publish the diagrams, glossary and other material in book form.If you’re interested, please let us know which form would be of greatest interest, and what you think a fair price would be (use [email protected] for mail on this subject).

Thanks! And now, on with the show.

You’ve been asked, which is to say told, to “do more with less.” You controlled your initial impulse, which was to apply direct pressure to the speaker’s carotid arteries with your thumbs. You successfully left the room having made enough of a commitment to get by politically but not such a specific commitment that you’re politically vulnerable.

Now you have to do something. Where do you look for savings?

Last week’s column looked at the relationship between IT and the rest of the business — probably the single most important factor driving IT effectiveness, and the one that lets you achieve anything else of any importance. That relationship is the informal half of what drives strong alignment between IT and the rest of the business. The formal half is IT governance — how the enterprise makes decisions about its use of information technology. As with the business/IT relationship, IT governance can’t help you do more with less, but it can help you achieve more with less, which is at least as good and probably better.

One area of opportunity has already been mentioned here a few times: Screening out any and all requests for IT effort for which the requesting business area has committed neither to the benefit nor to providing the business staff required for the effort to succeed. This takes guaranteed failures off IT’s to-do list, a sure way to achieve more with the same IT staffing.

That’s screening out guaranteed failures. Here are a few other notions for improving IT governance that can help you make sure every IT effort is devoted to achieving something worthwhile for the business:

• Stratify the process: Create separate funding and staffing budgets for non-discretionary maintenance, small enhancements, and large initiatives. Set priorities within each group, not across all groups.The alternative is trying to decide whether updating the tax tables in your payroll system is more or less important than investing in a supply chain optimization initiative that has the potential for a 438% return on investment. If you’ve ever been in this kind of discussion you know just how pointless it is.

• Think of small enhancements as low-risk, high-return opportunities, not annoying distractions. IT rarely fails at 30 hour requests, which is why these are low risk. As for the high return, I’ve seen examples where (for example) three hours of IT effort have eliminated three hours a day of business staff effort.There are those who claim there is no business benefit unless a headless corpse is tossed out the door. There are also those who claim the earth is flat and the Apollo missions were special effects frauds. Ignore them all.

  If it needs saying: A business that ignores any process improvement that doesn’t eliminate headcount is a business that tells its employees it doesn’t care about streamlining its processes, only about eliminating headcount. It’s that simple: You either care about running your business better or you don’t. If you don’t, there’s a deeper root cause for the company’s profitability problems than IT governance.

• Re-label the results of the prioritization process. Most companies have three possible results: Yes, no, and maybe. Eliminate maybe and yes, but for different reasons.Maybe is the worst of all possible answers. It wastes everyone’s time for no good reason other than decision-makers lacking the courage to make decisions. Yes is a problem because it’s meaningless. Unless an effort has been scheduled, with the start and finish dates based on the availability of all resources needed for success, it won’t happen.

  The only two outcomes for any request should be no and on the schedule.

  Well, not quite — there is a third outcome which is entirely valid: “This requires more work.”

Want a good way to not make decisions about IT priorities? Divide requests into needs, wants, and desires, only funding needs. It’s one of those notions that’s superficially plausible but which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Why? Go back to that supply chain initiative with the 438% ROI. Does the company need to do it? No, it’s manufacturing and selling products now, and making money doing so. Should the company do it anyway, even though it doesn’t need to? Well, yes, of course it should.

Businesses don’t have needs, wants and desires. Those are consumer responses — the psychological notions of individual human beings. A business isn’t just like a person only bigger. It’s an entirely different kind of animal.

At least I hope that’s true. Otherwise, just as business make decisions through a consensus of key decision-makers, readers of this column will make decisions on their own priorities based on votes taken by their internal organs. I imagine the stomach, intestines, pancreas, liver and spleen forming a voting block to get their way.

Maybe that’s what people mean when they say they base their decisions on their gut.

As American businesses continue in their drive to make themselves emaciated and unpleasant … lean and mean, that is … IT frequently finds itself caught in the cross-hairs. The Kafkaesque dialog that often ensues is filled with traps for the unwary, and in particular with veiled accusations for which all possible responses are admissions of guilt.

“Like the rest of the company, IT has to do more with less,” is one of those accusations hidden in a statement. You’re stuck: Claim you’re already running as lean as possible and you’ll lose your status as a team player, not to mention your credibility. Offer to cut expenses while delivering more and you’re admitting IT has a bloated budget that desperately needs trimming. How can you walk this tightrope?

Start by mastering the art of ManagementSpeak. You need to practice some doubletalk that gets you out of the conversation. The specifics are left as an exercise for the reader. Use your ingenuity.

Once you’re out of the room with your skin intact, you need a plan. Where exactly should you look as you try to “do more with less”? That’s what this and the next several columns are for.

To organize the search we’ll use the IT Effectiveness Framework and performance factor maps my consulting company, IT Catalysts, Inc., developed to assess and analyze IT organizations. The complete framework includes 137 factors that drive IT performance, divided into four categories: Business alignment, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance. We aren’t going to walk through all 137 factors, only those with the best chance of getting you where you need to go. (The process of obtaining permission from IT Catalysts to use the framework was, if you’re wondering, a Smeagol/Gollum-like conversation. Luckily, Smeagol won.)

Start with business alignment, the buzzwordy version of, “How IT knows what it should be working on.” It covers trendy-sounding subjects like “governance” and more prosaic ones like budgeting.

It also includes the relationship between IT and the rest of the business — the single most important determinant of IT effectiveness. One piece of the relationship is simple — is it good, bad, or someplace in between. If it isn’t good, make it good: Nothing else has higher priority than that.

The other aspect of this factor is how it is formally defined: Is IT supposed to be a collaborative partner with the rest of the business, a supplier for whom the rest of the business constitutes “internal customers,” or an information utility, supplying the core IT infrastructure and applications used by embedded business-unit IT organizations to satisfy business requirements?

You need clarity on this point. If you’re supposed to be a supplier to the rest of the business (or an information utility, which amounts to being a wholesale supplier) you can stop. This isn’t a particularly good model, but if the business insists on it you need to start running IT like a real business … as a profit center. Instead of doing more with less, focus on your catalog of products and services and how you price them. Supplier/customer relationships get into the most trouble when IT can’t charge for its services, because then the true relationship isn’t one of supplier and customer. It’s more master and slave, or maybe government agency and constituency — the connection between supply and demand has been severed.

If, on the other hand, the business is more enlightened and IT is a full collaborator, you might have opportunities. Review last year’s projects. If some failed for reasons external to IT … for example, because the affected business areas weren’t able to supply the project staff needed to achieve success … then improving IT governance, using the screening process introduced a couple of weeks ago, will reduce waste by eliminating the initiatives most likely to fail.

This is your single best shot at doing more with less: You can claim success by simply doing less. Which is to say, if you cut out all the effort devoted to initiatives doomed to failure in the first place you can cut your budget without reducing the value you deliver. Who knows? Maybe you can even squeeze in a few more projects that can succeed.

Sure, it’s smoke and mirrors, but who cares? Few business executives are lexicographic purists. They won’t care about the difference between doing more with less and achieving more with less.

And anyway, what you achieve is what matters.