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Dave Teleki wrote in to say, “Something’s been nagging me about your phrase ’emaciated and unpleasant’, your replacement for ‘lean and mean’, and I have now figured out what it is.

“‘Emaciated’ is just a bit too Latinate and abstract. And ‘unpleasant’ is this year’s contender for understatement of the decade.”

Mr. Teleki doesn’t claim to have the ideal alternative, although one of his suggestions, “starved and rabid,” does have some promising characteristics.

So we’re gonna have us a contest. Send your synonyms for “lean and mean” to letters@issurvivor.com. The deadline is July 26, 2004. We’ll feature the winner as the ManagementSpeak for a future column, and the winner will receive a free copy of Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World as a prize.

The opinion of the judge … that would be me … is final. There’s no appeal, and I don’t enjoy duck hunting.

And no, the first runner up will not receive two copies.

Speaking of lean and mean, I’m getting bored writing about how to do more with less. That’s been the subject of the last six columns, and there are at least another fifty to go. Let me know if you’d like more; that will influence how often I add to the collection.

But before we leave the subject, the whole topic of organizational efficiency is worth a bit of inspection, because it’s something lots of executives — business as well as CIOs — get wrong. Here’s the problem:

Every business has a strategic theme — an underlying focus. Some strategic themes are overt, stated, and actually guide action. Others are window-dressing — covers for the unstated strategy that really guides action.

There are sixteen strategic themes to choose from: Product, customer, market, utilization, technology, sales/marketing method, distribution, natural resources, size and growth, return and profitability, shareholder value, the deal, amoeba, Charybdis, wait-’em-out, and find a buyer. (My list began with the ten themes provided by Michel Robert in his excellent Strategy Pure and Simple, (McGraw-Hill, 1993) to which I added six very common unstated strategies not covered by Mr. Robert). Of them, maybe six require efficiency as a core focus.

This isn’t to say efficiency is unimportant in companies pursuing other strategies. Of course it is. But when goals conflict, a utilization-driven company will choose efficiency at the expense of product excellence where a product-driven company will make the opposite decision.

Some business executives understand this point and use it to create competitive differentiation and advantage. Others fail to do so. They’re the ones who, when asked which of the three most common themes is their company’s driving force (product innovation, customer intimacy, or operational efficiency) respond, “All three.” It’s a paradox: Claiming they want a disciplined organization, they themselves are too undisciplined to make an essential choice.

And it is an essential choice. Certainly, a company driven by product innovation can’t afford to get sloppy or it will lose money on every one of its innovative products. But a company that must choose between spending more to improve a product and spending less to price more competitively needs to know which of the two is the right decision. The too-frequent answer is to decide on a case-by-case basis, which is always true and is also always ducking the issue, because every employee in the company needs to know whether the company competes on features or price.

Which brings us to IT. Even some business executives who have otherwise mastered the art of choosing and focusing on a single strategic theme then turn to IT and forget all about it. The company might be driven by an emphasis on customer relationships, but IT needs to be leaner and meaner.

Well, okay, that makes sense, so long as the management of customer relationships doesn’t depend on the use of information technology. Otherwise it’s as if a marathon runner was to say, “I run on my feet. Why should I care about my knees?”

The answer, in both cases, comes from a very old song: “The ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone. The shin bone’s connected to the knee bone.”

Since IT is connected to every bone, aimlessly cutting the IT budget isn’t just bad business.

It’s bad physiology.

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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 seminars@issurvivor.com 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.

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