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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

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.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

You say the lean manufacturing consultants have been through and squeezed all the fat out of the production departments? You say the business process re-engineering department went through the rest of the company and squeezed a bunch more? You say the CEO laid off a thousand productive employees to send a message to Wall Street, and now, everyone else is working sixty hour weeks just to keep everything running?

And you say the executive team woke up to discover another company is eating your lunch because they’ve modernized their product line while yours has been coasting for five years? And there’s nobody left to develop a competitive product because you’ve discovered “lean and mean” really means emaciated and unpleasant?

Is that what’s troubling you, bunky?

You aren’t the only one. In one form or another, lots of companies are discovering that “lean and mean” means there’s no spare capacity to deal with unexpected situations, let alone the expected situation of the business’s need to continually evolve to adapt to a changing, competitive marketplace.

CIOs are in a sensitive position, because while IT experiences financial pressure in good times as well as bad, application development and support is an expected component of even the thinnest IT budget. The problem is, it’s always about business change, not software delivery, and when the desired business change fails to occur, everyone will blame IT no matter what actually went wrong.

What’s a CIO to do? In a word, influence.

Which is to say, the CIO can’t do anything other than suggest a solution for the enterprise, which is to stop squeezing quite so hard. In the era of lean and mean, companies need to make explicit the business change budget.

Build this into the IT governance process. Any project proposal should pass five filters before it’s even considered for scheduling:

  • It must have a business sponsor. Even better — establish a one-hour business sponsor “process briefing.” (Whatever you do, don’t call it a training session or nobody will show up.) Even executives and managers who have sponsored projects in the past should receive the briefing once, just before the next project they sponsor, because this is a new set of ground rules.
  • The affected business areas must sign up for the claimed benefits. Making IT commit to business benefits is as ridiculous as it is common.
  • Every area that will incur costs must sign up for the cost estimates related to their part of the change effort. IT must sign up for the cost of software delivery, of course. The affected business areas must sign up as well, for all of the costs they’ll incur related to the change. That includes the cost of assigning staff to the design effort, just as much as it includes the cost of remodeling, should a change program require that.
  • The proposal must have a staffing plan, both for IT and for the affected business areas. During the screening process it’s enough to express this in terms of number of people and percent commitment, but before the project is allowed to launch, these abstract budgets must be replaced with names.
  • The proposed project must at least be consistent with business strategy; better, it should help advance achievement of the strategy in a realistic way. (Note that any manager with two brain cells to rub together knows how to write the obligatory paragraph asserting the strategic relevance of whatever pet project he or she is proposing, up to and including replacing the tires on his or her car.)

What does this all have to do with overcoming leanness and meanness? Go back to the middle, where it talks about signing up for the cost estimates. For this to work, business managers will have to budget enough staff to support their business change efforts. “But all that will happen is that the CEO and CFO will cut that out of their budget,” I can hear you object.

Yes, that might happen, especially in the era of lean and mean. You can’t prevent that. No process in the world can overcome bad executive business judgment. What you can do is put a spotlight on the issue. It’s one thing to say, “We expect you to find enough efficiencies to run your area with 5% less budget than last year.” It’s quite another to say, “We expect you to execute a change program with no staffing.”

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