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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Most IT managers started reading in the first grade. So far as I can tell, most stop shortly after they’re hired for their first full-time position.

I’m no longer surprised, but am chronically disappointed in the response when I ask members of IT leadership teams what they read to stay informed about industry developments. The usual response? Embarrassed shrugs, punctuated by acknowledgement that Gartner is their primary … make that sole source of strategic IT insights.

You’re reading this right now, which makes you an exception. On behalf of all of us who write and publish, thank you.

But if you’re in management and especially if you’re in IT management, reading is just the ante. It won’t win you the pot.

As a reader you’re aware that “Digital” has become a noun. As a regular KJR reader you know that, whether noun or adjective, Digital is about turning new technologies into new business capabilities and turning those new business capabilities into competitive advantage.

Presumably you read more than just KJR, familiarizing yourself with specific Digital technologies that seem especially promising for your company. That’s what prepares you for conversations about using them to increase marketshare, walletshare, and mindshare.

As a regular KJR reader you’re an IT leader no matter what your job title or official position on the organizational chart is. If you weren’t, your eyeballs would be elsewhere. And so, a reminder: The most important difference between a leader and an individual contributor is that individual contributors succeed. Leaders build organizations that succeed.

It might be my fault. I named this e-letter Keep the Joint Running to embody the principle that, as put forth in the KJR Manifesto, before you can be strategic you have to be competent.

Keeping the joint running is no small thing. That doesn’t mean it’s enough. It’s necessary, but it isn’t sufficient.

Reading isn’t just for management. Reading is the difference between a data warehousing team actively promoting hyperscale “schema on demand,” data-lake repositories and wondering why IT management brought in outside consultants to make them happen.

It’s the difference between developers embracing microservices architectures and saying, “This is no different from what we used to do with COBOL copylibs,” while IT management brings in outside consultants to develop new applications built on a microservices foundation.

It’s the difference between IT infrastructure management advocating replacing the company’s MPLS-based WAN with an ISP-centric connectivity model, and figuring they’re meeting their SLAs so it’s all good while the CIO brings in an IT services firm to make it happen.

So reading isn’t just important for management. It’s everyone’s tool for staying current and not slowly sliding into irrelevance.

It’s everyone’s tool, and as an IT leader it’s up to you to encourage every member of your organization to use it … to recognize that being knowledgeable matters. Maybe not quite as much as competence, but close.

What does this encouragement look like?

Here’s one possibility: With the rest of the IT leadership team, settle on a handful of promising Digital technologies and parcel out responsibility for turning “promising” into either “important” or “never mind.”

Then, each IT leadership team member involves their staff in the process. For small and medium-size IT organizations this might mean reserving two hours in everyone’s time budget for this purpose — one hour to read and one hour for discussion. The desired outcome: A briefing on the technology, that (1) defines and explains what it is; (2) lists and describes the new or enhanced business capabilities the technology might make possible; (3) assesses the technology’s maturity and market readiness; and (4) sketches an adoption roadmap that takes IT from incubation to integration.

And, by the way, once-and-done isn’t good enough. These briefs will be out of date as soon as they’re published, and new high-potential technologies are popping up all the time. Those who write the briefs are responsible for keeping them current.

Keeping track of Digital possibilities is a vital role for IT because the company’s org chart says it is. It is, that is, unless the CEO gave up on the CIO’s ability to provide this level of leadership and hired a chief digital officer to pick up the slack.

In our upcoming book, There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project, Dave Kaiser and I reserved a chapter to describe IT’s new role as business strategy leader. It’s a role that’s important for IT because a department that doesn’t know What’s Going On Out There is a department that neither receives or deserves respect from the rest of the business. It’s important for the rest of the business because …

Well if it isn’t, what’s all the fuss about Digital about?

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Aw, cripes. Another one?

I’m talking about the KonMari method, how annoying fads like this are, and the likelihood we’ll have to deal with someone who thinks it’s clever to put us on the defensive by pointing out our unenlightened failure to apply it to our day-to-day business decisions.

In case you’ve been spared from awareness of this silly bit o’ fluff, it’s a methodology, invented by one Marie Kondo, for simplifying your life. The way it works: (1) Gather together all of one’s belongings, one category at a time; (2) keep only those things that “spark joy”; and (3) choose a place for everything from then on.

I tried it. I kept only those furnishings that sparked joy. My garbage cans didn’t make the cut. Out they went, and by the way, have you ever tried to throw a garbage can in the garbage? It’s a tricky proposition.

I conducted this trial as a thought experiment — my garbage cans are still here — because seriously, people fall for nonsense like this?

Understand, I’m severely jealous. Armed with such a patently preposterous proposition and adroit self-promotion, Marie Kondo, at the ripe old age of callow, has millions of devotees while I, saddled with a self-imposed requirement of subjecting ideas to at least 15 seconds of close scrutiny before sharing them with you, enjoy a more limited level of celebrity.

But never mind my virology failures. This is a column about preparedness, as in how will you respond when someone proposes that as a manager you should be applying the KonMari method to your areas of responsibility?

The question might be directly KonMari. More likely, it will be KonMcKinsey in phrasing instead (“prune underperforming assets”).

And by the way, in both locutions the underlying concept isn’t entirely stupid. If the point is to take a fresh look at all your stuff and recognize what you have in your closets, shelves, and dressers that’s only there because keeping it is easier than throwing it out, then yes, throw it out.

Based on our experience moving from a suburban townhouse to a downtown condo with substantially less storage, I can tell you many of our possessions were items we had no particular need for, and that’s after we jettisoned several hundred books we’d already read and would never read again.

In your business responsibilities, you also have “assets” where taking a fresh look isn’t unreasonable. The problem is the ROI (return on investment) mentality that’s usually associated with such evaluations.

By “ROI mentality” I mean the requirement, drilled into the heads of most managers like some form of business trepanning, that anything for which we can’t prove a direct financial return provides only “intangible benefits.”

This is such a nice turn of phrase, don’t you think? Technically, it means the benefits are non-financial in nature. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s wording carefully constructed to put managers advocating for these things on the defensive. We aren’t differentiating between financial and non-financial benefits. We can see, touch, and feel things that are tangible. Intangible is just one short step from imaginary.

But … isn’t insisting that everything produces a profit a good idea?

In a word, no. In several words, organizations aren’t portfolios of uncoupled assets. They’re assemblages of interconnected functions … services if you’re in an SOA frame of mind … that turn raw materials, also known as inputs, into the organization’s work products, also known as outputs.

Management’s job is to make sure each asset — each service, sub-service, sub-sub-service, and microservice — works as it’s supposed to in order to keep the joint running. Asking whether each asset provides proper value and ROI just misses the point entirely.

So if someone tries to drag you through a KonMari or KonMcKinsey exercise, be ready to explain, as patiently as you can, that your organization is a mechanism constructed of interconnected components, not a bag of assets.

And while it’s entirely valid to ask if each component is performing as it should, it’s entirely invalid to ask if it’s contributing enough value to be worth keeping.

It is, if you like, like asking how my garbage cans contribute to my income.

On hearing the question, it will be so, so tempting to point out that the asker isn’t sparking joy in my life.

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