CIO’s Strategic Priorities for 2016 (part 1)
The Wall Street Journal recently held a strategic networking event for CIO’s during which a few working groups collaborated to define at a broad level what the top priorities for CIO’s would be for this year.
In many organizations two or three of these items, Leading Innovation, Getting Digital Right and (possibly, depending on the blocker) Integrating IT in the Business, are directly linked to a core cultural issue present in many environments.
The ‘IT’ function in most businesses is built on a strategy of stability and predictability. That is incredibly expensive and difficult to change in part because the strategy influences and often becomes the culture — so you now have people who thrive on, and are stable and predictable.
How many ideas have stalled due to one person or team taking the the “this is how we’ve always done it” stance ?
We’ve all experienced this first hand and let me just put it out there — it is really damned hard to get people who value predictability and stability to experiment with technology and to try different processes … things that are likely to fail in some way on the first attempt. Especially if there is a cultural fear of failure.
This is why many major changes in IT have come from outside the established authorities and teams. Cloud was rolled out largely by shadow IT, Linux was rolled out by rogue admins and so on. IT then had to figure out, at great cost, how to absorb those new things that came over the wall.
In order for CIO’s to tackle these problems they need to invest in a cultural strategy aligned with supporting these priorities. This should include embracing transparency, experimentation and failure inside their organizations .
CIO’s need to lower the barrier to change, regardless of who is driving the change.
Consider how hard is it for the average person in your organization to try out something different (tooling, applications, process changes etc) from the established organizational or team standards ?
Failure is also treated as a huge issue in most cultures. Even though many experiments and technologies fail on the first try. Leadership often places a huge burden on people to avoid failure and spend an enormous amount of capital (both money and brain power) in their organization to manage failure and treat the situation very negatively. Consequently they reap none of the benefits of those experiences.
What are the benefits of failure ? You can learn from failures (often more than from success) and build a culture of honesty and trust around those experiences, you just have to get your team to shift away from prizing predictability and playing the blame game politics often present in those dreadful ‘day after’ meetings most organizations have where everyone tries to assign blame.
Instead shift those meetings (which are beneficial) to a tone based on “what did we learn, how can we leverage this”, keep them fast moving and transparent, there is no need to harp on the obvious, and you will often find that the peer to peer relationships in your organization become much stronger as a result. People generally want to help, and are highly empathetic.
Failure in large projects (such as waterfall, or wholesale rip and replace) is very expensive, which is why the culture of fear has been built up around failure. The solution to this is to approach things in smaller increments and to introduce change on a constant basis — essentially training people to expect and adapt to change.
The tricky part about introducing change in most environments is balancing the investment in experiments and the pace of change they represent. Much like running every person or organization can sustain a different pace, but with training we can all improve that pace.
I constantly advocate give back time and smaller scale agile projects with my clients, so the investment and cost of failure is low. This also provides side benefits — people can learn and adapt in smaller increments and consequently it becomes easier to roll people onto and off of these projects to get ‘micro experience’ with the new technology, process or product being introduced.
If you start to shift your culture to be more technically agile and adaptable it will become monumentally easier to implement these three Strategic Priorities, and in my next post I’ll discuss developing a Data Strategy, which is the number one Strategic Priority for most CIO’s in 2016 and beyond.
