Process

Today's business environment places extraordinary demands on CIOs who are committed to playing a strategic role in the enterprise. Growing global competition, an increasing regulatory burden, market pressures for quarterly results, shrinking margins, and growing customer expectations are just some of the issues putting IT leaders at the center of business transformation. In trying to meet these ever-changing challenges, the CIO will encounter one constant: the resistance to change that is natural to individuals and organizations.

Overcoming this barrier can be a huge task, but CIOs can be comforted with the knowledge that planning and preparation can help clear the path to progress. Resistance to change has three heads, says Sean LaPlante, an enterprise IT consultant: "People, process, and technology." CIOs charged with envisioning and pursuing initiatives that will deliver value to every part of the enterprise must overcome barriers in all three of these dimensions - and be aware of their interplay - to be successful agents of change.

People Who Need People

A song from the 1964 musical Funny Girl asserts that "people who need people are the luckiest people in the world." A CIO confronted with resistance from staff, internal customers, or the executive team is unlikely to call it luck. In fact, one person interviewed for this article said facetiously that "if we could do away with people, change wouldn’t be a problem."

But the fact is that the CIO relies on people to effect change, which means effectively managing their suspicion of change. "Change is painful, political, and personal," says Elias VarVerazis, Vice President of Services at UNUM IT, an e-mail architecture consultancy. Most resistance to change comes from fear, especially fear of losing one's job, which is the first thing that comes to mind for most people when a mandate comes down from on high about new ways of doing business, especially if the dreaded word "efficiency" is used. "People feel that their jobs are on the line," says VarVerazis. "So you see a lot of hostility to change, especially at lower levels, where people think 'if they get more efficient, they'll need fewer of us.'"

The primary requirement for dealing with this reality is good communication, especially with IT staff. "Change always involves pain and suffering," says Henry Jenkins, Chief Technology Officer at the Keller Financial Group. "But the most painful initiatives are those where no one communicates the reason for the changes. People will work through the short-term pain if you show them the benefits of the change, but if you don't, if you implement one change after another with no explanation, very soon you end up losing trust - you’ve broken faith with your employees." The end result is an organization with an aversion to change, which is a recipe for stasis.

In this regard, today's CIO is likely to face a more difficult challenge than in the past because of the emphasis on cost savings that was the mantra for so many IT organizations in the 90s. "As the result of 10 years of squeezing the last dollar out of IT, everyone is terrified of getting outsourced or downsized," notes Peter Giannacopoulos, CEO of Myrmidon Networks, a security and disaster recovery consultancy. The result of this is not only fear, but often an inability to execute, for in some cases, too much talent was squeezed out along with the costs. The result can be a kind of paralysis in the face of business challenges.

"A lot of places today don't know how to execute at any level. The knowledge is too dispersed and very few people can see the big picture," says Giannacopoulos. "So they don't want to change anything. At the executive level they know there are new technologies that will help, but employees at lower levels are scared to do anything new. This is often a combination of fear, lack of empowerment, and poor compensation structures - the "5 percent a year" sort that makes people lazy. Without a supportive environment and the right incentives, there's no reason to take the kinds of risks that are necessary for business transformation."

This, of course, is where the CIO can make a huge difference. To start with, the CIO has to clearly communicate the big picture in a way that connects to the hopes and fears of everyone affected by change. "The CIO has to have a clear vision of the end in mind," says Jenkins, "and communicate that vision crisply, which includes specifying measurable results. If you can’t say what the outcome will look like, don't expect your staff to work it out."

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a CIO should keep in mind an old Sicilian aphorism: "Talk, you teach. Listen, you learn." Not only is feedback critical to developing and maintaining good processes, as discussed below, but the mere fact of being listened to empowers employees for change, as long as the listening is genuine; that is, as long as they can see results from their feedback.

Mark Lachance is president of M.E. Lachance & Associates, a business operations consultancy. He speaks of the surprising ROI that's possible from listening: "It's my experience that most IT people are really capable, but that too much of the time, when they speak up, they feel they get their heads shot off. A CIO who really listens, and who encourages feedback, even pushback, can get pretty much the equivalent of a new organization without any new investment in people, just by bringing out their full potential." But, he cautions, it doesn't happen overnight. "At one company I'm working with, we've discovered some real gems in the IT staff from this opening up, but it’s taken over a year for the changes to bring them to light."

The Process of Success

Process improvement is the phrase of the day in information technology. Best-practice collections like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) are rapidly gaining adherents, but too often these are treated as panaceas, rather than as the prescriptions for a lot of hard work that they really are.

A lot of the effort involved in successfully implementing new processes involves changing the corporate culture, which goes back to dealing with people. Perhaps the most important aspect of this is the utter necessity of honesty for building successful processes.

"Think of process as a box," says VarVarezis. "Input on the left, policy and procedure on top, tools on the bottom, and output on the right. But if you stop there, you have a dead process - you need to loop back from output to input, because there's no progress without feedback." As Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most responsive to change."

Responsiveness requires feedback, and feedback requires honesty, plus an environment that encourages openness. "The first thing I tell a client when building new processes is: no fingerpointing!" he says. Blame poisons process, and prevents failure from becoming the asset it can be in the proper environment. "If a failure results from an unforeseen risk, the documentation of that risk should be seen as a corporate asset. Failure to document should be seen as a failure of leadership."

This means that the focus in building a team should not be on the skill set of its individual members but the ability to work as a team, follow processes, and document results. This may seem counterintuitive, but the fact is that skills are merely the prerequisite for a position; they're the given. No matter how highly skilled people are, if they don't follow the process, if they don't provide the feedback built into the process, their skill does the enterprise no good, because it can't learn from their mistakes…or their successes. But a good CIO won't be content with waiting for feedback. Part of building good processes is good detective work. People should be encouraged to look beyond the metrics, not to assume that they measure accurately what needs to be measured. In the end, no measurement tool can substitute for knocking on doors or picking up the telephone to dig deeper, and a healthy skepticism about metrics is an important part of a CIO's toolkit.

"One of the biggest barriers to change is ignorance of a very simple equation," says Juan Jimenez, an ITIL/ITSM master practitioner. "OP + NT = VEOP. Old Process plus New Technology equals Very Expensive Old Process. If your metrics aren't right to begin with, more automation isn't going to help. You'll get the same incorrect result, only faster."

There is another, often-overlooked benefit of good process: the preservation of competitive advantage. Successful processes encapsulate hard-won knowledge about what works and what doesn't in a form that can't be taken along with a departing employee. "You can lose superstar performers to a competitor - sales, engineering, doesn't matter - but when they get there and try to replicate their success, they can't," says VarVarezis. "They can't because it depended on the support they got from your processes, which is what made them effective."

Finally, although process improvement is usually, and rightly, seen as accelerating business success, there are situations where acceleration is not the prime benefit. "Some people see these process frameworks as impeding business, slowing things down," says Jenkins. "And that's sometimes the case, and that's sometimes what you need. It's a matter of perspective. You can say that the brakes on a car are there to slow you down, but in reality, they're intended to give you more control. That's what good process does." Mark Lachance agrees. "One of the enemies of success with software in particular can be enthusiasm, approaching a new product with an almost religious fervor. I often hear people say that they "believe" in a product. The structure and insistence on measurable results imposed by process is a good antidote to that."

Consider Technology Wisely

As noted earlier, enthusiasm about technology can easily sidetrack an organization, whether it comes from IT personnel or end users. The growth of what Gartner calls "consumerization" - the penetration of consumer technologies such as instant messaging and desktop search tools into the corporate IT environment - is a case in point.

While some IT managers welcome the fact that the average user is becoming more technically savvy, and see the benefits from adapting to their demands, there are industries in which it pays to be risk-averse. "Consumerization is a huge problem with highly regulated industries such as the financial sector," says Jenkins. "The demands of compliance, privacy, and information security mean that IT in such companies can't possibly be as adaptive as the lifecycle of consumer electronics. In those cases, you really have to set things up to take change away from employees."

Again, communication is critical. Just telling salespeople that they can't download customer lists into their iPhone isn't enough. "You have to make them understand that the possible additional revenue they'll bring in from increased efficiency won't even come close to paying the fines imposed by the government, or by a court, if customer information is compromised."

A more common challenge is gaining a competitive advantage from technology that is increasingly commoditized. "In any mature technology, you can make your business work with any of a number of choices," says Giannacopoulos. "What you need to be able to do is leverage the same technology everyone else has in a more intelligent way."

He notes that, as discussed earlier, good processes are a part of this. But he also notes that a CIO will do well to find a good system architect and architectural team - big-picture thinkers in the technical sense, who can help translate the CIO's vision into the technical underpinnings of success using the same technologies available to competitors. "It's hard to find such people, but the effort pays off big time when you do," says Giannacopoulos. "If you don't have a good IT architecture, it's hard to leverage the technical expertise of your IT staff effectively. If you do, that's what delivers big cost savings and business advantage."

Finally, a word about the technology budget. There are a host of factors that go into determining technology spending - books have been written on the subject. But Mr. VarVarezis offers a very simple high-level guide for budgeting. "Make the determination of where availability ends and disaster recovery starts the guiding force for your budget." Keeping the budget realistic (do you really need five nines?) avoids turning the IT department into a victim of unrealistic expectations. People who feel their efforts are effective and appreciated are more productive, and that's a recipe for success.