The Journey Toward IT Success Begins with a Single Step

By Glenn Magala, CIO, Marvel Entertainment

The job of the chief information officer (CIO) is rife with contradictory challenges. Make sure the servers are running, but keep an eye on future technology. Deploy new capabilities, but make sure they are aligned with the business. Focus on making IT great, but develop relationships throughout the company.

It's enough to make your head spin.

But I maintain that CIOs can do all these contradictory tasks, and IT can expand its sphere of influence beyond building systems and keeping the servers running. You can walk a thousand miles.

The fundamental question is, how do you make the shift from technologist to "businessologist"? How do you inspire your IT people to be fluent and knowledgeable about business issues? To create change and process enhancements on the business side? Simple. You lay out the journey.

When I was CIO at another company, our data center was a mishmash of legacy equipment. One day I brought my staff in and told them we were going to migrate everything to a Linux-based enterprise and essentially make the data center a "black box." By thinking of the data center as a black box, we sidestepped the impulse to explain its inner workings to the rest of the company. But it also took our minds out of writing systems and into the idea of deploying business solutions. From that moment on, every step we took—everything we did—built upon the previous step and focused on the goal.

Part of our goal in creating the black box was to eliminate custom applications. That meant we had to understand how every single business process fit into the box. If it didn't fit, we would discuss creative adaptation so that their business would fit inside the box. Or we would discover a simple—perhaps not technological—way to solve the problem at hand. And by having that discussion, we transform an IT person who is focused on Oracle applications into a business solutions provider. They start talking about purchase orders, not Oracle Purchasing. We have business discussions, not system discussions.

It's not always easy to transform IT people into businesspeople. IT people tend to be analytical, which is good, but they can sometimes take it to extremes. They feel comfortable in the analytic world of IT, so they may be reluctant to go beyond that perspective. The challenge for leadership is to break through that reluctance. I recommend a two-step approach: first, hire people who exhibit interest in business challenges and opportunities, and then ask them to expand their horizons. If you bring in the right people, the rest will follow, as long as you don't waver in your approach. Don't put people in situations that set them up for failure—as with everything else, take it one step at a time. As the team becomes immersed, they become more excited (and more valuable employees).

Once you've gotten the IT team thinking about business, it's easier to improve your relationships with the business side. This involves two kinds of marketing: one in which you have direct control and another in which you have indirect control. With the first kind, you proactively build upon your successes with the business side by pointing them out. The second kind relies on viral marketing, in which the business side spreads the word on how much value a new capability brings. I'd much rather have an accounts receivable clerk tell senior management that their work is easier thanks to something IT did than to have to tell them myself.

There's an added benefit, too. Once you get IT communicating with business, you can start to get the various business sides communicating with each other. Just as IT may have operated as a silo, so too might the other groups. Use your newfound influence to bring them together to see where they may have common needs that technology can solve. Problems are opportunities for IT and the business to expand upon. The key is to look at them as challenges. If you can be an evangelist and get people excited, they will follow you anywhere, whether they're in IT or business. You create your momentum—just keep moving forward, one step at a time.