Agility is a big deal. As companies embrace digital transformation, we have stopped defending the old ways of doing business. Instead, we focus on making sure appropriate change occurs. We reorganize people, processes and technology to empower change and drive tangible results. Organizational agility matters now and is part of the business DNA.
In IT, we are used to thinking of agility in terms of the development team. Today, it means more. CIOs need to build and present an entire agile IT organization, which requires giving some serious thought to the way the organization works. We must move to a new IT operating model.
This sounds daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. To start putting more action behind all this talk of IT agility, CIOs have to lead our teams through some fundamental shifts:
- Automate everything you can so you can focus on the important stuff
- Learn to speak the business language and talk about outcomes
- Focus on what’s important, which isn’t the same as what’s urgent
Automate everything routine in your shop
IT departments continue to fall into the same trap. Traditionally, 70 percent to 80 percent of IT spending goes to maintenance and upkeep of legacy systems – keeping the lights on – and only 20 percent on innovation to move the business forward.
Most of us have operated under cost pressures, more in some industries than others. Operating with half the IT staff, or sometimes less, is the new normal and we shouldn’t expect that to change significantly – everyone across the entire business has to do more with less. However, the business needs IT to support new initiatives in order to grow. Therein lies the rub; with limited people and time, we can’t respond because we’re too busy keeping the lights on.
It’s time we dramatically shift the 80:20 ratio; until we do so, IT will be seen as just another cost center. CIOs need to lead our IT teams to root out our own manual, repeatable processes. All the routine, menial stuff that takes up valuable IT resources should be automated so that staff can tackle productive work that requires creativity and imagination, and moves the business forward.
If a company is just starting to automate IT processes, it’s typical to start with the simplest tasks like password resets and onboarding new hires. This makes sense; on average 25 percent of the helpdesk calls are password related. Resetting employees’ forgotten passwords is an easy problem for the helpdesk to fix, but it still takes time. Automate it.
Automating the simple tasks will deliver incremental improvements but, for maximum impact, tackle some of the messier stuff first. Automating complex, multi-step, highly manual activities that touch multiple people can more quickly deliver the agility needed. Routine changes, diagnostics, performance monitoring and incident resolution are a few places ripe for automation. Increasingly, machines are aware when something isn’t right.
Automation should start with the creation of work (incidents in the first place). Why can’t the infrastructure and end-user machines create the incident vs. a human having to do it? To take this a step further, why can’t an intelligent machine resolve the incident once it is received? All without human intervention.
The time we get back by automating everything that simply “makes systems work” affords IT departments the much-needed room to be agile and deliver business value.
Make sure your IT people can talk the talk
Most IT organizations struggle with talking in a language that speaks to business leaders. If IT sits down with the head of sales about a project and the question we ask is “What do you need us to do?” then we’ve become an order taker. We need to talk to stakeholders in their business terms and outcomes.
An agile IT organization needs people who have half their brain in IT and the other half in sales, marketing, finance or whichever line of business is sitting across the table. These IT people work with the business leaders to define the outcomes they are after. They seek to understand why something needs to change, not just how. This skillset is what separates leading IT organizations from the rest.
That may mean you need to hire a completely new staff. IT leaders need to shift their thought process and learn to communicate in the right language.
First, many IT organizations have created a culture of “no” that leads business users to bypass IT altogether. IT cannot be seen as the “no” man in the age of digital transformation. Second, an IT project that is on time and on budget is not enough; it also needs to be “on benefit”. IT needs to communicate this early and often to business leaders. We can’t just report that four projects went live this month. That falls in the “interesting, but not sure I really care” bucket. Our language needs to demonstrate that every dollar poured into IT drives a tangible business result, which could be faster revenue generation, profit margin growth or increased productivity. Whatever it is, IT needs to talk in terms of outcomes.
To help IT to start using the same vocabulary, one of my CIO peers started requiring all IT staffers to listen to quarterly earnings calls with analysts. That helped IT to understand the strategic goals of the business and to ask some poignant questions. It didn’t take long for this IT organization to start finding ways they could deliver results that not just align with business priorities but deliver business results.
Focus on what’s really important
Freeing up IT time allows us all to focus on the one thing that drives businesses forward and produces tangible results – innovation. As a country, Singapore already knows this. Earlier this year, the government added their S$19 billion Research Innovation Enterprise 2020 plan to its belt of national initiatives with the sole purpose to improve Singapore’s efficiency.
What’s truly important will be grounded in tangible business results; what’s not will waste valuable IT time and kill agility. It is critical IT recognize the difference. As IT staff become fluent in the business language and ask the right questions, what’s important will become easier to spot.
We also need to consider that there is a difference between what is important vs. what is urgent. Urgent is putting out fires, busywork or tasks IT staff tackle first because they are easier than the project list. But urgent requests that should only take a couple of minutes end up taking an hour. In our “Today’s State of Work: The Service Experience Gap” report, we found that 60% of managers spend more than 3 hours at work processing work emails, and that 84% of managers agree that the need to constantly monitor their email makes it difficult to drive tasks to completion. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we’re left wondering where all the time went.
Important work moves the business toward its desired outcomes. One of the easiest ways to distinguish between urgent and important tasks is to ask “how much value will it provide the business?” and “will it make a difference a week, a month, a year from now, five years?”
We’ve all had the seemingly “important” request that starts something like “Can you add a new field to a screen?” Of course we can, but does that really matter? Do we need to dedicate IT personnel to this? The answer is likely no because a year from now it won’t make a difference.
What’s stopping IT agility?
As CIOs, we’re focused on driving business outcomes and strategies for growth, efficiency and productivity. We see the value of migrating 6,000 apps to the cloud in the next three years. This type of project can be very stressful to the IT workforce, but it will deliver tangible business results. But a lot of IT staff view a project like this as a threat. What will they do after this? Will they still have a job when all these apps have moved to the cloud?
This is where many big, important changes die on the vine at the middle management layer. A CIO peer of mine who works at Fortune 500 Company ran into this exact situation. His cloud migration project had stalled, and there was always a steady drip of reasons why it was not moving. Turns out his middle managers’ pay grade was determined by how many people reported to them and perception was that migrating to the cloud would help the company’s margins but hurt them personally.
With people thinking that automation and technology will threaten job security, employees are less likely to adopt the vision of building an agile IT organization. At the McKinsey Innovation Forum in October, Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam spoke about how the workforce in general is becoming more fluid where technology is replacing tasks and job in the middle layer of the workforce.
However, he went to great lengths to further emphasize that there are plenty of good opportunities for the skilled worker. Therefore, as we continue building agile IT organizations and focus on delivering business results, we cannot overlook the legacy internal structures and processes that need to be addressed as well.
CIOs need to have patience, train our IT teams and get them past the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Bear in mind it’s not just fear of irrelevance that derails IT agility. Having the time to innovate and take risks in IT all in the name of better business outcomes sounds great, but what happens when an idea doesn’t work? IT folks need to know it is OK to fail and that mistakes will not be a capital crime. It’s the CIO’s job to give our teams a safety net.
Building an agile IT organization will not be easy. It will be uncomfortable at times, but it will be worth the effort. The agility we build into our organizations today will ensure IT does not become the order takers of tomorrow.
Jimmy Fitzgerald, Vice President, Asia-Pacific and Japan, ServiceNow