I posted yesterday on how IT organizational mission changes with business-IT maturity – both in terms of satisfying an evolving demand and in shaping that demand. In other words, as form follows function, organizational capabilities (and corresponding organizational design) follows IT organizational mission. Typically, a change in IT capabilities or organization implies a need for, or at least a change in the future state vision of the IT organization.
Having said that, I’ve worked with IT leaders who are not proponents of IT vision. I can sympathize with their perspective, having seen lots of time wasted in “visioning” workshops, and lots of poor or ineffective work done in the name of “visioning.” On the other hand, I’ve found that good visioning can be an incredibly powerful way of clarifying and enrolling organizational members and stakeholders in organizational change and transformation. So, let’s try to understand the differences between “visioning as a waste of time” and “powerful visioning that moves mountains.”
Visioning as a Waste of Time
The visioning efforts I’ve seem that don’t work typically make a couple of mistakes. First, they confuse “vision” with “vision statement, “ moving quickly from the former to the latter - and in the process, reducing the vision to a paragraph or two. I believe that in order to motivate change, organizational members need much more than a “vision statement.” They need images that complement the words. They need detail behind the words. IT professionals in particular, with their frequent low tolerance for ambiguity, need to understand what the future state will look like, feel like and how it will operate. They need to know the implications for themselves - words in a vision statement rarely, if ever, achieve this.
Second, the visioning process tends to involve too limited a subset of the organization – typically the leadership team. This is o.k. (in fact, probably essential) as a starting point, but it’s not an acceptable ending point. The leadership team, having gone through the debates and discussions that led to the vision statement really “get it.” They then take the vision statement, laminate it into handy pocket cards, or blow it up into posters, and somehow believe that everyone who sees the poster, or carries the laminated card will also “get it.”
Powerful Visioning that Moves Mountains
Fortunately, the two common errors above are strongly related, and can be solved by addressing both simultaneously. So imagine that the leadership team debates over a couple of sessions to arrive at a high level description of the future state vision – perhaps expressed through a strawman vision statement supported by a handful of PowerPoint slides or other artifacts that enrich that vision. They now describe this to the IT organization, encouraging discussion and clarification.
The IT leadership team then charges the organization with “fleshing out” the vision. There are many ways to do this, but for example, ask for one group to write and produce a short stage play (or video) about “a day in the life of an IT professional in 2012.” Ask another group to meet with business stakeholders and to come back with a “voice of the customer” findings – what our customers would like to see from the IT organization five years from now. Ask another group to come up with a number of role plays exploring various scenarios, such as identifying new opportunities, creating solutions, managing solutions and retiring solutions, again looking out five years. Another group is tasked with writing a hypothetical Fortune Magazine cover article that will appear in five years describing how IT capability led to the phenomenal success of the enterprise.
These groups are brought back together 2 to 3 weeks later for an off-site session where the deliverables (role plays, videos, Fortune article, etc.) are played out and discussed. At the end of this type of process, you will have the majority of the organization (and some key stakeholders) really bought into the vision; you will have a vision that is infinitely richer and more detailed that anything that could ever be expressed in a vision statement; you will have a much more comprehensive sense of what will be needed to realize the vision – the gaps to be closed. From this, you can begin to create a transformation plan for, dare I say, “Reaching level 3″ business-IT maturity.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it can be. The big question is, how would your enterprise benefit from a Level 3 IT capability? What would happen if a Level 3 business demand cannot be satisfied by IT supply? What other options realistically exist to meet that demand? While transformational work is difficult, it can also be exhilarating. And the alternative may be catastrophic – both for the IT organization and for the business it serves.
Filed under: Change Management, Demand Maturity, IS Management, IT Management, Next Generation IT, Supply Maturity
