IT Organization Circa 2017

Following several consecutive posts on ‘improvement versus innovation,’ I want to take a shift of focus, and start talking about the tricky topic of ‘organizational culture’ as it relates to Business-IT Maturity.

Back in 1994, my colleague Peter Scott-Morgan wrote a remarkable book, “The Unwritten Rules of the Game.”  Having been both a student of, and consultant in organizational change, Peter’s book crystallized for me many aspects of what we call ‘organizational culture.’  My ongoing work with Peter, and our research into ‘The Hidden Logic that Drives Business Performance’ has helped me expand this understanding, and turn that knowledge into practical ways to understand and accelerate organizational change.

I will come at this subject in a series of posts (not necessarily consecutive – life is inherently messy!)  Let me start with the basic idea.  All organizations have rules, e.g., don’t put unapproved software on your PC; record your time worked in the official Time Management System; for projects over 20 hours in duration, follow the formal Project Management methodology; don’t give out your password to anyone, and so on.  They are known (at least, in theory!) documented, and there is an assumption that they will be followed (though the consequences of breaking them is often not clear, and frequently non-existent – I’ll come back to that point.)

There are also a host of ‘unwritten rules.’  These are equally known (often better known) than the written rules.  They have an important impact in driving behaviors.  One way of thinking about the unwritten rules is to imagine the following:  A good friend of yours, Bill, is hired into your IT organization.  You’ve know him for years, like him, trust him, and want to see him succeed.  What kinds of things would you tell him in his first week at your company?

“Bill, it’s important here to be actually seen at the monthly town hall meetings.  These are webcast to your desktop, but you should try to make it down to the conference center and be seen.  Come up with some good questions to ask the CIO in the Q&A session.   Try to get on project sponsored by sales and marketing, and stay away from ‘corporate’ projects – they go on forever, and won’t help your promotion prospects!  Don’t obsess over the time management system – make up the numbers at the end of the week, and never record hours as ‘bench time.’  Meetings never start on time and always run over, so don’t break your neck to get there on time – you’ll be sitting around kicking your heels.  Anne’s on a mission to get something she calls ‘Enterprise Architecture 2.0′ into everything we do, but don’t take too much notice of it – she’s always coming up with some new ‘flavor of the month’ mission!  Just keep you head down, nod, and watch what happens.  Usually her ideas fade away pretty quickly, and I think she’s about to retire anyway.  And, Bill, most important is that to get on in this organization, you need lots of people reporting to you.  Just look at the IT leadership team – Fred and Mary have the largest organizations, and they have the most power and influence over what gets done.  Anne and Cedric have small groups – nobody really listens to them!”

You get the idea – I’m sure you can identify many ‘unwritten rules’ just like these in your own organization – they are powerful drivers of behavior – they are deep seated – and most important, if a change you are trying to introduce is incompatible with the unwritten rules, the change will probably fail unless you work to change those rules.

Think about some unwritten rules in your own organization, and some major change that is underway – can you identify some potential disconnects between those rules and the planned change?  I’ll get deeper into this topic next week.