Today I will expand upon the introduction in my last post to the topic of ‘unwritten rules’ as they pertain to Business-IT Maturity.
First a reminder – the Business-IT Maturity model I’ve discussed from various angles since starting this blog last October addresses ‘two sides of the coin’, those being Business Demand maturity(the business appetite for IT enablement) and IT Supply maturity(the ability to satisfy that demand in a safe, secure, predictable, efficient and effective manner. There are unwritten rules that impact the supply side (I provided some examples in the previous post), and others that impact the demand side. Given the interdependencies between IT demand and supply, rules on either side that drive dysfunctional behavior frequently impact the other side – often in a vicious cycle. For example, “IT is a necessary overhead cost to be minimized” is a very common demand side ’unwritten rule’ that dramatically limits IT performance and business value. You can imagine an environment that behaves according to such a rule, compared with one where the rule is, “IT is a business investment to be leveraged, that can provide significant opportunities for competitive advantage.”
Of course, the reality is that IT is both a cost to be minimized, and an investment to be leveraged, and a good IT portfolio classification scheme helps differentiate these, and strong IT portfolio management models and governance practices reinforce the desired behaviors around each investment class. However, if an unwritten rule is predominantly “IT is a cost to be minimized,” it is unlikely that business executives will invest their time and energy in implementing and sustaining the kinds of IT portfolio management and governance that will create real business value. i.e., the ‘unwritten rule’ becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and IT leaders must find a way to break the unwritten rule and replace it with something more productive.
Another unwritten rule common to Business Demand is, “Big systems development initiatives such as ERP implementations are IT projects.” Today, most enterprises have learned the lessons around this rule, and any seasoned CIO will push back and not collude with such behaviors. There is also a common unwritten rule on the supply side, “We accept any and all IT requests from the business.” You can imagine (and have probably seen) the kinds of value-limiting activities and behaviors created by this type of unwritten rule. You can also begin to see the kinds of systemic behaviors and vicious cycles that surface from these unwritten rules.
As you can see, the combination of the demand side rule, “IT is a cost to be minimized” (a typically Level 1 and low Level 2 Business-IT maturity rule) and the supply side, “All orders are good orders” (a typical Level 1 and low Level 2 rule) leads to low value activities being willingly worked by constrained supply resources, yielding low business value from IT investments, and stealing capacity away from potentially higher value opportunities. These dynamics reinforce the sense that IT is a cost to be minimized.
Effective IT leaders must be able to surface and understand the unwritten rules that drive both IT demand and supply behaviors, and must create interventions (education and awareness building, changes to governance mechanisms, and so forth) to re-shape the unhealthy rules into ones that are value-accretive as opposed to value-limiting. We will drill further into this topic in subsequent posts.
Filed under: Change Management, Demand Maturity, IT Management, IT Maturity, Supply Maturity Tagged: | Business-IT Maturity, Demand Maturity, IT governance, IT portfolio management, Supply Maturity, unwritten rules
