Monthly Archives: April 2010

Influcencing Change In Your IT Operating Model


My last post, “Business-IT alignment – The Relationship Dimension” drew some interesting and even passionate commentary.  In particular, one frustrated commenter (someone in a Relationship Management role) pleaded, “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”

I’ve posted numerous times on aspects of Organizational Change Management (see link for examples) but perhaps it’s time to revisit this perennial puzzle.

Change Management – The Quintessential Misnomer!

Actually, I think that the term “Organizational Change Management” is a terrible misnomer – change can’t be “managed” in the ways that people and projects can.  It can be “inspired”, “led”, “facilitated”, or it can “subverted” and “rejected,” but it can’t be managed.  Also, for IT folk, the term is too close to “change management” – that technical stuff associated with ensuring that changes to a system are implemented in a controlled manner.

I prefer the term “Change Leadership” – with the important caveat that we are all leaders when it comes to changes we’d like to see.  If it’s a change we don’t know is needed, or we would like to see it not happen, then it is down to others to “lead us into the light” and get us on board with the change.  Either way, it’s a leadership issue.  That’s why I loved my most recent commenter’s plea – “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”  This is one relationship manager who recognizes his role in leading change!  (And who is not afraid to ask for help in filling that role!)

So Much Known, So Little Applied!

The big irony for me is that so much is known about and written about Organizational Change, and that we all have many years of first-hand experience trying to change our own behaviors or those of friends or family members, and yet most organizations are so completely inept at it!  There are books on change dating back to the early 1940′s (see, for example Kurt Lewin’s work), and a current search on Amazon.com yields 11,860 titles!  And, according to Google, there are currently 191,000 Blogs on the topic!  Clearly, the domain is fraught with subtleties and complexities.

Why Are IT Professionals So Inept at Organizational Change?

OK, so that’s a deliberately inflammatory question and a massively sweeping generalization – but from my personal experience in a 40-year IT career, it’s generally true.  I think it has to do with the characteristics of the IT profession that draw people to it – tangible, finite, project oriented.  IT professionals take highly ambiguous situations and ultimately reduce them to zeros and ones!  I’m not sure which is ‘chicken’ and which is ‘egg’ (i.e., do people good at driving out ambiguity gravitate to IT, or is it a learned behavior by IT professionals?) but I find that IT folk don’t like ambiguity.  And yet leading change means living with ambiguity.  IT professionals like plans, with beginnings, middles and ends – with defined deliverables and clear milestones.  Organizational change has none of these characteristics.  It is about people, not systems or bits and bytes.  It is about politics and influence, not routines and processes.

So, with such a plethora of research and written wisdom, what can I hope add to this body of work?  My goal (in a short series of posts) is to highlight the most useful Organization Change Leadership Model I have come across, and try to simplify and illustrate it with real examples from the world of IT management.  I’ll also point you to the excellent Change Management Blog.

Kotter’s Change Model – And It’s Potential Flaws

Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter has researched and written extensively on organizational change and has articulated an 8-Step Change Model.   (See his excellent HBR article “Why Transformation Efforts Fail.”  Also, the invaluable MindTools web site has this excellent summary of the Kotter Change Model.)

First, an important caveat.  To my point about the misnomer of “Change Management”, the Kotter model  implies linearity and assumes predictability and manageability of the change processes.  I don’t believe it should be interpreted or used this way.  In the immortal wisdom of Jerry Weinberg, “The project actually started long before it was officially declared ‘a project’.”  So has the organizational change typically ‘started’ before anyone gets too involved in planning how to drive it or, at least, to steer it!

In the last 15 years or so, a more organic and emergent view of organizational change has surfaced, leveraging chaos and complexity theory.  See, for example, Wanda J. Orlikowski and J. Debra Hofman’s “An Improvisational Model of Change Management: The Case of Groupware Technologies.”

I don’t see these emergent models as alternatives to the more mechanistic models, but as refinements that help to interpret and apply them – i.e, organizational change should be planned, but the plans continuously revised in the light of emergent behaviors.  And sometimes the emergent behaviors actually precede the recognition of the need for organizational change.  For example, many IT organizations today are trying (and failing!) to leverage social networking (typically around Microsoft‘s SharePoint).  At the same time, many members of the IT organization are participating in a number of social networks – both within their company and with external communities (e.g., FaceBook, LinkedIn, Plaxo).  So, while IT leaders are trying to “manage” a social network initiative (i.e., planned, formally managed), the reality is that social networking is already happening, but in an unplanned and emergent way.  If the planned efforts could understand and leverage the emergent activities, there is a better chance that social networking could be “steered” towards improved outcomes for the IT community and for the company.

My next post will pick up on the Kotter Change Model and begin to illustrate it with real world war stories and examples.

Image Courtesy of Management Excellence

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Business-IT Alignment – The Relationship Dimension


Much has been written about “Business-IT Alignment” over the years.  Alignment can refer to Strategy – the degree to which IT strategy and business strategy are aligned.  (This, of course, is both ‘old news’ and yet often not the case in practice.  And there’s one school of thought that says there’s no such thing as IT strategy – it’s only business strategy with IT implications.)

Alignment can also refer to Structure – IT capabilities are structured to align with business structures and needs.  But there’s a crucial ‘third leg’ to the business-IT alignment stool, and that is the alignment of relationships that sit between business units and IT capabilities.

The Crucial Relationship Manager Role

Many IT organizations have created a role that bridges the business and IT.  Rarely actually called “Relationship Managers”, this role represents IT to the business and the business to IT. I’ve posted on this role before – see, for example The IT Relationship Manager’s Role in Expanding Business-IT Capability,  and From Supply-Constrained to Value-Constrained IT Business Model, and IT Maturity and the Role of the Relationship Management.  Sometimes called an IT Account Manager, or Business-IT Director, or some-such, the role is primarily responsible for ‘demand shaping‘ – stimulating an appetite for high value demand, and suppressing appetites for low value demand.  Sometimes, people in this Relationship Manager Role are effectively mini-CIO’s or Business Unit CIO’s – leveraging shared IT infrastructure (and often leveraging common applications and enterprise systems) but taking care of business unit-specific IT needs.

Relationship Alignment

There are at least three dimensions along which Relationship Managers can align with their business partners.  The first two dimensions are pretty obvious and generally handled well, but the third dimension is trickier and often not well addressed.  The dimensions are:

  1. Domain Expertise – the Relationship Manager (or whatever title this role operates under) needs to really understand the business domain for which they are responsible.  Be it marketing, supply chain, human resources, and so on, they need to have deep domain knowledge in order to bring real value to their business partners and have the credibility to have impact.
  2. Geography – as the real estate cliché goes, ‘location, location, location!’ so goes Relationship Management.  At its best, the Relationship Manager should be co-located with the senior managers of the business unit with which they are aligned.  At the very least, they need easy access.  The occasional ‘fly in’ to meet with their business partners typically doesn’t do it in terms of creating a productive business-IT partnership.
  3. Maturity – this is the tricky dimension, and one that is typically not well addressed.  Skilled Relationship Managers are a rare resource.  You want your most effective and creative Relationship Managers aligned with those business units and executives with the highest demand maturity – i.e., with the best  capacity to recognize and leverage high value IT-enabled opportunities.  Innovative, ‘change agent’ types of Relationship Managers will quickly become frustrated facing off against executives who are technologically in the dark ages, or who cherish the status quo.  Similarly, progressive, innovative business leaders will become quickly frustrated working with a Relationship Manager who lacks drive, a sense of urgency, the creativity to generate valuable ideas about IT possibilities, and the wherewithal to bring them to fruition.

How Healthy Are Your Business-IT Relationships?

Clearly, the CIO is in many ways the ‘über-Relationship Manager’, setting the tone for demand shaping and the strategic context for IT, and typically ‘owning’ the business-IT relationships with the most senior executive team.  But no CIO has the bandwidth or domain expertise to handle all the relationships at all the management levels needed to surface and steer the best opportunities to create business value from IT.  So, how healthy and productive are your key relationships between business and IT? Do you even know what would be considered ‘key relationships’?  How would you know the degree to which they are fully delivering value against their potential?

Let me know your thoughts and experiences around Relationship Management effectiveness.

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IT Leadership – Caught between Two Realities?


It’s always been tough being an IT leader.  The “Career Is Over” distortion of the CIO acronym is humorous because of the real world challenges associated with the CIO job.  I think that today is an especially challenging time for IT leaders.  I say that because these jobs are typically caught somewhere between two very different realities – realities we might refer to as “1.0″ and “2.0″.

IT Reality 1.0

Reality 1.0 holds that IT must be managed.  It is difficult and complex – fraught with crucial technical details.  Mastering these details requires teams of technical experts, following rigorous processes and procedures.  Issues that mere mortals don’t often think about – things such as back up and recovery, security and privacy, regulatory compliance, business continuity – must be planned for and managed by IT specialists who have been properly trained and certified in these disciplines.

Reality 1.0 holds that IT should be owned, and certainly, must be controlled internally.  It holds that business users must be protected – both from themselves and from the raft of vendors and consultants, all trying to sell them stuff that could cost them money (at the very least) and might even get them in trouble.

Reality 1.0 holds that qualified IT resources are scarce and costly.  They take time to develop and cannot be ramped up or down quickly.  Therefore, long term planning and concerns about scaling are constantly on the IT professional’s mind.

Reality 1.0 is obsessed with risk avoidance.  Constantly aware of many of the horror stories that are told around the IT campfires (and sometimes involved in either perpetrating or recovering from such horrors), IT leaders work to prevent the many risks associated with IT.

Given resource and risk issues with IT, Reality 1.0 deploys sophisticated tools and governance processes to filter the many opportunities for IT-enablement and weed out all but the key initiatives that justify the the investment and risks.

Reality 1.0 perceives the world of IT as relatively closed and proprietary.  Therefore, it is obsessed with IT architectures and standards – with figuring out how to weave together point solutions into capabilities that meet enterprise needs.

Reality 1.0 is about large projects and solutions – multi-month, sometimes multi-year initiatives designed to last for years.

Reality 1.0 separates the world into ‘development’ and ‘production.’  The move from one to the other is like the move through an airlock – from a dangerous and polluted free-for-all into the safe, secure and sterile data center.

IT Reality 2.0

Reality 2.0, by contrast, holds that IT is simple, ubiquitous and inherently safe.  Almost anyone can be creative and productive with IT – all they need is an Internet connection and a device equipped with a web browser.  If the user knows nothing, they can simply leverage what is already on the web – and learn as they do so.  If they know a little, and are adventurous, they can do much more than passively leverage what is already there – they can “mash up” new capabilities from existing ones to solve new problems.  They can learn as they go, become even more adventurous and creative – perhaps even commercialize what they have created.  Over time they will become even more skilled – creating more sophisticated solutions – or leveraging ‘crowdsourcing‘ to engage others to help them create the solutions they need.

Reality 2.0 does not care about IT ownership or control – they care about results.

Reality 2.0 sees the world as a sea of opportunities and solutions to be tried and exploited.

Reality 2.0 sees IT resources as ubiquitous – found with a click of the mouse, engaged with a few more clicks, and paid only when they’ve delivered.  Resources are paid for as they are needed – no long term commitments or overhead payments to worry about or justify.

Reality 2.0 is about risk management – moving incrementally and organically, managing risks as they are recognized.

Reality 2.0 has no time for bureaucratic processes such as governance committees and cost justification rigmaroles.  It sees any opportunity as worthy of a quick experiment to see if its real – it believes that in the time it takes to create a business case or wait for the next governance committee meeting, the idea can be tested and validated or eliminated – let the proof of the pudding be in the eating, so to speak, not in the political machinations of investment review bodies.

Reality 2.0 perceives the world of IT as essentially open.  Things in its world naturally fit together.  Therefore, things can be built in small incremental steps – evolving in the light of experience and changing needs.  Things can also be built as discrete point solutions – and yet still can be fitted together if need be.

Reality 2.0 is about small projects and solutions – created in days or weeks and designed for just as long as they are effective.

Reality 2.0 sees development and production as living side-by-side in some virtual place in the sky – while I’m working on its creation, it’s in development.  Once it’s working, I declare it ‘production’ and it is so.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times…

If IT Reality 1.0 accurately reflected today’s world – as it did for most of the last 50 years or so – life would be ok for IT leaders.  Both they and their business consumers would understand their respective roles and would work together for the mutual good.  If Reality 2.0 accurately reflected the world – as it might do in the next 50 years or so, life would ok for IT leaders.  While their roles and those of their business consumers would be very different from those typical today, again they’d be on common ground.

The really big challenge today is that the reality today is neither 1.0 or 2.0 – it is in transition.  And in the immortal words of William Gibson, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”  This ‘uneven distribution’ of IT Realities 1.0 and 2.0 is going to represent both a curse and an opportunity to IT leaders.  For the progressives, it’s a wonderful opportunity to shift IT into overdrive.  For the laggards, I fear that it’s going to make their lives more and more miserable!

Do you live in this dichotomy?  How quickly is reality 1.0 being replaced by reality 2.0?  Are these realities coexisting?  What are you doing to accelerate or impede the shift?

Image courtesy of Rumple at Flickr

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Innovation and Web 2.0 – A Compelling Relationship?



I had a very interesting and exciting week!  I was a speaker at an nGenera Senior Executive Summit, which drew about 60 top executives from mostly large companies – CEO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s, HR and shared service heads, and even a couple of Lawyers and Platform/Brand managers.  It was an auspicious group – both in terms of participants and presenters/session leaders, which included Jim Collins, Michael Treacy, Don Tapscott, Tammy Erickson and Dartmouth’s Tuck School Professor, Chris Trimble.

I introduced my ideas about leveraging Web 2.0 (broadly defined) to significantly drive up the value of business innovation – specifically by following the principles and processes of Design Thinking.  I’ve been getting to this point in my last series of posts (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.)  In fact, those posts were largely written as I was developing my session materials.

Does ‘Design Thinking’ Have Legs?

Part of my thesis built upon the success of the Design Thinking movement that has gelled over the last 5 years.  I have found the success stories compelling, and the underlying principles resonate with my own experiences and values over the last 30 years in trying to leverage IT for increased innovation.  However, I was troubled by the recognition and acceptability of the term ‘Design Thinking’ – especially in the US.  The text of a 2007 speech by BusinessWeek‘s Bruce Nussbaum given in London tipped me off that there might be a problem here.

Nussbaum’s Banana…

In his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art, Nussbaum noted:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana. Peel that banana back and you find great design. Yummy design. . The kind of design that can change business culture and all of our civil society as well.”

One of the first to make the Web 2.0 connection, Nussbaum went on to say:

Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.”

I tested the waters of my Summit attendees, first by asking how many in the room had some familiarity with the term ‘Design Thinking’?   Three hands shot up, and a couple sort of hovered around shoulder level (presumably meaning, “I’ve heard of it, but please don’t call on me to talk about it!”).  Of the three hands, two were from companies for whom I had Design Thinking case studies about and who were listed in my very first slide (I had not at this point turned on the projector.)  The third hand was from a senior executive at a major Industrial Supply company that I had not expected to be particularly Design Thinking literate.  So, test 1 indicated that the term is not widely known.  Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Design Thinking is not widely practiced – perhaps all 60 companies in the room do in fact excel at Design Thinking, but refer to what they do as some variation of Nussbaum’s ‘banana’?  However, I truly doubt this.  In fact, the many one-on-one conversations that I had with the executives at this summit during the reception and dinner following my presentation supported my sense that explicit efforts to drive up the value of business innovation are relatively few and far between.

Are Design Thinkers Web 2.0 Enabled?

To the larger part of my thesis, there was little evidence at this Summit that any form of Web 2.0 was being explicitly leverage to support Design Thinking (or innovation, or the banana!)  There were a few ‘accidental experiments’ and emergent social networks – both internal and external – but nothing claimed as part of a deliberate, holistic effort to increase innovation through Web 2.0 technologies.  This for me was the big surprise.  The Senior Vice President of Strategy from one of the Design Thinking literate companies told me at the reception, “When you first connected Design Thinking and Web 2.0 in your presentation, I thought you’d completely lost it!  But as you gave examples, the light bulbs began to turn on – I think you are onto something!”  This was gratifying indeed – well worth the price of admission!

Graphic courtesy of RI Nexus

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