IT Can't Win By Only Playing Defense.

One of the myriad benefits of my current role with EMC is that I get to work with the IT groups from hundreds of companies, and get exposed to a lot of different environments and viewpoints. It's been very interesting to see how different teams are responding to the pressures being placed on IT today.

In the majority of the companies I have worked at or been exposed to, there is an . .. . interesting relationship between IT and the rest of the company. If you work in IT, you know what I'm talking about. It sounds something like:

"IT is a cost center."
"Our budgets are shrinking."
"Data centers are old technology, and all of this will be running somewhere else soon."
"IT is slow, and unresponsive, and it's inhibiting the company's ability to innovate."

I've heard people say "perception is reality." I think a better way is to say that often perceptions create reality, in that they become self-fulfilling prophecies.

If you believe IT is [only] a cost center -  then your only response is to seek to drive down cost.
If you believe that IT budgets must shrink -  then your only option is to choose where to cut.
If you believe that on-premise data centers are obsolete - you are unlikely to invest in modernization.
If you believe that IT is slow and unresponsive, why would you provide training and budgets to change that?

Here is a law I believe wholeheartedly:  "Over time, all organizations get the IT service they deserve."

If you believe that technology isn't a competitive differentiator, why hire anything more than the candidate asking the lowest salary? You are sure to have your assumptions affirmed after a few hires.

My father led a challenging organization (ask me sometime - it's an interesting story), and he was constantly reading everything he could get his hands on around organizational theory and leadership. As a result, from a young age I received dinnertime lectures on Covey, De Pree, and Collins' writings and theories. Dad used to spend a lot of time talking about how short-term leadership can "hollow out" a company to show short-term savings. A new VP comes in, postpones maintenance and defers training ("because after all, IT is a cost center"), shows a few million saved, and gets promoted to a senior VP role with a nice pat on the back. In his short-sighted wake, IT is now further behind and deeper into technical debt. This becomes a negative, downward cycle.

Here is another law I believe:  "Rest assured that if you value yourself cheaply, the world will not raise your price."

IT has every reason to have a seat at the table, and more than most. The senior leadership of companies going forward will need a solid background in technology more than ever. Companies today cannot attract customers, transact business, communicate, or operate internally without technology. It is as fundamental to business as calculators, pens and paper were decades ago. Who are you to require a higher budget? Who else needs it more? Show me the big initiatives that engineering, marketing, sales, and operations have at your company and I'll show you a litany of requests for IT services before any of those projects can begin.

My father used to spend a lot of time theorizing about the differences between "management" and "leadership," and I've come to realize that he was pondering an important distinction that gets far too little thought. He finally decided that in simple terms - Management is getting daily things done. Leadership is deciding what we ought to be doing. In a world where IT has become so central to getting things done, a key role of IT leadership is to intercept the existing dynamic (see above) and outline how IT can help, and what it needs in resources to succeed. Why do anything else?

To accept what you know to be a losing proposition in constantly declining budget and headcount, and make cuts in areas you know to be strategic is to essentially resign yourself to just delaying the inevitable. Once you are on the downward spiral of missed deadlines, failed projects, and disappointed expectations, will the business be more inclined to give you the budget you need three years from now? Your only option in that world is to play defense, and dodge the axe of outsourcing as long as possible.

****Disclaimer:  Easier said than done, I know. Everyone has to take cuts at some point, and that's part of the benefit of on-premise, in-house IT. Try getting AWS to postpone their bill! It may be that in some years things get deferred. However, this shouldn't become the norm. There should be some discussion and understanding that this is a temporary setback, and needs to be remedied by a year of plenty, and that sustained cuts and deferrals aren't in anyone's interests.****

The best IT shops I visit today are characterized by a few common elements:

1. The business understands that effective use of technology is a key differentiator, and so is willing to invest in order to do it right.
2. IT leadership recognizes that they have to deliver value to deserve a seat at the table, and strongly advocates for the resources necessary for success.
3. From top to bottom, IT staff recognize that they are competing for their (internal) customers, and their jobs.

Now, I think all of us can agree that the above three elements are every IT leader's dream! However, very few inherit this situation, or find it naturally occurring in the business world. It's a rare species. Usually, it has to be created. The key to creating this dynamic is the decision that IT needs to go on the offensive. To get more salary, major league teams have to show a plan for how they are going to win more games. Once they win more games, more people attend, and ticket sales go up. Once the money is rolling in, the business side of the ball club is willing to think about growth, and investment. 

What does going on the offensive look like? IT has to find something the business cares about, and deliver quickly and reliably. If you are going to pick something the business cares about to get started, pick something as close to the decision maker's hearts as possible. 

Easier said than done, right? Here's a simple idea that has caught my imagination. A wise man told me that if you have all the facts and data, making the right decisions is relatively easy. The challenge is that we rarely have many facts or useful data. What if IT had access to Ph.D -level data scientists who understand business, and had them interview every VP about what it is they wish they knew? "What answers do you wish you had in order to run a more effective business?"  What if IT could have those Ph.D Data Scientists examine the company's data, and determine how to answer those questions, using the existing tools and technologies the company already owns? What if they then held a session with all the company leadership showing all of the questions, ranked by feasibility, and value, and highlighted which ones could be answered, and then gave the answers? What if all of that could be done in three weeks?

At the end of it, the leadership has a strategy for how to go about using information and technology to directly drive revenue and make better decisions which is what IT is all about in the first place. IT has undeniably brought value to the table, and delivered in rapid fashion. Best of all, it hardly took any time or cycles from IT, and didn't come with strings attached to large capital outlays for infrastructure. 

This theoretical service actually exists, and is exceedingly affordable. Pivotal Data Labs is an amazing part of the EMC/VMware/Pivotal Federation of companies, and has an amazing pool of world-class professors, consultants, and true data scientists that are accessible to customers. We're talking about less than $60K to get access to the types of talent that helped Goldman Sachs create their money-making models. Three weeks to having made a case that IT is worth investing in. 

Yes, I work for an IT vendor, but I'm not asking you to get more budget to spend on large storage arrays. I'm not asking you to buy Greenplum, or Pivotal HD. If you need those things at some point in the future, fine, we will be here for that. Increasingly, we are less about the hardware, and more about helping you compete in a world that demands flexibility, choice, and speed-to-value through self-service, automation, and software. Let's do it on the hardware you already own, or some whitebox stuff you buy at Fry's. Skeptical? I'd be happy to explain how we can help you do that - and I'm a free resource.

However - the above is just one idea. The larger point here is that IT must go on the offensive. By only playing defense, one can't hope to stay ahead of the pressures and disruption that businesses are going to experience in the coming decade. IT leadership has two choices - to shrink from engaging and to try to dodge the outsourcing axe as long as possible, or to try and take their budgets into their own hands, and make a strong case for why the effective use of technology is more critical than ever.

Many thanks to the great leaders who I have witnessed doing exactly that, and to my father for thinking out loud at the dinner table.

Creating Shared Vision, Part II

So - after a long period of doing other things - family vacation, training, multiple work trips, diving with sharks in Belize (it was so cool!), I finally decided that this is the afternoon I would sit down and finish this thought. If you haven't read the first part of this post - go read that first. This is the second half, where we get down to conclusions.

To review the challenge: how can 20 or 30 people of disparate and highly specialized disciplines quickly develop common vision and understanding on complex projects that no-one fully understands, and that aren't repeated?

1. Top-down "command and control" [often] doesn't work, because frequently if the leadership has the vision for what the final outcome will be (and they don't always), they almost always lack the deep technical expertise to deploy/build each part. IT projects are often very, very complicated and technical.
2. Bottom-up is too slow, because each person approaches the problem from a completely different viewpoint, because of their different areas of responsibility, and it's not possible for everyone to learn everything. . . . . and this is where the endless meetings come in.
3. Organic learning effects don't work, because most IT projects are one-offs, where that project with those technologies and team members will probably never happen again (I'm primarily talking about infrastructure projects, here).

So. .. . . how can IT groups quickly agree on the why, what, and how? (PMO can figure out the when, usually)

I think the answer is to find a reference model outside the organization. Unless you are Google, chances are someone else has done a similar project before. Better yet - find someone who has done a similar project many, many times, and who has deep expertise in each domain, but also sufficient scope to not only be able to explain each part, but also how they all go together.

Let's go back to the theoretical group trying to consolidate many smaller IT departments (part 1). 

• Security has their concerns, and doesn't understand the other pieces
• The virtualization, storage, and networking folks have pet peeves and issues they want to ensure get addressed.
• The VP often knows what's wrong with the current, and maybe what needs to be done to fix it, but may not be able to articulate a feasible technical solution that can accomplish that.
• The finance folks are worried, and I have to admit they often have reason to be.
• The VP of X is annoyed because project Y is being postponed until after this one.

What if (and I'm just totally spit-balling here!), we were able to take each of these groups, and expose them to deep-domain expertise in their field, and each department came back 8 hours later with an overview of the larger project and goals, and actionable specifics around their part in it? What would that be worth in terms of saved time, stress, endless meetings, conflict, waste, and compromises resulting in sub-optimal outcomes? What would that be worth to YOU as a leader, to have a team that identifies itself as productive, and effective, rather than what IT often gets labeled with? 

That's one of the value propositions of a portfolio of solutions, and companies. Rather than having security figuring out how to integrate a disparate solution with a backup technology built by another vendor, and a highly specialized storage widget made for a completely independent use case - what if all these solutions were designed with each other in mind, and with a single vision? What if there were products (and expertise) in each category that all "snapped" together to accomplish the task? Essentially - what if you could task thousands and thousands of people to develop an integrated solution before you needed it?

That's what I love to see come out of a really well-run engagement with customers. Ideally, after an executive briefing (we often have a joint session, and then break-outs by discipline) their VPs are satisfied that the team understands not only where they want to end up, but also each piece of how they will get there. The individual disciplines have gotten to beat up on (it's OK) and ask questions of experts who understand how all the pieces fit together, but also speak the [security|storage|analytics|development] language, and understand the pain and criticality of the field.

Essentially, I believe an engagement with a vendor should be about only a few key things:

A. How are you going to help me compete for and keep my customers, and my job? (If you don't understand that YOU as an individual have customers, and don't believe that you need to compete for your customers, we need to talk. There is no such thing as a captive customer base anymore. Your competitors are gleefully extending the lead if you are standing still)

B. What is the vision your product(s) were developed around, and how complete is that vision?

C. How can you help me rapidly and quickly deliver on the answers to question #1? (hint: shared vision)

Because of my tenure and because I enjoy it, I often get called in to talk with people who are either:

Painfully aware of point A, and actively looking for an answer to point C, 

OR:

people who are unaware of point A, and believe the "new" and "best" thing for [storage|networking|analytics|development] is going to cure cancer and solve world hunger [at least for their department]. There will always be companies willing to agree ("it's transformational!"), and sell them that "thing." 

So - this is why I am resolved to always, always, always start with "what are we really trying to do to help you compete?"   Unless I forget, am having a bad day, or have been brought in half-way through. 

In which case. . . . . would you do everyone a favor, and ask us? 

"What is the EMC+Pivotal+VMware+RSA+VCE vision for helping me compete for my customers?"

(And - btw - give all your vendors/partners an opportunity to answer that question!)