The Hindu Business Line : Score for the team

Gone are the days when the CIO and her team were busy only with matters IT. Today, this team and its players too need to pad up and play the business game along with the rest of the company.

In the first part of this article, which appeared in eWorld dated August 22, 2005, the author talked of the changing role of the chief information officer (CIO) and her team. Nine imperatives need to be kept in mind while making the transition. Four of them were spelt out in part 1. Here, in the second and concluding part, are the other imperatives that come into play.

IT is funny, but true. Until recently, IT organisations wanted their internal customers to come to them after they were `clear' about what they needed.

So rigid was that need that if the marketing chief walked into the IT department without the `use case scenarios' sorted out or the HR head did not know whether the last version of Documentum could co-exist with the latest SAP release, they were made to look like inferior life forms.

Collaborate with big ideas

The general motto was "Do not come to me till you know what you are looking for."

But, wait a minute, that changed while you were sleeping. Today, customers want to ask you a simple question: "Do you have a big idea for me yet? If not, don't waste my time."

Life is difficult enough with China and India and globalisation and competition and eroding margins and shrinking market shares and customer infidelity. So the IT folks are expected to be ready with great ideas that will make the internal customer go where no one has gone before.

Not with budget demands. Not with technology ideas, but business ideas like how to get newer customers; how to create hitherto non-existent service lines; how to improve supplier traction.

How will technology folks come out with great new ideas? First by changing the mindset of jumping to platforms and features. Do not think about Documentum first, think about content and what it can do to people's lives.

Innovate

More of the same is out. The new imperative is `innovate.'

What is innovation? It has to do with your mindset, your way of thinking and doing. In the simplest terms, it is your ability to answer a simple question: what is new and different this quarter?

Do not expect a tool like SAP or Siebel or Oracle to teach you that. You need to be able to ask, what are we doing differently with the same resources or less? How have we changed our own organisation structure? What new skills are we learning and pushing down? In what way have our processes changed? How have our business models changed? How has our way of IT engagements changed?

Far too often, people think of innovation as the creation of something that did not exist before. Quite contrary to this, there is larger scope of innovation with existing things, artifacts and resources. No doubt then, when you speak with your CIO staff, you seldom hear words like `creativity,' `content,' `process,' `knowledge' and `reuse.'

While the IT industry is synonymous with pervasive innovation, most IT users in organisations do not consider their CIO organisations to be innovation's greenhouses. It is time to create an IT agenda that showcases innovation in the way that the IT organisation itself runs. Lastly, innovation is seldom an output. More critically, it is a way of doing things.

Be emergent

What did the slowdown, the tech meltdown, the recession and 9/11 teach us? We will live in a world in which periods of continuity will be bounded by events of a highly unpredictable nature. The time lapsing between such events will shrink increasingly. They will be extraneous and unscripted.

The key is to accept that nothing will be the same again. This is antithetical to the conventional thinking that taught present day leaders to work according to a plan.

It does not mean that in the future, we will not plan. Planning is key but it cannot have rigid boundaries. All good plans must be porous. This alone will ensure that we have the mental make-up to respond to extraneous stimuli as well as anticipate some of them. Today, that ability is understood as disaster recovery and remote back-up.

Here we are talking about a more profound change in IT thinking itself. We are talking about accepting the fact that in the future, we cannot have holy cows any longer about any issue — be it technology roadmap or outsourcing, personal re-skill or formula for cost allocations. We will have to create and dump strategies on the fly. We will have to build agility and intelligence in the way we engage and learn to drastically reduce the lag between great ideas and great execution.

If you work on the basis of planning things very well, you are probably incapable of managing the concept of emergence — it demands that you harness the ability to work with more unknowns, to de-risk things and to have a higher tolerance for failure.

It is not so much the act of failing, it is going to be about the act of recovering from failure, and learning from it such that you do not fail on the same count again.

Co-Own the outcome

"Here is the intranet you had wanted, see you again in two years." That will not do any longer, be ready to say good-bye to completion. IT will have to live through usage and not, deployment of technology. If your customer is not making money, it will haunt you sooner than you think.

When the work is over and the product or service has just rolled out, your work has just begun. You will have to engage deeply to see who is using the system, and for what. How is the system changing the lives of people? What is the level of business success that people are experiencing, as against the number of bugs people are reporting? It is a completely different way of thinking.

For far too long, traditional IT organisations have asked for well-thought out requirements, matching budgets and ambient decibel levels of end-user whining. Today's IT organisations must co-own outcomes and be willing to be measured, not by bugs and change requirements, but by increase in sales, reduction in cost, rapidity of response time and the quality of response itself. Increasingly, the experience of using IT will be more valued than the outcome of what we build and we have to create perceptivity for such things among IT leaders.

Change and Change again

It is not without reason that we are using capital letters here. Any change makes every user-interface designer, every system architect, and every coder cringe.

Just as the new extra-net gets rolled out, a second-level dealer in Turkey complains about the speed of downloads because you assumed that the world is on 100 Mbps Ethernet on demand. Or the supplier in South Africa complains about poor navigation and internationalisation because the system was designed with an American end-user environment in mind.

In the nineties, IT organisations made a religion out of change-management, and even created their own lexicon around the subject. That is not relevant any longer. In today's world, we have to learn to change and change yet again. We have to build change capability in the system design — from the user-interface to system security.

More importantly, we need to cultivate the mindset that change is an opportunity to grow, it is an opportunity to innovate, it is an opportunity to create unusual new value. But change can be overwhelming. Most often, it is overwhelming because it is synonymous with uncertainty — but if uncertainty is the name of the times, isn't it better to master that craft before we master technology?

Concluded

Picture by K. Ramesh Babu

(The author is co-founder and COO of MindTree Consulting.)

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