What IT really needs - managers, the real kind

In a recent HBR blog post by Susan Cramm, I found this one line particularly interesting:

This lack of competence and confidence means that you are letting technology manage you rather than the other way around.

She makes this pronouncement shortly after citing survey statistics that basically demonstrate that business users either don't know how and don't fully use their IT resources. While this may surprise some, it doesn't surprise me in the least. I can't count the number of times I've seen application deployments go this way: IT deploys a huge time-saving, money-saving application that automates a number of business processes. Business doesn't adopt out of fear or misunderstanding. IT doesn't understand out of fear or misunderstanding and voices this to the business. Business thinks IT is trying to ramrod processes it didn't create down its throat. IT thinks business is being petulant and misguided.

(On a side note: These situations have created an entire cottage industry in consulting around benefits realization, change management, and release management.)

I agree with Susan that it's a management problem, but it's not the technology managing you, it's a lack of management on the part of IT. Maybe a better way to state it would be to say that there is IT management and regular management. Some IT organizations do a wonderful job on the IT management, but very few actually manage.

What do I mean by this? A dearth of professional managers exist in IT leadership positions. Many of these folks have grown up as developers and architects and then graduated into positions that require dealing with customers and subordinates. What ends up happening is the classic Peter Principle where IT folks are promoted to the level of their least competence and in many of those cases, it's when they take on subordinates or deal with clients/customers. Some pull up their bootstraps and become good people managers. Others do not. While this occurs in the business side of the business as well, metrics for success are much better defined through balanced scorecards and profit and loss statements. In IT, the incompetence of a manager is obfuscated by lack of good success measurement. So, what happens is that these people continue to rise through the ranks, despite their managerial inadequacies. These inadequacies are the ones that create change management, adoption, and risk. Thinking about it another way: You never hear a brand manager complain that it's his customer's fault that his adoption rate is too low. Why? Because it's the brand manager's fault, not the customers. However, you will commonly hear this complaint echoed in IT.

Remember, I am not speaking about IT prowess. It is important for the Director of Business Intelligence to have knowledge regarding enterprise data warehouses, reporting tools, etc., but even more importantly, this person needs to be a professional manager. At this position, they are more or less managing their own line of business. I would ask you to consider this: Take some of these IT leaders and think of whether or not you would consider putting them into line management positions. If you've exhausted your IT leadership roster and the answer was "no" most of the time, then Houston, we have a problem.

So, what's the solution? I have two suggestions.

1. Develop measurements that are directly correlated with IT's ability to satisfy the needs of the business. Period. I have seen too many IT "scorecards" that take into account all of these other factors that dilute the true success criteria. Another way to look at it would be to take the IT metrics and align them with your business metrics. You've decided they're good for the business, why not make IT use the same ones? It might not be a one-to-one match, but the concepts and principles can be copied over to IT.

What will this fix? A whole host of common problems such as IT doing their own thing, IT delivering nonvalue-add, IT blaming the business (this will still happen but less frequently), and IT management getting promoted into stratospheric heights who have no business being there.

2. Before allowing any IT person to assume a managerial role, make them take a customer-facing role where there is no option but to satisfy the customer. This will teach two things: what it's like in the real world where you have to fight for every single customer's business by getting them what they need and how to play nice in the corporate sandbox because they'll finally realize there are people of whom they have no control, but desperately need assistance.

We all hate swarmy salespeople, but let's face it. If they don't sell, they don't eat. We have forgotten this in IT land. When our customers don't buy (or adopt), we keep eating what doesn't belong to us.