“My company faces technology issues all of the time, but my IT budget seems to run wild with consultants, capital expenses, and personnel training!” For most businesses leaders we’ve met with, this statement sums up their entire view of (and frustration with) IT. Even if they do not immediately see issues and have just a general feeling of malaise with their IT efforts, after we go over our five questions it begins to crystallize. I personally feel that this desperate statement is cried out not only due to a misunderstanding of the role of IT, but can also be due to either lack of or downright ineffective IT management in their organization.

A lack of IT leadership is obviously an issue and while completely different from ineffective IT management, the same critical problems arise. Poor IT management views personnel as resources instead of talent (a big no-no) and infrastructure as a cost (another no-no). This is indicative of PMP/project management thinking: everything is a functional commodity whose output can be measured on a Gannt chart. (Incidentally, I’ve seen Gannt charts from long-time project managers that literally state “two hours to solve any integration problems.” From an technology worker’s perspective, claiming that solving “any integration problem” can be packaged and completed as a deliverable within two hours is laughable. Technology doesn’t work this way because technology is not an assembly line.)

As we’ve said before, it is of absolute import that IT leadership be both technologically astute and business aware.

What manifests itself out of these leadership problems is a slow death spiral of your IT department. Without a stable strategy, you’ll find your IT budget escalating and costs rising because every problem will be addressed with “quick fixes” and patch work. When it comes to IT, throwing money at a problem never solves anything; doing so can even make matters worse! Don’t believe the hype a consultant tells you. Don’t believe the hype from a VAR. No, you don’t need to buy some new software to address a problem.

Be proactive, keep IT focused as an investment, and build your strategy wisely. This is what Bradman Group does for its clients. We live by this approach. We examine existing infrastructure, talent pool, business processes, and business goals to posit a course of action that will address what should be key concerns for business leaders. Then we execute. The end result is that our clients have an IT strategy built with a long-term, holistic view that is scalable.

Once a business starts to look at IT as an investment instead of a cost, they’ll find that the capital that is spent on IT has a return (even in the short-term, one project I’ve personally worked on had a quarter-million dollar budget and realized its ROI in six months — because it supported the business goals and had measurable results).

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Tags: cost control, management principles, Virtual CIO

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 9:06 am and is filed under Executive Briefs, Management, Virtual CIO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.