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By Mel Duvall
CIOZone offers its members a platform to create groups around areas of interest, such as business intelligence, Global CIOs or Women in IT. One of the more successful groups on CIOZone is KJR Manifestations, created by Bob Lewis. CIOZone Chief Content Officer Mel Duvall asked Lewis about the purpose behind the group.
Question: Bob, the KJR Manifestations group is a really great example of how CIOZone can be used to create groups or communities of interest around a topic. What is the purpose or focus of the KJR group?
Answer: The "standard model" of internal IT ... that it should be run like a business, satisfying its "internal customers" by delivering software that "meets requirements" ... is entrenched. It's so ingrained in the business community that CIOs trying to promote a more advanced model need a lot of self-confidence to avoid giving up and just going along with the old model, even though experience tells us it doesn't work very well.
I formed the group to provide a sort of virtual gathering place for CIOs who are in this position, to give them a the sense that they aren't the only ones facing the situation ... and also to provide a public forum for exchanging concerns, ideas, and techniques that have worked in some companies and are worth trying in others.
Question: Who can join the group and who would find it of interest?
Answer: Everyone is welcome who is interested in promoting excellent IT management practices. The core group consists of CIOs. That doesn't mean the group is restricted to CIOs. I'd be delighted to have anyone in an IT leadership role participate. For that matter, individual contributors would be terrific additions to the community, to add a reality check to the conversations.
And, since the new model I've been promoting in my blog and the new book starts with a radically different model for the Business/IT relationship and the whole governance process, non-IT business managers who have a strong interest in making it work better would, I think, find participation to be an excellent use of their time.
Question: In difficult economic periods like the one we're now facing, is it common for CIOs to retrench into standard model approaches. What is the danger in doing that?
Answer: It seems likely. In particular, faced with declining budgets, charge-backs will look very attractive to CIOs who otherwise end up dealing with across-the-board cuts where they are made responsible for allocating pain.
The danger is no different from the danger in a strong economy: Using charge-backs as a governance mechanism is the opposite of leadership. Enterprises that use charge-backs as a regulatory mechanism have defined themselves as marketplaces and not as entities with purpose and strategy.
In the end, that's a formula for failure, because competitors that are driven by purpose and strategy will eat the ones that aren't.
Question: One of the things you have argued against is the adoption of best practices. Yet most of the big ERP vendors, like SAP and Oracle, are marketing industry solutions based on a deeply ingrained set of best practices. Aren't you just tilting at windmills?
Answer: Hey, are you accusing me of being anti-green? I like windmills, and would never tilt at them.
"Best practices" are another matter, and I have to thank you for the question. I've been collecting translations of "best practice" for a few years now (for example, "basic professionalism," "compliance requires it," and "mirror chess," and you highlighted one that I'd missed.
When SAP and Oracle describe their built-in business process models as "best practices," they're engaging in puffery, because if they actually knew the best way to run businesses in all these industries, they'd be running businesses in these industries and outcompeting everyone else.
Which would be fine with me: If Larry Ellison wants to buy General Motors, the good news is that he'd have a hard time doing a worse job than the folks who have run it into the ground over the past few decades.
A more accurate term for what SAP and Oracle are packaging would, I think, be "patterns." They're useful starting points customers can use when implementing the software.
Here's one area they'd be of particular use: As businesses evaluate whether to adapt software to their processes and practices, or their processes and practices to the software, they first have to decide whether their way of operating is the way it is because it has to be or because it happens to be.
If it has to be that way ... if the way they do business provides a competitive advantage ... then they should adapt the software.
But if it's the way it is because it happens to be, then starting with the built-in pattern and adapting the business to it might be an excellent approach. While the pattern probably isn't "best" in any meaningful way, it will probably be as good or better than the current operating model. And, it will have the added advantage of shaking things up.
People do become overly comfortable with what they know; assumptions become hidden assumptions, and then "the way things are around here." Instituting a new process, even if it's merely just as good as the current one, just might force business managers to start thinking things through again instead of just coasting along with something that's good enough.
Question: Your group is meant to serve as a forum for sharing excellent IT practices. If there was one idea or practice you could share, what would it be?
Answer: I'm torn between the last two principles described in the "Manifesto": To promote a "culture of honest inquiry," and the preeminent importance of having great people working for you.
If I have to choose just one, though, I'll go with the culture of honest inquiry, because with it CIOs will easily and inevitably reach the right conclusion regarding the importance of great employees.
So ... what exactly is a culture of honest inquiry? It's a culture in which everyone in the organization tells everyone else what they need to know, not what they want to know. It's a culture in which people focus on solving problems, without concern that blame-storming will immediately follow. It's a culture in which evidence leads to conclusions instead of a culture in which pre-defined conclusions drive decisions about which data to collect ... in which, that is, evidence is considered a tool and not ammunition.
Most of all, it's a culture in which nobody ever says "I trust my gut" as a way to make decisions or persuade anyone else, because everyone realizes one of the basics of human physiology: Their intestines are for digesting. They use their brains when they need to think.
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