When I attended an IT conference in June, I did so to meet some new people and maybe even learn something. I found much in common with our technical cousins, as I wrote here and here. But the second day reinforced the common themes of desire to be taken seriously as business people, not just technical experts; of attempting to speak the language of business, rather than a narrow specialty jargon; and of struggling to provide meaningful measures of the value an organization receives from investing on our specialty. And the speakers were quite accomplished.
IT Paradigmologist, Speaker, Professor, Consultant
Mark Smalley, who describes himself as an “IT Paradigmologist,” and has a day job as a consultant for CapGemini, detailed several factors weighing heavily on the formerly bulletproof IT discipline:
Speed of change — the switch from mainframes to servers was hard enough, now the user experience outside the enterprise is improving seemingly hourly, whilst inside the organization, we’re still trying to convince people of the need for upgrading three year old systems
A “hybrid” application landscape — IT people refer to “applications” where we lay people talk about “programs.” Legacy applications are being supplanted by “the cloud,” which the internet is fostering and supporting.
Immature “demand management” — IT people must understand the business well enough to effectively manage expectations and help users adjust demand for them. Here, the expectations are that IT can do vastly more than it can (at least at the price users expect to pay.)
Differing levels of “emotional quotient” and “systemizing quotient” — For users, IT is an emotional discipline. We care not for elegance, we care that it works. IT people, however, see the work as something to be systemized — predictable and repeatable processes. That leads to a disconnect if left unbalanced.
At the heart of Smalley’s recommendation is that “IT is from Flatland and business is from Spaceland.” We PR folk ask ourselves frequently why management doesn’t understand our work (it’s easy, it’s not really a business skill, it’s art), but we make little effort to understand the business (it’s boring, it’s numbers, it’s hard).
His excited, animated delivery and somewhat esoteric language made him fun to watch, even as a chunk of content was busy sailing over my head. A 15-page pamphlet summarizing Smalley’s upcoming book on business information management made a helpful sidebar to an interesting, if challenging subject.
Valerian Harris presented a great case study
Valerian Harris, VP of Enterprise Solutions for Patni Americas, walked a small group through a case study of an IT transformation — the wholesale destruction and reconstruction of a crop nutrient company’s IT systems and processes. Harris focused on the importance of organizational change management to the success of the case. This is different from IT change management, which is a separate discipline that looks more at system user process change than on the human factors affecting the project.
The project sought to free up internal resources and outsource IT functions outside the company’s core businesses in port operations and deep mining of potash and phosphates (not a particularly sexy business, but one vitally important to agriculture around the world). The company needed cost effective support in several countries, which meant shifting previously country-specific resources to a more centralized environment. You know that could have led to a sense of loss — not only for employees who might be reassigned, but for the business leaders who were used to dealing with local resources.
Designing the IT solution set too little time — globalize the IT organization, focus on business value and implement SAP globally. Designing the organizational change program took far longer. They needed to change:
- how the organization thought about IT;
- inspire what had been a downtrodden and beat-up IT staff;
- retain, redeploy or release staff as required;
- enhance IT’s capabilities as service providers, and
- foster a culture of interrelationships and high performance.
In terms of applicable content, this presentation would have been at home at IABC or SHRM, especially as the metrics describing progress were outcome-related. Too many communication programs focus only on outputs — did the material get sent on time to the right people (checking boxes on a list)? In this case, the signs of success were infrastructure uptime, lower costs and, importantly, increases in end user confidence. Process standardization and the move to integrated service delivery fed the technical changes and provided a burning platform for communication surrounding the organizational changes.
I had the strongest impression that little might change were a communications pro delivering a similar presentation!
David Cannon, Hewlett-Packard’s IT Service Management grand pooh-bah, wrapped up the event with an entertaining summary of everything that had gone before. Another in a line of excellent presenters, he involved the audience, asked questions and roamed the floor with not one PowerPoint slide in sight.
His first question, right at the start line, was: “What does the customer get from us?” People shouted out several things, including “consulting” and “service desk” and other specific applications. But Cannon told us that it was service that the customer gets — not the applications and tools we use to deliver it.
The credo needs to be, Cannon said, find out what the customer is trying to achieve, then choose the utility that will get it to them at the right price. This simplicity of message, elegant and easy to understand, silenced the crowd. It would have done the same with a communication audience. But after extolling the virtues of IT business relationship management, of a single point of contact for IT services regardless of specialty or system, and warning that service is not the same as activity, he challenged everyone to embrace innovation and take more risks.
“You are the pioneers of the information revolution,” declared Cannon. “Who will step forward to harness and re-revolutionize it? Which of you will be our Henry Ford?”
We can ask the same of PR/Communications people today. We were the pioneers of the Internet communication age. Which of us will step forward to lead the next revolution? Which of us will be the next Arthur Page or Betsy Plank?
I learned quite a lot from embracing my inner geek.
