What Is Success?
WHY IT AND BUSINESS LEADERS NEED TO AGREE ON A DESTINATION.
BY MINDA ZETLIN
the program to load. He kept on insisting that there wasn’t a
problem, right up until the day he was fired.
s your IT department a success? How good are you at success-
fully completing projects? How do you know if your project
or team is a success? And if someone were to ask your contacts
on the business side if they think your projects and department
are successful, would they have the same answer that you do?
For the majority of companies, the answer to that last question is no. It’s depressingly common for technology people to
complete what they think of as a successful project but fail to
meet the business needs that inspired it.
“The folks in information systems sometimes have a nar-
rower definition of success than their customers or partners in
the business do,” says Rob Meilen, CIO at Hunter Douglas North
America, a leading manufacturer of window treatments. “They
may view their role as purely delivering the systemic aspects of
a product, new application system, or upgrade. They may not
include changes to the business process or whether adoption of
the new technology brings measurable business results.”
Therein lies the problem. A business leader will judge the
success of a technical project by asking, “Did this solve a busi-
ness problem and improve our bottom line?” At the same time,
a technology leader might ask, “Did we deliver technology that
performs correctly according to the specifications we were given?”
It’s easy to see how the answer to the second question might
be yes, while the answer to the first could be a resounding no. “I
had one project where I was the quality assurance lead,” recalls
Paul Glen, CEO at the Leading Geeks Company, an IT consul-
tancy, and author of Leading Geeks: How to Lead and Manage the
People Who Deliver Technology (Jossey-Bass, 2002). “The product
did what the functional specs said
it should, but I went to the head
of development and said, ‘We have
a problem. When a user clicks on
the icon, it takes 20 minutes for the
application to load.’”
The developer thought the software was just fine as it was, because
it completely met all the specifications he’d been given. “Load time
wasn’t in the specs,” he pointed
out, adding that users could “do
something else” while waiting for
Few tech people would be as willfully blind to business issues
as this developer was, but his attitude reveals a real concern that
IT and business managers must both reflect on. Many IT staff
believe that their departments serve two functions only: ( 1) to
keep needed systems running, and ( 2) to act as order-takers,
delivering technology that precisely matches whatever requirements they’ve been given.
That outlook is a natural result of the history of IT in most
organizations. “For the longest time, IT has been seen as a
necessary evil,” says Subra Sripada, senior vice president and
CIO at Beaumont Health System, a hospital chain in Michigan.
“As businesses become more and more dependent on IT and
technology spend continues to spike, IT has quickly become
a subject of boardroom discussions. Leading organizations are
leveraging IT as a strategic asset.”
The problem is that most IT organizations aren’t prepared
to leverage IT as a strategic asset, and most traditional CIOs
aren’t ready to lead them there, he says. “Traditional focus is on
operations and keeping the lights on. Developing the aware-
ness or the power of technology will help organizations harness
the capabilities to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and create
market differentiation for the organization.”
Operational CIOs must change their views to embrace a more
strategic role, says Gerard Verweij, partner at accounting and
consultancy firm PwC. “Whenever I talk to a CIO who can quote
numbers from weekly operational reports, I know I’m dealing
with someone still focused on
operations. When a CIO talks about
business performance and what
the business needs, that’s someone
focused on business strategy.”
BUSINESS SPONSORSHIP
Becoming more focused on strategy
and less on operations will help CIOs
bring their whole department’s view
of success more in line with that of
business constituents. But how do
you actually change that focus?
