I.T. in Crisis

Let’s begin

Let’s pretend you and I work together, and we’re beginning a late-night conversation, in your office, about the way our company’s IT department is perceived by the people we serve.

You’re an experienced IT professional. I’m an experienced IT professional. Neither of us is particularly happy about the way people talk about, and e-mail each other about, what they think our department does (or doesn’t do) all day long. So we decide to do something about it. We stay late one night. We order some Chinese food. We open our notebooks and our minds. And as the night goes on, we end up having a really great discussion with each other about … service.

Specifically, we have a great conversation about our IT department’s capacity to improve its perceived value by providing truly excellent service to our client base.

You and I talk for three straight hours about what good service really is, how to build a service strategy, and how to create and support a service-oriented IT organization—an organization that will establish our department—and us as individuals—as truly valued contributors to the organization. We’re having this discussion, on our own time, because we want to improve our department’s reputation among all the internal clients it serves, from the receptionist to the CEO of the organization … and because we are really very proud of the value we know we can add to those internal customers.

What would that conversation sound like? What great ideas and strategies and follow-through would we come up with? What would we do as a result of that conversation? How could we transform the level of service we actually deliver … and the way we were perceived by the people who decide how big our budget is … or even whether we get a budget at all?

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.” Helen Keller

We in the IT profession have for many years provided what I believe to be a very valuable service to our organization. But even given our accomplishments, we seem to have to work extra-hard to get the recognition we deserve.

Many times, our value is challenged at budget renewal time. We are often questioned in great detail as to why this or that expense is really required. I’ve experienced this phenomenon myself for decades now, both as an IT manager and as a consultant to many IT organizations, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this “do-we-really-need-to-spend-money-on-that” conversation is not the result of higher management looking for new ways to make our lives difficult. That’s the working assumption that a lot of IT professionals seem to use, though: “Management has nothing better to do than to push hard on us and make our jobs more difficult.”

Perhaps we don’t really believe that—but, as I say, we sometimes act as though we do. Obviously, management has many more important things to deal with than pushing hard on IT. What management is really asking us for is the answer to these questions:

Why should I approve this request over the requests of other departments that seem to be doing a better job of returning value for the investments they’re asking for?

What does this seemingly exorbitant investment actually do to enhance the company’s bottom line?

It seems a little odd for us to have to face such questions, doesn’t it? After all, our department has been around a while and has served many, many people. Our technology is everywhere. Most, and perhaps all, of the company’s employees use our technology to fulfill their daily work requirements.

Why, then, do we feel like we are still introducing ourselves, like we’re somehow the new kids on the block?

Here’s why. When you take a closer look at the many components that make up the functioning body of our company, and then compare us to departments like accounting, engineering, personnel, drafting, research, marketing, sales, manufacturing, or maintenance—we actually are the new kids on the block!

If you looked at the typical organizational chart from the 1940s, you would have found all of those departments, or at least their close cousins—but you certainly wouldn’t have found an IT department.

Old habits, and old ways of looking at the workplace, die hard. Many people still don’t think of IT as part of the “standard,” value-producing portion of the company. They think of us as an added, and perhaps unnecessary, expense. If we choose to do nothing about that—if we choose to focus on our resentment on the “do-we-really-have-to-spend-money” conversation at budget time, or, even worse, if we choose to pick out technical flaws in what management says or implies about our department—we will lose our customer. And when that customer is a senior executive, we shouldn’t be surprised if “losing the customer” translates to “watching most or all of what we do get outsourced.” That’s what happens when there’s a conflict in the way value is perceived between the customer and the vendor: The customer changes vendors!

That night, as you and I talk long into the night over our Chinese food, you and I realize that we have no alternative. We must close the value gap that our customers perceive.

So: What do we have to