Featured Article: September 2010
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Keeping the “I” in IT
by ARZIKA guest writer, Keith Ensroth • Senior Program Manager • Teradata Corporation
As IT leaders, we have many roles to perform. Information technology is a tremendously powerful tool for transforming an enterprise. We need to understand the business of those we serve. We need to remain current on those areas of technology that has the most potential for delivering value. We need to attract and retain the right technical talent, both employees and suppliers, in order to best serve our customers. In these and other roles, it is sometimes easy to maintain the focus on the Technology —- forgetting the Information aspect of our jobs.
Information is as vital a resource as people, money and equipment when it comes to the functions of an organization. More than any other part of an organization, we are the stewards of information. In order to do our jobs well, we need to understand information and the crucial role it plays in the organizations we serve. Fundamentally information is the input to decisions. As Blenko, Mankins and Rogers assert in The Decision-Driven Organization” in the June 2010 Harvard Business Review, “an organization’s performance is the sum of its decisions made and executed.” Just as finance leaders view their organizations through a lens of money; we need to lead our teams to view the organization through a lens of information as it moves through the organization. This means that the information needs to be gathered accurately, stored reliably, transformed appropriately, and put in front of the right person at the right time in order for the right decision to be made. These decisions can take several different forms.
The accounts receivable (A/R) clerk processes the application of payments to invoices, that is. The emphasis here is on decision making accuracy, the availability of complete information (such as matching payment to invoice), efficiency (number of payments processed per A/R clerk) and speed (achieving days-sales-outstanding targets for cash flow).
Purchasing decisions by customers on a web site requires easy access to complete product information in order to convert from interest to sale. This can take many forms, from user interface design to online chat capability to well-timed incentives triggered by click-stream analysis.
Data aggregated in a data warehouse is transformed into information that is used to make operational or strategic business decisions.
What is the importance of leading our teams to view their work from the perspective of information? From this perspective, it can be too easy to “just do my job” but not add value to the business. Let’s look at each of the three examples above.
If my job is just to “configure an ERP package,” then do I really understand the decisions being made by the A/R clerk and how the work I do effects success? If the ERP analyst thinks in terms of providing information to support decisions, then he or she should know how they are successful and look for what the bottlenecks to decision-making for the clerk may be. This may require asking questions that probe upstream from the job forthis particular area of the business to asking how to get invoice numbers more reliably associated with payments in order to improve cash flow.
Understanding how critical the customer’s decision-making process is to the success of a web site may cause a project manager to draw on a resource familiar with user interface design; not just a programmer who takes what an end user believes their requirements to be and codes them into the site.
Similarly, a report developer who merely works from specifications will likely provide less value to the decisions being made than one who understands the overall business context within which the user of the report is making a decision. How will it fit into his or her work day? Will the report aid in the decision-making process, or merely be the jumping-off point for the report user to copy the data into a spreadsheet and combine it with other off-line information to make a decision?
Beyond broadening the thought horizons of information technology professionals we place on projects, IT leaders who view the business as the flow of information enabling decisions should look into our own organizations to decide if we have the right resources to bring value to our customers.
Have we succumbed to a notion that business analysis is not really a necessary IT function and assumed that business subject matter experts can tell software engineers what they need to know to develop a new application?
Do we assume that a project to “just deliver a few reports” is a data-only project and requires no understanding of the business processes within which the reports will be used and how those processes will have to change once the reports have been delivered?
Are we prepared to deliver our unique values to our internal and external customers?
Keeping the “I” in IT requires a change in mindset on the part of IT leaders. We are not just technologists. We are enablers of decision-making. I believe this change in mindset can make us some of the most important contributors to any organization.
Keith Ensroth has over fifteen years experience in senior IT leadership roles. Most recently, he was CIO at Entertainment Publications. He oversaw several key initiatives including identifying and implementing a new IT strategy, plus he successfully established a business process re-engineering program.
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About the Author:
Prior to Entertainment, Keith was Vice President of Americas Applications for Kelly Services. There he led a team of about 100 IT professionals who were responsible for the acquisition, development and ongoing enhancement of applications that served Kelly’s North American branch offices, Finance, Administration, HR, Sales, Marketing and Business Intelligence needs. His team was also responsible for the delivery of PeopleSoft technology for the upgrade of Kelly’s payroll, billing and accounts receivable functions.
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