Who’s in Charge Here?

(Audience for today’s column: CEOs, CFOs, and COOs. Everyone else go away.) 

As senior management at a Fortune 500 company, you know who’s in charge of finance, manufacturing, marketing, and operations–the various VPs with those nouns in their titles. They’re probably doing their jobs fairly well. If they aren’t, either they, or you, will be having a long talk with an executive recruiter real soon now. 

You probably also think you have someone, a VP/IT, CIO, or CTO who’s in control of your IT operations.

You very likely don’t.  

Sure, someone’s name is on the organization chart, and someone sits in a nice corner office, and someone cashes a couple hundred thousand in salary and bonus checks every year. But, odds on, he’s not in control of IT at all. He (or she) talks a good game, delivers nice vision and strategy briefings whenever asked, manages his resources, and is probably an intelligent and articulate executive. He is doing everything right, except building an IT organization that can deliver the integrated and reliable business applications you need in a timely manner, his single most important job. 

Harsh assessment? Yes. Have I met your CIO? No. But I’ve met some of his brethren, and I’ve seen the handiwork of dozens, in telecommunications, petroleum, technology services, food processing, financial services and federal sectors, to name a few. And, statistically, they are failing. Big time. 

Now, don’t e-mail and tell me the CIO of your little $100 million company is doing a great job. Might be. Any 10 year old can build a nice tree house, few men can build a skyscraper. The CIOs in billion dollar companies are being paid big bucks to do the hard job, get the skyscrapers built. And they are failing miserably, and often getting away with it. If you’re the COO, it’s your job to put an end to that, and by reading this column, you’re getting a start. 

Now why are these guys failing, and what can you do about it? First, the obvious question: are CIOs and IT VPs dumber than your other executives? Almost certainly not. They are likely to be at least as smart and well-educated. It would be nice if this were the problem – you could just get the headhunters out to round up some CIO candidates with a little better resumes, a bit more intellect, maybe one more graduate degree. The usual suspects. And then you’d interview the candidates … um, you probably did that with the last CIO, eh? Didn’t seem to help, did it? 

So what’s the root problem here? Well, it’s pretty subtle: Information Technology is really hard. It’s harder than Manufacturing. It’s harder than Operations. It’s much harder than HR. It’s even harder than Research. The realities of Fortune 500 IT are these: 

• Enterprise IT is still a mixture of art and science, of analysis and informed intuition.

• Hardware and software platforms continue to evolve rapidly, and the pace of change is increasing.

• Almost every business person thinks he knows something about IT by now, including you. Most don’t, in any real sense.

• IT has evolved to a group of isolated technology domains, with few practitioners having expertise in more than one.

• There are over 50,000 expert IT professionals in the U.S. Unfortunately, there are over 5,000,000 people who earn their living in IT.

• Hardware, software, and services vendors promise silver bullet solutions in their expensive and well-crafted ads. Now, pay attention: there are no silver bullets. The ads are the finest quality fertilizer available on the market.

• The Space Shuttle has 270,000 moving parts and took about 15 years to design and build. A new business application may have that many lines of software code, and you expect it to be built in six months. (Notice that the shuttle has only crashed two times out of 100. Your new applications explode on the launch pad more than half the time, and fail to reach the desired orbit about 80% of the time.) 

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point:  

Billion dollar enterprise IT is an inherently hyper-complex creative / engineering activity performed by folks who cannot all possibly be experts. The basic technologies change every few years. Unrealistic expectations are held by most managers, fueled by tremendously misleading extrapolation of small IT tasks (Written a few programs in college? Managed development of a departmental system?) that have no relationship to mission-critical enterprise applications. Vendors promise the Moon and stars, but it’s Uranus on a platter when the systems don’t work.

What’s this got to do with your CIO? Everything. If it’s not his job to put in place a competent, learning organization that deals with these realities, whose is it?

I’ll expand on each of the IT realities listed above in future columns, and we’ll talk about ways to build a competent IT organization.