IT is clearly where business innovation takes place today. Given this, the productivity of IT matters to just about everyone within the ecosystem IT touches. This includes marketing, finance, service, and HR. So, what are the greatest IT productivity limiters, and what should your IT leaders do to eliminate them and enable your business to transform faster? This Advisor provides some answers.

IT Productivity Limiters

I want to start by understanding where work is most needed. Clearly, these limiters center around people, process, and technology. But in my conversations with CIOs and industry analysts, I was honestly surprised by the number of items they perceived as limiters. Here is their list by category:

• People: siloed departments, turf-based mindsets, inefficient communications, ineffective project management, inadequate stakeholder engagement, lack of systems thinking

• Process: siloed processes, inefficient processes, backlogs that squander opportunities, reliance on manual processes instead of automation, security and compliance complexities, poor solution and vendor selection

• Technology: legacy systems, disconnected systems, siloed data, poor user experience (UX), lack of comprehensive UX, system proliferation, technical debt, underutilized data, underutilized apps and systems, bringing in systems that worked at last company

Clearly from the list, there are, as one CIO put it, many pathologies within IT. These prevent their organizations from transforming and building relevant competitive advantage. They also result in employee-engagement failures, broken supply chains, and the inability to properly engage customers.

Former CIO Isaac Sacolick says, “Transformation in IT is needed when the department is stuck maintaining yesterday’s technology challenges instead of providing forward-looking business, customer, and employee experiences, data, and other technology capabilities.” Manhattanville College CIO Jim Russell adds, “System proliferation is a barrier as IT becomes the data-integration monitor removing any flexibility or agility. I need to or am required to do x, even if that inhibits y or z the way I choose to do it. The lack of lateral vision or matrixed thinking challenges IT to meet disparate requirements and serve CX.” According to Constellation Principal Analyst and VP Dion Hinchcliffe, “These challenges push IT into reactive mode and stretch it into doing everything for everyone. This results in a ‘whack-a-mole’ mentality. For this reason, it is critical to step back and regard it all properly.”

Practices & Approaches Holding Back IT Organizations

Research from business expert Gary Hamel has considered the orthodoxies that limit innovation. My question to CIOs is: what practices or approaches worked in the past but hold back IT organizations today? Russell believes that:

Everything starts with a lack of alignment and integration with line-of-business leaders as they build their plans. Establishing IT as just a service prevents real business integration. In this type of environment, managers hired with value and skills learn not to decide or take risks. Instead, they wait for the over-stretched senior managers to make snap decisions. This often leads to a “hero culture” within IT. For this reason, I describe the stages of CIOs as moving from: (1) chief irritation officer teaching the discipline of “no”; (2) chief information officer establishing the value of data and disciplines/processes; and (3) chief inspiration officer helping clients at all levels dream and realize better.

New Zealand CIO Anthony McMahon argues that:

Hierarchical decision-making, where all decisions are made by a few individuals or departments holds back organizations. This is especially the case where decision makers don’t have visibility of the underlying problems that need to be solved. Adaptation is needed, and not just in the sense of pivoting. Hero culture and knowledge hoarding seem to go hand in hand, which then amplifies the issue with hierarchical decision-making.

Beyond culture, Hinchcliffe says several orthodoxies hold back IT today, including:

• Heavy documentation + processes

• Linear approaches to system development

• Big vendor takeover syndrome

• Overemphasis of technical skills

• Siloed teams/departments/systems

• Giving the business what IT prefers

• A “Dr. No” mentality (being good at saying no versus listening and solving problems)

In terms of processes, FIRST CIO Deb Gildersleeve claims, “I am not sure this ever really worked, but it is still around ... the waterfall method of building out the whole system before rolling it out. This means that it could be a year before anyone sees anything. This, unfortunately, is still expected by business partners in many organizations.”

Implementing the Cultural Change Needed to Transform IT

CIOs repeatedly have shared with me over the years the classic saying from Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” So, with this as a backdrop, what is needed for the culture change? Gildersleeve suggests that “technology leaders fix things starting with communication and building relationships that allow businesses to educate peers and teams on how to identify problems, improve processes, and use technology to enable those solutions.” McMahon agrees by stressing the importance of “regular, clear, consistent communication. In this process, consultation is important, consensus less so.”

To get there, Russell says, “Culture change is needed including outside of IT as well. IT culture needs to align with organization culture. This should include reducing personal heroics, modeling matrixed thinking and communication, and distributed authority. These are a few of the things that need to change. Useful tools such as RACI [responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed] still haven’t attached themselves sufficiently within IT.” University of California Santa Barbara Deputy CIO Joseph Sabado claims getting there involves a “clearly articulated purpose, commitment, mindset, resources, and time. Establishing a change management model is a good place to start, but this should have a sponsor, product manager, and change management.”

In terms of better instantiating change management, leaders need, according to Hinchliffe, to be:

• Clear about what needs to change

• A living example of the change

• A storyteller of the desired to-be state/successes

• Someone who rewards early adopters of the desired change

• Someone who does this until “blue in the face”

Reskilling Personnel to Transform IT Practices

Reskilling people can have a big impact on dealing with practices that limit IT. In terms of skills that matter, here is what makes the CIOs’ list: 

• Mobility

• Soft skills

• Empathy, deep listening

• Project management

• Design and agile thinking

• Culture and intent

• Speaking the language

• Business storytelling

• Business acumen

• Learning how to ask effective questions

 Hinchcliffe claims:

Change must be at grassroots. It isn’t something you do to people. It’s something you do with them. For these reasons, CIOs need to cultivate and enlist change agents! While CIOs are at it, they should throw out the hierarchical model of the IT organization. A more networked and agile organization that recombines around opportunities needs to emerge. Some hierarchy and stability will still be required, but what should remain is a more resilient, flexible structure that is equal to the future.

Sacolick concludes that, from his vantage point, “The key skills needed include knowing how to implement automations and integrations, using more no-code/low-code solutions than DIY, delivering reliable infrastructure with elastic scale up/down, and driving agile co-creation with biz and partners.”

Parting Words

Clearly, getting after IT productivity limiters matters. CIOs certainly have their work cut out for themselves. The good news is that there are concrete actions for moving forward, and by adding the right skills, real change is possible.