Have you ever been to a dinner and known that one of the guests is about to get a surprise? The tingling excitement seeing their normal carry on persona until “it” happens and everyone shrieks in laughter. Well I sometimes feel IT / Business meetings are a bit like that – each side sharing what they think is important and when problems happen they ask “how could they have not known about that?”
The big IT decisions are taken in leadership governance forums, structured to get the right level of input about the opportunities and threats from the business, and likewise from technology. The trouble is that they don’t know everything that we know (on either side of the table). In fact often we don’t think they have sufficient understanding of the realities of the world we live in (again common to both sides).
People have to take decisions based on their understanding of the relevance and quality of the information in front of them. And if you want to get good outcomes, you have to take good decisions. So how do you develop effective governance in the organization. I have a few tips:
- The business side needs to see technology literacy as a core development requirement of its leaders. This is not about giving them an i-pad, but teaching them about the value of frameworks, the role of enterprise architecture and service models. Formal courses are required here and an increased technology focus in MBA courses would be a good start.
- There just has to be less optimism around IT solutions and more realism. Yes they are the free lunch that accounting firms drool over (while the IT folk work through lunch); but miracles don’t happen, they are dragged out by strong leadership teams steering a steady course and holding to realistic business outcomes – just like the team did with the Collins Class improvements.
- The people mix has to be right. You need governance teams with perceptive insight. These may not be the operationally focussed IT staff who have been promoted for brilliantly resolving the ceaseless IT outages. More likely it is the analysts or architects who will develop to GOVN7 competencies.
- The information that is shared has to be just right! The governance meetings may take up only a few percentage of the working week. What information to share and what to leave under the covers becomes very important. For project governance, this is reasonably well understood. As you move to programme, portfolio and business process governance, it comes down to having the right leaders with the perceptive insights of what is really important.
I have been a member of a State Government programme board for one of the largest IT projects in the country. We used to receive 300 page board packs, supplemented with consultants’ reports that ran to 100 pages each. Fortunately we had perspicacious board members who knew where the really important information was – and it was very rarely in the executive summary!
So how do you think we can improve knowledge on both sides of the table?