Interestingly, each year, for the last 10 years, a number of technology management researchers have consistently reported the same IT management concerns. Each of these concerns have centered around common themes to improve the management of IT. In our experience, we have seen these concerns get addressed (and or resolved) when technology and business team together to achieve common business results.

Top 10 Key IT Management Concerns:

• Alignment of IT and / with the business
• Security / Privacy
• Business Productivity
• Business Agility
• Business Process Management
• Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery
• IT Time to Market
• Time-to-Market / Velocity of Change
• IT Cost Reduction / Controls
• IT Value Proposition to the business

A Perceptive Problem

Teams come together and corporate functions engage on a common purpose to achieve corporate goals. Poor engagement organization and modeling remains the number one perceptive problem that senior management needs to address.

We see this happens due to one of two reasons:
1. Employee disengagement or, in other words, each corporate individual disengages and takes no responsibility to promote and or engage/collaborate with other individuals, or

2. Leadership’s inability to engage collectively with each other. This is partly due to cultural and management functional issues. Territorial or silo problems persist when functional leaders manage outcomes separately, and ultimately create additional work.
Individuals contribute, Teams solve problems, Leadership motivates

Alignment

Alignment of IT, and/with the business assumes a current state of where IT is acting as a task taker when dealing with the business, has no joint ownership of business results and is an internal service provider to business sponsors. This condition is outdated, where progressive firms today, have spent time encouraging joint ownership of delivery, invested in cross-functional teaming efforts and adhered to the basic principles of project management teaming. Secondly, Business Agility is measured by business results and delivery. When combined cross functional teams engage effectively, ownership is shared, alignment is seamless and IT is an active participant and contributor to promote business agility, flexibility and alignment.

Value

IT’s Value Proposition to the business, and time to market are important contributors to enterprise and business value. Today, IT’s value cannot be separated unless technology drivers are tracked separately to business drivers. More often than not technology innovation, disruptive technology change and business transformation drivers are the major contributors to enterprise value, and or share price increase. To separate technology management and business value is futile and redundant. When teams come together to solve business problems, business cases get proposed collectively, design and execution is performed in role based teams and measurements of success are team based. Overall, business value increases when teams produce results.

Productivity

In order for productivity to increase it means that output and (input) contribution have to increase. In our experience, we have seen firms that embrace taking a business process management and business productivity approach to solutions have a higher level of success than firms that solve technology only, or business only problems. Technology transformation, product development and any business process when analyzed, designed or actioned upon follow a supply chain continuum. Role based teams perform independently and collectively, as these project teams include representation from each function involved in a business process. Team and deliverable productivity are tracked and easily measured using basic project management techniques. Member performance drives team performance drives enterprise performance.

Controls

Management typically control costs, ensure business continuity and protect security and privacy of people and assets. In our experience, if these problems are tackled separately (IT and other business units), common enterprise-level solutions get missed and or work effort is duplicated. We see functional controls as having consistent themes in terms of process, technology and people. More often than not, today, firms are collectively addressing organization teaming approaches to solve control and compliance issues across functional groups. Teams are consistently being held accountable for costs and controls that span functional boundaries and are project specific.

How exactly does teaming help to solve these concerns?
Technology transformation is starting to take an enterprise teaming approach. Governance and strategic planning of enterprise deliverables is putting a sharper focus on the people, processes and technologies needed to successfully execute all projects. It does not make sense for companies to use limited functional resources as they have in the past.

By forming teams at all levels helps to channel team energy at the right level;

1. steering group; strategic planning and decisioning at the executive level,
2. at the operation level; program specific, functional execution, and
3. lastly at tactical level; project teams address the execution aspects of solution delivery.

Enterprise groups are more commonly addressing technology change and transformation challenges by taking enterprise teaming approaches vs having each function solve problems individually. There are a number of recent trends that are reshaping how projects get managed today and in the future.

• Trend 1: Focus on strategy over projects
• Trend 2: The move away from operations hierarchies to leverage employee strengths (roles)
• Trend 3: The increased need for accountability and social responsibility
• Trend 4: More emphasis on softer collaboration skills, not just technical training
• Trend 5: Remote work, collaboration tools & increased “out of the box” security tools

In conclusion

Overall, we find that IT and management thereof is becoming more strategic and business focused. It appears that organizations are becoming more digitized with their focus shifting away from tactical and organizational IT issues like efficiency, service delivery, and cost reduction to more strategic and organizational priorities like business agility, innovation, the velocity change in the organization, IT time to market, and the value of business. These trends among global organizations confirm that there is a shift in how CIOs are spending their time encouraging and engaging in business driven teams.

Written by Terry Coull. Terry is a management consultant focusing on transformation and continuous improvement in technology today. This is part 6 of a series of informative team-centric leading practice white-papers.