Want to Implement AI? Repair your IT Dept First.

Embrace being in the business of relationships, not technology

CIO’s have had a challenging job for some time. Reduced resources, ever increasing complexity of technology, lack of skilled workers and most of all the never ending flood of security risks. It’s a difficult job. AI can, and should, be expected to make it easier in some respects but not if you don’t do the one thing you’ve been resisting: Change.

I’m not going to write an essay on AI implementation. Nope, that’s for later. First we must address foundational issues that still plague many IT departments around the world at a time when we must all be on our A game. As an IT leader you need technically competent, engaged and engaging employees. You must traverse the gap between technology and business every day and support your organization in delivering on its customer promises.

No, you aren’t an Agile shop - you’re practicing “Bad-gile”

Many corporate IT departments were swept up in the Agile development craze. Unfortunately, only a few actually transitioned to true Agile practices. Instead, they implemented what I call, “Bad-gile”; a mish mosh of faster projects with less definition and even worse stakeholder management. They actually missed the point of what Agile was supposed to bring to IT which was a greater ability to speed delivery and deeper relationships with our stakeholders.

The time where this could be tolerated is over. It is time for all CIO’s to face and be rid of the things that are blocking them from greatness. What I’m writing is based not only on my decades of experience in corporate IT but the privilege of getting to talk to many IT professionals and leaders in the course of my work at Microsoft. Follow along with me here.

You have more work and less people - That logically means you must capture and prioritize your backlog of work more efficiently. How can you prioritize if you don’t have deep meaningful understanding of your workforce and customers? You got it - you can’t. This lack of insight into the business value you can deliver leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of political and financial shenanigans that occur every day in corporations around the world. Time to fix this.

Own, deploy and analyze listening systems that capture data from customers and employees.

Go TALK to employees to find out what is working in their area. Conduct research. While other departments may own similar processes no one is going to look at the information with your lens. Honor your own wisdom about your organization which is quite different from HR or Marketing. Prioritize 1:1 or 1:few small meetings with your most important leaders, fans and foes, to invest in your relationships. You are going to need them.

You need engaged talent, and different types of skills for the future we’re being asked to build. For too long we’ve indulged a stereotype about IT professionals. Similar in some ways to developers (because often we are wearing both hats) we have a reputation for not really liking to talk to “users”. We can be gruff and off putting to some. Our communication style does not always lend itself to understanding, instead diving deep into the hard won depth of our knowledge and leaving the average stakeholders behind. All this is true. That’s because “Sally”, who’s brilliant at network management, really should not be writing the front line onboarding guide’s section on security best practices! A person with user facing communications skills needs to partner with Sally to get this done in a way that non-technical humans will understand. We need a varied set of skills to bring everyone in the organization along for this next decade of change.

It’s time for IT to formally embrace diversity of skill set within the wall of the modern IT department. Communicators, trainers, adoption specialists, product and service managers while all technically competent lead with different but essential skills. Our job as IT leaders is to blend these people into a cohesive team. We can not allow a division between the user enablement folks and the deep technical folks. Our leadership has failed them in this way. Each of the many roles I could articulate here from corporate developer to network manager to user experience designers is essential to your future success. You must change the way you lead, to meet each of these people, with their different motivations where they live. If you don’t understand those motivations, see the paragraphs above about listening systems and 1:1 meetings.

Lastly, we must improve our skills at following the money and capturing some for ourselves.

All too often I hear from IT leaders about the financial crunch their teams are under. No matter the profitability of the company money doesn’t seem to flow easily into IT. That’s our fault. Referring to points #1 and #2 - we weren’t listening and we didn’t hire someone who can deeply communicate with business users, like the heads of the departments where money exists. Shadow IT doesn’t exist only because we failed to delivery quickly. It also exists because marketing, sales, customer service and basically ANY other department gets money before we do. They are better at it. Time to change this.

As leaders we must dedicate a portion of our time and leadership skill to improving our ability to hunt. We must hunt on behalf of our teams to bring opportunity, resources and funding into our realm. We can only do that when we speak the language of the decision maker and offer something they truly want - results that they define. This is alongside the results we must deliver like security, accessibility and operational up-time. Our job is to make other people the hero of their own story while in turn being hero’s ourselves. Would it hurt us to hire someone in IT who has enterprise sales in their background? Who can clearly articulate the business value of the project at hand, without a bunch of techno-jargon? Features don’t sell projects. Decisions are primarily based on emotion, confidence, and above all, HOPE. Once we get that tentative hope from our business partners we must deliver on it or be very clear what is in our way. As leaders we are in the business of relationship not technology. This is the fundamental shift in thinking we must embrace.

We haven’t historically been that comfortable with emotions in our world. That has to change if we want to create a better future for our IT department employees. We must hunt projects for our business stakeholders so they choose US to deliver for them and not yet another 3rd party vendor or goddess-forbid hire a dev team themselves.

If you can’t tell, I’m not a fan of distributing accountability for IT systems across departments. I view that as a response to our failure to keep up - not with the delivery of capabilities - but with the relationships across our companies that allowed us to expand. We failed the hunt so people decided to hunt for themselves.

So, before you embark upon the next great transformational project in your organization, which AI of any flavor purports to be, fix and be rid of these foundational problems.

You want every business leaders in your company to talk about how essential you are to their success when you aren’t in the room. You need them to like working with your teams because they feel heard and supporting in their business objectives. You want the happy morale of your diverse and talented team to be its own recruiting magnet so you won’t fall prey to the IT talent shortage with constant employee churn.

If you can honestly say all these positives are mostly true, then you are ready to proceed forward and implement AI. We’ll talk about that next. Thanks for dropping by.