Business thinking is filtering through IT. Soon IT will be part of the business and everyone in IT will have to think that way. But for many geeks, this might be a struggle.
The concept of business-IT alignment is well accepted. It even has its own acronym, bITa. It is so well accepted that we are on to the next big thing: business-IT integration. “Alignment” is, like, so 2007.
Whatever you call it, the concept that IT needs to work for the business, with the business and ultimately in the business is well entrenched.
The IT Service Management (ITSM) movement is driven by the demand for bITa. ITSM is IT’s response to business expectation that IT will think in business terms, communicate in business terms, and most of all spend money in business terms instead of technological ones.
There has been a change in the nature of CIOs over the past decade, from the days when most CIOs came up through the technical ranks and many of them never understood the business, to today when most CIOs are outward-facing business people who represent IT in the executive councils of the organisation. The day-to-day running of IT is delegated to operational managers -– fewer CIOs are hands on. And more often than not they have come in from outside IT to run it.
Certainly we still have a ways to go. CIOInsight.com reports that “Just 31 percent of the 281 CIOs we polled have earned an MBA… (Most CIOs instead earned degrees in science, math and engineering.)” But I think a third of CIOs with an MBA would be a lot higher than in 1998, and certainly would exceed that of 1988!
The trends are positive. IT strategic plans tend to be informed by the business strategic plan instead of Windows releases or the advent of new technologies. A concept growing in popularity is that there is no such thing as an IT strategic plan, just the IT part of the business plan.
So CIOs get it. They understand that IT has to think as part of the business. They grok business.
Among the next tier down of IT management, my experience is that the level of “business-grok” is variable. IT managers range from suits to geeks. Some know the business, some know that they don’t know the business, and some don’t even know what it is they ought to know.
A Hybrid Manager is "A person with strong technical skills and adequate business knowledge or vice versa" (Dr. Michael Earl). According to Dr. David Skyrme, the term Hybrid Manager was first coined in the 1980s! We have been waiting a long time.
So CIOs are grokking business, IT managers are a mixed bag. What about the workers? There seems to be no research of this question, but common perception is that the process has only just begun. A few people talk the talk, but the culture of almost all IT organisations is not a business-centric one. The geeks don’t grok business.
ITSM is playing a role in getting the message across. Many people think ITSM is about improving service or saving money. It isn’t. It usually improves service and it just might save some money, but the purpose of Service Management (of anything) is to get deliverers thinking in terms of customers. In IT we hope this will better align IT with the business.
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