Value-Driven IT Management. Commercializing the IT Function

320 Pages·2003·3.37 MB·English

by  Iain Aitken (Auth.)

Butterworth-Heinemann
An imprint of Elsevier
Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP
200 Wheeler Road, Burlington, MA 01803
First published 2003
Copyright © 2003, Iain Aitken. All rights reserved
The right of Iain Aitken to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988
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Note: every effort has been made to trace owners of copyright material but the author
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ISBN 0 7506 59254
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Computer Weekly Professional Series
There are few professions which require as much continuous
updating as that of the IT executive. Not only does the hardware
and software scene change relentlessly, but also ideas about the
actual management of the IT function are being continuously
modified, updated and changed. Thus keeping abreast of what
is going on is really a major task.
The Butterworth-Heinemann – Computer Weekly Professional
Series has been created to assist IT executives keep up to date
with the management ideas and issues of which they need to be
aware.
One of the key objectives of the series is to reduce the time it
takes for leading edge management ideas to move from the
academic and consulting environments into the hands of the IT
practitioner. Thus this series employs appropriate technology to
speed up the publishing process. Where appropriate some
books are supported by CD-ROM or by additional information
or templates located on the Web.
This series provides IT professionals with an opportunity to
build up a bookcase of easily accessible, but detailed informa-
tion on the important issues that they need to be aware of to
successfully perform their jobs.
Aspiring or already established authors are invited to get in
touch with me directly if they would like to be published in this
series.
Dr Dan Remenyi
Series Editor
[e-mail]
ix
Computer Weekly Professional Series
Series Editor
Dan Remenyi, Visiting Professor, Trinity College Dublin
Advisory Board
Frank Bannister, Trinity College Dublin
Ross Bentley, Management Editor, Computer Weekly
Egon Berghout, Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands
Ann Brown, City University Business School, London
Roger Clark, The Australian National University
Reet Cronk, Harding University, Arkansas, USA
Arthur Money, Henley Management College, UK
Sue Nugus, MCIL, UK
David Taylor, CERTUS, UK
Terry White, BentleyWest, Johannesburg
Other titles in the Series
Corporate politics for IT managers: how to get streetwise
Delivering IT and e-business value
eBusiness implementation
eBusiness strategies for virtual organizations
The effective measurement and management of IT costs and benefits
ERP: the implementation cycle
A hacker’s guide to project management
How to become a successful IT consultant
How to manage the IT helpdesk
Information warfare: corporate attack and defence in a digital world
IT investment – making a business case
Knowledge management – a blueprint for delivery
Make or break issues in IT management
Making IT count
Network security
Prince 2: a practical handbook
The project manager’s toolkit
Reinventing the IT department
Understanding the Internet
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Acknowledgements
This book has been built on the foundations of my experiences
advising a wide range of major organizations in both the private
and public sectors. As a business advisor I have been in a very
privileged position, giving me extraordinary access to ask
probing (and sometimes impertinent!) questions of people from
the board to the trainee programmer. Had these people not been
(generally) frank and open with me then this book could
certainly not have been written. Therefore my thanks go to all
those unfortunate victims over the years who have been
subjected to my disarming interviewing technique!
Iain Aitken
[e-mail]
xi
My way of joking is to tell the truth.
It’s the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw (1907)
Preface: the Four Noble Truths
She took to telling the truth; she said she was forty-two and five
months. It may have been pleasing to the angels, but her elder sister
was not gratified.
Saki
My name is Iain Aitken and I am a management consultant.
There. I’ve said it. Yes, I am one of those smiling suits who are
brought in by senior management to see the big picture, think
outside the box, stretch the envelope and go the extra mile to
visualize blue sky, synergistic, holistic, proactive, client-focused,
paradigm shifting, win–win, fast-track solutions to wholly
insoluble problems. For years I was in denial. But when you find
yourself secreting emergency jargon under the bed and in the
broom closet you have to face the fact that you are the one who
has a problem.
It is a sad (but cathartic) confession because my profession is
generally perceived to be a tad unpopular. Not, perhaps, up
there with used car salesmen, tort lawyers and international
terrorists, but nevertheless held by many to also be an
unnecessary evil. And an expensive one at that. All right, we
may be perceived to be unpopular, unnecessary, evil and
expensive, but are we worth it? Well, the late Douglas Adams
paid us the compliment of equating our worth with that of that
other great professional elite, telephone sanitizers. However, let
me temper my confession by pointing out that I am now a self-
employed, semi-retired and independent management consultant.
This bestows upon me certain important freedoms. In particular,
that freedom enshrined in the First Amendment of the American
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Preface: the Four Noble Truths
Constitution, but denied to all of us who have products to sell,
freedom of speech. I will exercise this freedom in this book and
offer advice that is not necessarily the kind of advice you might
expect to receive from the typical management consultant. I will
attempt, in short, to tell the truth, even if occasionally this means
my breaking the management consultants’ omerta` and appar-
ently placing my profession under a pedestal.
Please understand that by this I do not mean to suggest that the
typical management consultant is actually dishonest. Perish the
thought. I spent 16 years working for ‘Big 6/5/4’ management
consultancy firms and I can say (trust me on this) that I was
never put in a position in which I was required to (explicitly) lie.
I simply mean that there are times when a certain dash of
disingenuousness, even a soupçon of sophistry, is required.
Typically this is because consultants believe that clients don’t
want to be told the plain and uncomfortable truth, won’t thank
you for it and, most to the point, won’t ask you back. Of course,
the most plain and uncomfortable truth of all (which, of course,
we nevertell clients) is that often the only real hope they have of
addressing their problems is to change their senior management
team. That’s right, the people who commissioned you and who
will now not be paying your bill. However, that is an extreme
example. More typically it is simply an issue of telling the client
about his ‘opportunities for improvement’ (i.e. weaknesses) in
the form of palatable half truths. However, as Arthur Koestler
said, ‘Two half truths do not make a truth.’
In my experience, most management consultants accept that on
many (oh, all right, most) occasions the benefits promised from
implementing the recommendations in their reports fail to
materialize fully (if at all). The main reason typically given (by
management consultants) is that the client failed to fully act (if
at all) on the advice they were given. It is hardly the consultant’s
fault if the client accepts the findings and recommendations and
then does little or nothing about it, is it? Plausible, very
plausible, but ...
A classic example of this occurred when I conducted a review of
the IT management and delivery practices at a major food
retailer. The final presentation to the CIO (chief information
officer, or ‘IT director’) and his senior management team was
quite uncompromising in its criticisms and made quite radical
recommendations for change (although, as we will see in the
case study in Chapter 3, perhaps not radical enough). At the end
of my presentation I went round the table asking for feedback
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Preface: the Four Noble Truths
and reactions from each member of the management team.
Every single one of them was unhesitating in agreeing that our
findings and proposals were sound. We were congratulated on
our insight into their problems and our far-reaching and
uncompromising recommendations for change. It was, in short,
too easy. So before leaving the venue I obtained agreement from
the CIO subsequently to interview each of his managers,
ostensibly just to ensure that they understood the changes they
would be required to make on their own ‘patch’ in order to
deliver on the recommendations. When I did so the response I
got from every manager, without exception, demonstrated that
they were wasted in an IT career and should really move into
politics. Basically, everyone agreed that it was a superb piece of
consultancy work, that it had accurately identified the problems
and that the recommendations for change were critically
required. Having gained agreement on these points I then asked
them when they would be implementing the changes in their
department. Ah, came the reply, for complex reasons, in their
particular, unique, department, it wouldn’t really be entirely
appropriate, or the timing, unfortunately, was really not good or
further work would, of course, be required, or the sun was,
unfortunately, in Aries etc. But everyone else should certainly
adopt our proposals immediately.
This lack of true buy-in to change by key stakeholders is an
endemic problem in any proposed programme of change. It is
fundamentally important and I will make much of it in the
‘change implementation’ sections of Chapters 3, 4 and 5. While
human capacity for change may be huge (when needs must),
human willingness to change is very limited (when there is no
overwhelming mandate to change or when there are a hundred
other competing pressures). In many cases of organizational
change there is a fundamental lack of understanding by the
sponsors of change of how people actually respond. The by no
means atypical response of individuals who must change their
behaviours or working practices to realize the benefits of change
could well be characterized as follows.
(cid:2) I don’t really understand why they are doing this and the little
I do understand I’m not sure I agree with.
(cid:2) No one asked my opinion, thank you very much.
(cid:2) Maybe it suits others but it sure doesn’t suit the way I
work.
(cid:2) I don’t see what’s in it for me – in fact, it might make me look
bad.
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Preface: the Four Noble Truths
(cid:2) I’ll get no thanks for adopting this – it’s just more
aggravation.
(cid:2) I’m stressed enough without this too.
(cid:2) This just shows how little they trust me.
(cid:2) OK, the way I work now may not be ideal – but it took me
years to get my mind round it and it works for me.
(cid:2) The guys at the top aren’t really committed to this; give it a
few months and it will all blow over with the next ‘crisis’.
(cid:2) Even the guys at the top don’t really wantto do this – they just
want to be seen to do this so it makes them look good.
(cid:2) They are going to expect me to do this in my spare time – what
spare time?
(cid:2) They are being silly about how quickly they are trying to do
this.
(cid:2) They made a mess of the last set of changes and they’ll do the
same this time.
(cid:2) This is going to cost time and money that could better be
spent elsewhere.
(cid:2) But ... I guess I’ll have to go through the motions and
outwardly pretend to support this in order to protect my
backside – what a farce!
This is sometimes (oh, all right, often) coupled with a ‘corporate
culture’ that produces management teams that can display all
the commercial acumen and entrepreneurial zeal of the average
novice in a nunnery (I exaggerate only a little). We tend to think
of the words ‘corporate’ and ‘commercial’ as almost being
synonyms. But in my experience there is, ironically, no quality
rarer in ‘corporate management man’ (especially when it is a
man) than common (commercial) sense. In this culture the main
way to get ahead is based far more on rhetoric than results. You
talk and talk and always talk ‘politically correctly’ (‘I’m 100 per
cent behind this initiative, which will empower our greatest
assets, our people, and maximize shareholder value, blah blah
blah . . . ‘) but actually do little or nothing but keep your head
below the parapet (‘It will probably fail and I’m 100 per cent
sure I’m not going down with this initiative’). Here you have a
recipe for complacency, conservatism and stagnation, the name
of the game being to ‘talk the talk’ but not ‘walk the talk’.
Were consultants to tell the ‘whole truth’ they might well say at
the end of their final presentation to client management, ‘Those,
gentlemen, were my 30 key recommendations for change ...
Mind you, quite aside from the bureaucratic and uncommercial
culture that permeates your entire organization, generally low
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Preface: the Four Noble Truths
calibre of management and the total absence of anyone with the
requisite leadership skills to make change actually happen, we
all know you are far too frightened of change and far too busy
doing things the way you have always done them to have a
hope in hell of implementing a fraction of these recommenda-
tions this century. However, the good news is that I’ve learned a
lot and billed a lot.’
My other key concern is to honestly face up to the fact that the
recommendations made by consultants are typically rooted in
advising clients to adopt ‘industry best practices’. What could
possibly be wrong with that, you may say. Well, as I hope to
show in Chapter 2, ‘industry best practices’ may produce
‘higher quality’ solutions but do not necessarily produce the
best commercial outcomes. In the first place, ‘quality’ has a price
tag and in the second place ‘quality’ does not necessarily equate
to value being added to the business. Were consultants to tell the
whole truth they might well say, ‘Those, gentlemen, were my 30
key recommendations for change. They are firmly rooted in
international best practice and if you adopt them you should
become a “world class IT” organization . . . Mind you, it will cost
you a fortune to make and sustain all these changes and you
probably won’t contribute much more to the business bottom
line at the end of it, but, hey, that’s not my problem. Have a nice
day.’
Management consultancy (like, I suspect, politics) is a job that
tends to engender a degree of cynicism. You see, consultants just
can’t tell the whole truth. And if they did, then of course they
wouldn’t be in a position to sell on all that consultancy work to
help you implement the 30 key recommendations, would they?
Aside from confronting the senior management team with an
honest appraisal of their leadership (in)ability, the ‘whole truth’
would probably include something like, ‘Instead of those 30
“key” best practice recommendations for change, here are half a
dozen critical things you should do to genuinely transform the
business value of IT in your company. Given that some of these
things you already do reasonably well, you should be able to
make these changes, and make them stick, in the next year or so,
if you really focus on them (and you have a bit of luck). At the
end of it you won’t get any “world class IT” awards but you will
get the respect of the business you serve. Oh, and by the way,
you can probably make these changes with little or no external
consultancy support. In fact, we have found much the same
problems in virtually all our other clients so this job was really
quite simple for us. So we will only be billing you half of our
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