What should be changed first – the CIO, the IT team or the IT strategy?

Wants the IT function to delve into the Business issues themselves, look for solutions and propose the best ones that deliver maximum business impact at minimum cost.

IT requires a ToR for every change, without a request no one wants to even talk. If there are problems in the business, they say that everything works in IT, and we don't care about the rest, etc. They don't understand business problems.

Black box and blackmail

Wants to be able to manage IT costs, operating with the concepts of task priorities, risks, sequence of task solutions. Have the ability to verify decisions made. Understand the relationship between costs and business benefits.

IT incurs constant costs for equipment, FOT and licences, saying that if we don't buy it, ‘everything will collapse’. That said, the Business has no choice. Either we buy urgently or ‘we're all going to die’. There is no correlation between costs and business effect. The Business answers the questions posed with difficulty or does not answer at all.

Wants to be guided in making decisions that have long-term implications for the company by the best available expertise to help make the best value for money decisions.

IT makes decisions based on immediate circumstances, here-and-now knowledge and constraints. This leads to the creation of new constraints that gradually snowball and eventually create problems for the development and even normal functioning of the company.

Inexperienced, can't communicate, doesn't know the market, doesn't work with employees, barks at everyone, doesn't make contact, etc.

It's as simple as that

I had an experience of working in a company where in the struggle for the management's favour it was the norm to accuse one's colleagues of failures, to give evidence of their mistakes in public, to humiliate them in front of everyone, to set them up. And this was at the level of top management. This was encouraged from the owner's side and went all the way down the vertical chain from top to bottom. There were two categories of employees in this company - careerists who liked these rules of the game and actively used them, and opportunists who had nowhere else to go, so they tolerated and abstracted themselves from what was happening. Other categories of employees did not stay long and dropped out on their own, the culture squeezed them out. Needless to say, in this company the IT department was to blame for absolutely all the problems, and IT directors were changed more than once a year (as, by the way, were other top managers).

Obviously, passivity in such a culture is a defensive reaction, and bureaucracy is a way of dealing with the environment, of defending against it.

It is impossible to change the culture in only one division and not change the rest.

You have to change it everywhere, starting with the PM. If the PM cannot or does not want to change, the PM must be changed. If the LPR is a business owner, it is necessary to remove him from operational activities for the benefit of his own business.

No other solutions will change the situation. Not a change in the CIO, not a change in the IT team.

I recently encountered a situation when the entire department refused to change the established rules of work, citing the fact that the requirements to be transparent for business are not interesting for them and they will not fulfil them. I will write a separate article on this topic later, it is a very interesting story.

And this happens all over the place, on different scales. People are used to not being controlled, because they do not realise that they are left to themselves and that they are irreplaceable in the current environment. They begin to oppose themselves to the company and the environment, to exploit their exceptional position. And the habit was to reduce the amount of work by fencing themselves with requests and requests for requests. Eventually it led to the fact that almost everyone who could afford it refused to work with this department. And those who couldn't, were forced to endure being held hostage.

Change, starting with a dissident executive. ‘Cut without waiting for peritonitis’ (C). This issue is closely related to the first point. It is the IT director's responsibility to prevent this state of affairs from happening. Even if he is new to the company and the saboteurs have been there for a long time. This is entirely on the CIO's conscience. You have the right to demand that he solve the problem. If he cannot solve it, see point one.

The CIO can't explain the need in terms the business understands - money, risk, business impact. He or she lacks experience and/or expertise.

If there is a lack of knowledge, you can send for training. After that, you can give a chance to gain experience and consolidate the skill. You can bring in a mentor from the market, who will help to build processes and pull up your IT director. But if he doesn't want to develop himself, or training doesn't help, then change. Perhaps he needs a different scale or a different company to work comfortably.

Ensuring business transparency is also a job that requires resources for itself. The accounting department of an enterprise can be taken as an example. Purely theoretically, the enterprise can work without accounting, and even faster and better than with it. No one will not require documents and the correctness of their filling. However, this enterprise is likely to exist for a short time.

It's important to realise that allocating resource to build transparency and manageability of IT costs, although it will increase local costs, will eventually pay off by making better decisions on the right numbers. Decisions made on numbers are usually more accurate than decisions made intuitively, unless we're talking about astrology and guessing at coffee grounds.

In the previous block I have already announced a case about a team that is not interested in transparency. The reasons can be quite different, but most often it is about hiding information. Hiding what is being done, how much time is spent, what tasks are being solved, how many tasks were solved in a week and what are the plans for the next week. The key objective is not to give material for formulating the right questions from the management. With equipment purchases, by the way, it was the same story there.

We don't negotiate with terrorists. If it turns out that the reason is not a lack of experience or knowledge, but malicious intent, we must weed them out mercilessly. Don't let such a culture spread to the neighborhood.

If IT processes assume a ‘well approach’, i.e. each performer is only involved in its own narrow loop, without intersecting with others, there will be nowhere for broad thinking to take place.

It is the direct task of the CIO to ensure that he is fully competent in both technical and business expertise. Unless he or she has the obvious problems described in the following paragraphs, it is his or her responsibility to meet the challenge.

It can be expressed either in extremely low rates for positions, or in a shortage that does not allow hiring and/or retaining experienced specialists with a broad outlook, but only enough for juniors.

I've encountered a situation where a company's HR department decided that the market was unfair and that the salary ceiling for IT employees would be what HRD wanted it to be. This led to the fact that the entire previous IT team scattered from under such a ceiling, and junas who were not hired by other companies were hastily hired for these positions. How do you think this affected the bottom line? The company saved money on FTP, but then paid triple the price in results.

If there is no one to work with, the result will be difficult to achieve. Obviously, one should not go to the other extreme in the form of wasting resources either. but the minimum necessary resource with competences should be there. And the task of the CIO is to outline it and show it to the PM for joint decision-making.