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When it comes to deploying the IT troops, old models of command and control don't work.
BY ANONYMOUS
DURING A BOARD DINNER a while back, I managed to get myself trapped in a predictably overheated argument about the best method for managing projects and organizing IT departments. One of the other board members (also a CIO) and I decided to entertain the rest of the committee by pointing out the various and fatal flaws in each other's approach.
Now stand back and watch as I try not to shoot any cheese up my nose. As I see it, IT organization charts and project execution ought to be less about managing IT and more about managing users and the needs of the company. A good CIO has to overcome her natural tendency to want to mix it up in the trenches and
file://D:\Clients\2003\KPMG-ABS\Resources%20&%20reference\articles\Let's%20Get%20 10/28/2003
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must be careful not to overcontrol a department, especially a big one. An effective CIO stands far enough back to observe what is going on, calibrate and refine. Get the strategy right, the saying goes, and any middle manager can work out the tactics best suited for the situation. If you don't agree, it may be because you're a control nut.
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company's most creative, capable talent to address the shortterm needs of your green-money customers. A big mistake. Furthermore, nameless, faceless IT people in far-off places make for ready-made villains and highly useful scapegoats when things don't go as planned. For IT folks, this remoteness and the sense of being only a small part of a very big project plays hell with morale, workmanship, productivity and innovation.
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servers, and centralize the database design and management on universal data servers to ensure compliance with standards and uniformity of results. That takes us a half-step toward a long-predicted environment where users write the applications and we manage the platforms. Eventually, secret IT teams (skunk works that appear when central IT is unresponsive) were absorbed into departmental IT teams, development cycles got shorter, morale went up, and solutions The closer and got more focused and timely. At one of more directly IT the companies I left, the changes I made lasted only as long as I did. Slap people interact with end users a seed cap on his head and call him and customers, Bubba, the CIO that replaced me simply couldn't figure out how to make the better the a decentralized model work. results. The fundamental things apply (as time goes by). Even if the pros and cons of the centralized versus decentralized approaches added up to a draw, the tiebreaker must, in the end, be systems users and green-money customers. It seems intuitively obvious to me that the closer and more directly IT people interact with end users and customers, the better the results. Filtering design requirements through "subject-matter experts," or whatever they're being called these days, with their associate biases and yield loss of information quality, is a waste of money and time. If a decentralized approach (giving power away to the users) can be said to be harder to manageand I think it isit must then follow that CIOs choose to manage centrally in order to make it easier on IT. Is that why we're here? Well, is it?
Care to disagree? Then get out those poison pens and write to Anonymous at confidential@cio.com. Anonymous has been a CIO at household-name companies for more than a dozen years. ILLUSTRATION BY JENNIFER JESSEE
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http://www.cio.com/archive/091501/confidential.html