If you can’t, you look at how things can change so you can meet the order. Your responsibilities are very clear: If an order comes in from a sales team, you can look at your plant capacity and see if you can fulfill it or not. Imagine you’re the head of manufacturing. And it inevitably means that the metrics by which the IT department is measured are often irrelevant to the success of the business. The problem starts with what I think of as the “partnership engagement model,” which is a natural outgrowth of having a separate IT department that is promoted as a partner to the “business.” While intuitively appealing-who wouldn’t want to be seen as a partner?-this model positions the IT island as a supplier, mandated to build IT solutions and deliver services to the mainland.
It is deeply fused with the work of staff, a core enabler of business models, and driver of customer experience. Covid-19 has only reinforced the fact that most organizations can’t survive without tech. Leaving IT decisions and activities to a department that is figuratively and sometimes physically far from the so-called core business is a recipe for disaster.Īfter all, technology is no longer an option, something distinct it is a competitive necessity. Today, while the departments may have chic new names (“global digital solutions,” anyone?), the idea of corralling all staff with knowledge and expertise deemed necessary to manage IT into one organizational unit no longer makes sense. That made sense when there was business, and there was technology. Originally known as the “computer department,” they had a strictly back-office function, making sure the organization’s computers kept running. To understand how we got here, it helps to remember why IT departments came into being. And their examples offer models for others looking to do the same. The encouraging news is there are also a small number of pioneers who are ditching their IT departments. It’s with the whole idea of IT departments in the first place, which sets up IT to fail. The problem isn’t with the people or the leaders. We all love to complain about our IT departments-blaming the people in them and their leaders for living in their own worlds, and for being unresponsive to business needs. That’s because IT departments are for a bygone era and are ill-suited to the demands of a digital-first world. Just look at any organization’s structure, and you are very likely to see a rectangular box labeled IT, with its own management hierarchy and budget.īut here’s the sad fact: Having an IT department is exactly what will prevent companies from being innovative, agile, customer-focused and digitally transformed. And the IT department shouldn’t be one, either.ĭespite their mission, which often talks about driving corporatewide innovation and digital transformation, chief information officers, as heads of these departments, are frequently reduced to running a metaphorical island. It’s Time to Get Rid of the IT DepartmentIt made sense in a bygone era, when technology was separate from the business. Having an IT department on its own island is exactly what will prevent companies from being innovative, agile and digitally transformed. MICHAEL PARKIN
It very likely reveals they are also becoming gradually more apathetic about customer experience, process efficiency, and product modernization-and those parallel apathies will spell the end, not their IT apathy. It’s unlikely that their apathy towards meaningful investment in brand-defining process automation is isolated only to IT. They are unwilling to properly invest in needed process automation, and leaving LOB (line of business) middle managers to fend for themselves out of their own budgets… (through shadow IT or the consumerization of enterprise IT.) If they’re unwilling to invest in the robust automation of the workflows and business processes that define their brand, there’s probably other really, really important stuff that they aren’t investing in either. They’re going to crater because it is only one small symptom of the unwillingness of senior management to understand, optimize, and automate their business. They’re not going to crater because it’s wasteful. IT organization and consumption strategy is an area where I have deep consulting expertise.