The Enlightened IT Leader
Part I of 4
Mr. George Lin, CIO of Documentum, developed the concept of the Tao of IT Leaders to deal with challenging leadership, management, and alignment issues surrounding IT. "Tao" means "the enlightened way." The Tao IT Leader is the enlightened way in which CIO's can enable business success, through wisdom rather than brute force.
The Tao of IT Leaders is comprised of five fundamentals of "leading by example," five strategies for "uniting the forces," and two practices for "sustaining success."
The five fundamentals lead to both alignment within IT and alignment between IT and the business, creating an environment in which IT can be an effective service provider and a valuable business enabler. The five strategies enable alignment within the business, leveraging IT's role as a business partner. The two practices enable a sustainable upward success spiral for the CIO.
CIO's often try to attack conflicts and problems head on and to maintain tight control, thinking that by doing so they can better achieve their goals. More often than not, they achieve exactly the opposite result while expending a huge amount of effort. Even if they are successful in some situations, their position and credibility may become weakened over time.
Newton's Third Law tells us that whenever a force is exerted, it will generate an equal and opposite force in return. Mr. Lin thinks Sir Isaac Newton is right on. His Third Law applies not only to physical nature, but often to human nature as well.
So why not take an indirect approach? If they don't employ force head on, they won't experience an opposing force in return. Let them change the paradigm. Instead of using brute force to directly attack conflicts and problems-which are often only the symptoms in any case-the Tao of IT Leaders encourages CIO's to focus on observing and understanding the most fundamental things and use the wisdom gained to create subtle but powerful influences. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, this approach can enable them to resolve conflicts and problems almost effortlessly. Further, this method often cures the root cause because it encourages them to think deep and plan well.
The root cause of most of the challenges confronting IT organizations today is the CIO's inability to lead and manage alignment, starting with IT/business alignment. Not only must the CIO's vision be strategic and well-aligned to the business, his entire IT organization, from top to bottom, needs to be both internally well aligned and well-aligned to the business as well.
IT is not about technology, however, but rather about applying information technology to create a competitive advantage for a business. A technology-centric IT organization is likely to be inundated with technical details and thus distracted from its ultimate goal, which is to improve shareholder value. IT organizations that lose focus in this way may find themselves doing IT for the sake of IT.
In a business-focused IT organization, on the other hand, IT staffers are more interested in understanding the business, and the people, process, and organization that make up the business, than they are in the technology for its own sake. These staffers possess a balanced set of soft skills, business acumen as well as analytical and technical skills. They think about business process first and technology second. The solutions they propose tend to be more complete, often involving people, process, and organization as well as technology, which are seen as simply tools. Interacting with such an organization yields an experience similar to that expected from Big 5 consulting firms, but with the added intimacy and insights only an internal organization can provide.
The Tao of IT Leaders calls on them to build a business-focused IT organization because by doing so, they confront the root cause and not the symptom of IT/business alignment issues. Once they have a business-focused IT organization, IT/business alignment issues are effortlessly resolved-doing without doing.
Very few of them have the luxury of building an entire IT organization from scratch. In most cases, they need to transform a traditional technology-centric IT organization into a business-focused one. One practice that Mr. Lin has used very successfully is actively filling key IT positions and openings with appropriate employees from other functional/business units within the company. This is not stealing employees from his executive peers; in fact, his company encourages internal transfers because this practice is beneficial to the business at large. It is especially beneficial to IT because these transferees bring a wealth of knowledge about the business and are naturally aligned to it.
While some IT positions can be filled with appropriate internal transfers or by hiring technology-inclined business people from outside the company, most IT staffers have to undergo a transformation to become business-savvy technologists, although the term business-savvy technologist may feel like an oxymoron.
If a CIO can convince his IT staffers to internalize his beliefs and priorities-in essence, sharing the CIO's DNA-the CIO can lead his IT organization with little or no effort, doing without doing as depicted by Lao-Tzu. Lao-Tzu's Tao-Te Ching conveys a sense of harmony and the natural order of the world. The power of physical nature and human nature is limitless. Power belongs to the leader who can understand nature and use it to his own advantage. Once nature is on his side, he can then lead the world with little or no effort, achieving his goals as if by magic. In such an IT organization, everyone believes in the same vision and acts accordingly.
In the series of articles to follow, Mr. Lin will take you through a new approach. Part II, Leading by Example-Five Fundamentals for Better IT/Business Alignment, Part III, Uniting the Forces-Five Strategies to Align the Business, and Part IV, Sustaining Success-Two Practices.
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