Business-Centric Change #1 – The Problem

From my previous post, the problem seems pretty straightforward: “IT isn’t delivering what the business wants or needs, or it is perceived that IT costs are not in line with the value being delivered”

Solve for that statement and we will fix the problem, correct?

It’s possible, but not likely. Jumping to a premature solution is like a doctor prescribing a cure for a serious ailment based on a symptom or two. If you want a cure that works (and doesn’t kill the patient) you must thoroughly understand the ailment, its history, and its symptoms.

Now back to our problem. Chances are that like a sickness, the problem didn’t appear overnight. Sufficient time must be spent gaining a comprehensive understanding of what has been happening from different perspectives. Business leadership, business customers, IT leadership, IT staff and perhaps key vendors will have a perspective to share that will contribute to the understanding of the problem.

Taking time to meet with these stakeholders and gain their perspectives is the first step in understanding the problem.

If the solution were simply to fix the articulated problems, then we would have a pretty good chance of being able to use the information received to put together piecemeal solutions. However, very little of that information is what IT needs to be, only what it shouldn’t be. Getting information from executive business leaders is the next step.

These conversations almost always begin with issues, which is fine for gaining additional perspective. The discussion must eventually turn to a positive statement of what the business seeks to do in the next 18 months (or pick a suitable length of time that is future-oriented enough for strategic purposes) and what contribution or capability IT will need to have in order to support the business objectives. Done well, that part of the discussion will be incredibly rich and will form most of the objectives for our solution.

But we’re not quite finished gathering information for our solution yet. Again, from executive business leadership, we’ll have to get some idea of any constraints for our solution. These usually take the form of budget, capital or time-to-results and may extend to dimensions of company values, strategic concerns, or “unwritten rules.”

For me, the most interesting part of the process is working with the executive business leadership and working through the “disconnects” between executive business leadership that inevitably arise in the discussions. Be prepared for several follow-up meetings for clarification and collaborative issue resolution before being able to create a first draft of the problem statement, with constraining parameters for the solution and what “success” looks like (complete with proposed top-level metrics and measures).

Usually, the document will need some tweaking before the executive leadership team fully buys into it. However long that takes, it is vital that this part of the process results in a very crisp and clear understanding by the executive team of the business problem that is being solved (actually now more appropriately phrased as what IT needs to do to support the business objectives) and what success looks like.

Next post: Business-Centric Change #2 – The Solution