E-MailManaging IT During Periods of Rapid Growth
"The time horizon of rapidly growing organizations is often measured in months if not weeks; the time horizon of the IT function, on the other hand, can involve years. The resulting schism caused by this time perspective disparity can lead to frustration and financial loss for the business and its venture capitalists at a minimum, and, in severe cases, to the business risks of competitive disadvantage, loss of market share, and financial insolvency," says Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Kenneth Rau.
For those CIOs caught in this dilemma, four techniques may prove helpful:
Go agile. In periods of rapid growth of the organization, agile techniques are mandatory, not an alternative. Maintaining agility not only during design, but in what is delivered, is paramount. Be modular, avoid tightly integrated solutions, go with best-of-breed, and incorporate service-oriented architecture principles, if not the whole enchilada.
Focus on inclusion. Ensuring IT is included in everything that has to do with setting and changing business strategy and direction is key in these situations. In small, rapidly growing situations, strategy-setting is seldom formal, but it is rampant and pervasive. As the CIO, you must be involved early and often in setting business strategy and direction, where your role is to advise on what is technologically possible. This means both in terms of limitations, but more importantly, in terms of what is possible. Remember, strategy and direction in these situations is mostly informal. Fortunately, full emersion in the informal strategic planning stuff in rapidly growing concerns is often more easily accomplished than in more mature, stable ones.
Realign IT strategic objectives. In rapidly growing organizations, IT has a tendency to set objectives in a bottom-up fashion for expediency's sake. Low-level managers in the IT function set their objectives and these are then rolled up to become the IT function's objectives. In rapid growth, emphasis must instead be placed on assuring enterprise awareness, responsiveness, and flexibility as had been stated. The CIO should set goals consistent with the understood parent organization's direction, and then cascade these goals down into the IT organization's objective-setting process. Typically in these situations, set goals consistent with:
Gaining a competitive advantage
Maximizing the use of resources
Assuring availability of critical systems
Enhancing organizational communications
The IT organization can then respond with appropriate plans for achieving these goals or define what is not possible. In the latter case, alerted to a gap, management can then decide to modify its goals for IT, for the enterprise, or look for creative alternatives.
Initiate scenario-based strategic planning in IT. Because of its long lead times, IT must attempt to anticipate the future information system needs of their parent organization in order to define and launch the appropriate programs and projects. Scenario-based planning constructs multiple possible views of the future, and then identifies how to respond to each view. In IT, scenario-based planning can be used to establish principles for application construction or acquisition, hardware configuration, network architecture, and organization structuring that can adapt to multiple possible futures.
Rau concludes, "The schism in time perspectives between IT and its parent organization that is exacerbated in rapidly growing concerns can create business risks ranging from misstatement of financial results to insolvency of the firm. Initiatives exist that can alleviate these risks and their cause, and extend the life expectancy of the CIO."
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