"Some have said that the era of the IT organization as a service organization is long past, and that IT has now been fully integrated with the business as a partner and opportunity generator. While this may be true in some organizations, in most others there is still a great deal to be done."

Opening Statement

What is the role of IT organizations in providing strategic leadership to their companies, and what are the best ways for IT to go about developing leadership? Some have said that this problem has been solved long ago, that the era of the IT organization as a service organization is long past, and that IT has now been fully integrated with the business as a partner and opportunity generator. While this may be true in some organizations, in most others there is still a great deal to be done, both in changing the way people think of IT and in developing the platform and tools that will allow IT to provide effective strategic leadership.

In contemplating the challenges still ahead, the authors of the articles in this issue divide into two groups. The first group looks at strategic leadership as a state of mind and asks why the current mindset prevalent in many IT organizations prevents these organizations from achieving their leadership potential. According to author Mark Fung-A-Fat, part of the answer lies in the choices organizations make as to whom they promote to leadership positions and the support and mentoring these individuals receive once promoted. Anjali Kaushik argues, on the other hand, that the more fundamental issue has to do with the way in which CIOs and the IT organizations they lead think of themselves and their roles as strategic leaders.

The second group of authors looks at some specific ways in which IT organizations can provide strategic leadership to their companies, identifying technology platforms that are still needed in order to enable this capability. Jeffrey Stamps and Jessica Lipnack consider the various dimensions across the organization in which IT solutions can be leveraged to promote better integration and decision making, while Neal McWhorter discusses a semantic platform that would eliminate some of the translation issues that hinder effective IT integration with the business. According to these authors, the problem is not so much in how people are thinking but the absence of tools and platforms that enable strategic leadership across increasingly complex and distributed organizations.

We begin the issue with Kaushik's article, which describes the changing roles of the CIO over time. Traditionally, the role of a CIO involved managing operational functions associated with infrastructure and applications development, advising on technology opportunities, and informing IT-related purchasing decisions. Today's CIO has the opportunity to become a more effective partner to the business as a strategic leader. This leadership opportunity is based on creating a vision rooted in an understanding of the business. By leading the IT function and providing a vision of the future, the CIO can help maximize the value of IT investments to the organization, spearhead an IT strategy, and drive innovation. According to Kaushik, IT executives "can no longer be reactive, providing only support as they manage some of the most important tools for influencing the firm's future." Instead, they must be more proactive in helping the company create a vision of its future and its use of IT.

She notes that other new role possibilities for the CIO include IT governance, which entails financial controls and achieving regulatory compliance, as well as continuity planning and disaster recovery. The CIO of today also heads IT planning, which includes enterprise architecture planning and exploration of new technologies. Another responsibility is the assessment of complementary assets, which can help the organization achieve its business goals and meet its IT strategy. The CIO must drive continuous business process innovation in order to achieve desired results from IT. In developing people capabilities, the CIO is also responsible for managing and delivering change so that people can adapt to new technologies and applications. Other important roles include the sharing of information between processes and the business and managing relationships across and outside the organization. The bottom line is that the needs of organizations have evolved, and CIOs who want to survive must evolve with them by stretching into new roles.

In our next article, I delve more deeply into the characteristics of strategic leadership as contrasted with good management. Strategic leadership starts with a vision and a connection to the big picture. The main difference is not in what the CIO does but in how the CIO thinks and defines his or her leadership role. If the traditional IT manager looks within the IT organization at technologies and processes to make the organization operate smoothly, the new IT leader is connected to the business overall and to the market, with equal footing inside and outside the IT organization. The vision the IT leader defines is informed by the needs of the market and the mission of the business in serving this market. IT leadership is therefore about the creation of opportunities for the business rather than about serving needs upon request.

While connected to the business and the market externally, the IT leader must also disseminate this vision internally within the IT organization. Communication of the vision becomes a primary role for the IT leader, especially in getting managers further down in the organization to understand and internalize the vision so they can propagate it within their own groups. The CIO also needs to empower the IT organization to innovate and to treat failed ideas as learning opportunities on the road to eventual success. With this attitude, the IT leader can transform the core of the IT organization from a service organization to one that generates the future business opportunities of the company.

Next up, Fung-A-Fat further explores the distinction between management and leadership by looking at the ways in which companies promote people into leadership positions. The article first examines the practical differences between management (which he defines as the "organization and processing of complexity") and leadership (which he defines as "the art and science of preparing companies and individuals for change") as the two play out in IT organizations. He then goes on to compare and contrast different types of activities in which IT managers and IT leaders engage as they move their organizations forward.

Fung-A-Fat then examines the reasons that companies promote IT professionals into management roles and the criteria they use in making promotion decisions. Very often, people are promoted based on technical excellence and with the purpose of rewarding them with salary increases, since many companies offer higher salaries to managers than to individual contributors. By taking these people out of the technical roles in which they excel and placing them in leadership roles for which they often are poorly equipped and trained, companies set up these individuals for failure or diminished performance in their new roles. Moreover, by doing so, companies fail to realize the leadership potential that their IT organizations could contribute.

The solution, according to the author, is first to promote the right people into leadership positions by identifying individuals who both are interested in leadership and possess the interpersonal skills to succeed in these positions. Second, these people must be given the training, coaching, and mentoring needed to grow into their new leadership responsibilities. Finally, companies must find other ways to reward their strong technical contributors, allowing them to advance their careers within the technical realm and not forcing them to transition into leadership or management roles for which they are less suited.

If the first three articles in the issue look at IT leadership from the perspective of the mindset and characteristics of leaders, the final two articles look at leadership in terms of the skills and tools that need to be developed for IT leadership to be feasible and effective. Stamps and Lipnack list four organizational capabilities that, in their view, are the tools by which IT organizations help their companies achieve strategic leadership. These capabilities are enhanced communication, coordination, collaboration, and decision making.

As technology has developed new ways for people to communicate with each other, IT organizations have often reacted after the fact based on the needs and activities of employees. Instead, the authors argue, IT organizations should be deliberately at the forefront of communications platforms and technologies, seeing themselves as facilitators of information flow across the organization and looking to anticipate both needs and capabilities. IT can also enhance an organization's ability to work collaboratively by providing both platforms and protocols for video-, tele-, and Web conferencing, and by providing repositories that allow distributed group members to store, share, and access documents.

According to Stamps and Lipnack, IT can further lead strategically by:

... providing unique organizational information in novel and quantitative ways. It can map the organization to aid communication, collaboration, and coordination. And it can analyze the maps to produce data about the organization that supports the large-scale, decision-making capacity..., [helping] a small network of organizations visualize its assembly into a new organizational function.

Finally, IT can take a strategic leadership role by providing mechanisms to aid decision making throughout the organization. A company's hierarchy can therefore be made to function like a giant decision tree in which nodes are interconnected to optimize the advantages of centralized and decentralized decision making.

In our final article, McWhorter discusses how IT can enable better integration between business objectives and technological capabilities by providing flexible technology platforms that allow both custom-developed and externally outsourced solutions to be integrated into business solutions. The key element of this approach is the development of a business design, which is a semantic framework that captures the interrelated business elements of the automation solution that is to be delivered. McWhorter contrasts this paradigm with the common practice in which the business develops requirements documents that then must be translated into technical specifications. Much is lost in the translation, he argues, and moreover the communication is one-way, which prevents IT from providing leadership.

Without business-centric platforms, the translation of business requirements into technical designs slows down development and limits the ability of business organizations to respond to change. The creation of business-centric platforms would therefore at once integrate and decouple the business from the technology, allowing business organizations to specify their needs in response to the market demands in business terms. McWhorter writes that "the intention is to create platforms that are capable of having the [business] designs directly loaded into them and executed," thus speeding response. By creating this capability, IT can enable the business to compete through business innovation while building technology breakthroughs through internal and external resources.

And so the debate continues. As IT leaders and their organizations look to provide greater value to the companies they serve, some focus more on changing the mindset and attitudes with which they perform their role, while others look to enhance their leadership capabilities by focusing on skills, tools, and platforms. The first approach, embodied in the first three articles, focuses on placing the most appropriate people in leadership roles and providing them with the support, coaching, and mentoring necessary for them to successfully meet their responsibilities. In this view, leadership is a way of thinking based on vision, values, and change. The second approach, as embodied in the final two articles, sees IT's leadership as currently limited by technological platforms and suggests innovative methods of addressing these limitations and enhancing the strategic leadership impact of IT organizations on their companies. We hope that one of these approaches -- or facets of both -- will help your IT organization realize its strategic leadership potential.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Moshe Cohen is President of The Negotiating Table, a firm that provides mediation services to people in conflict as well as negotiation and conflict management training. Since founding the firm in 1995, Mr. Cohen has mediated hundreds of disputes in a variety of settings and in a multitude of topic areas. He teaches negotiation, mediation, facilitation, conflict management, and leadership. Mr. Cohen has conducted training programs for corporations, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and conferences. He teaches negotiation and leadership at Boston University and has also taught at Bentley College and Cambridge College. Mr. Cohen holds a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in physics, a master's in electrical engineering from McGill University, and an MBA from Boston University. His career includes more than 12 years of engineering and project management experience prior to founding The Negotiating Table. Mr. Cohen is a frequent guest speaker at business functions, conferences, and universities. He has also published numerous articles on negotiation, mediation, and conflict management. Mr. Cohen can be reached at moshe@negotiatingtable.com or via www.negotiatingtable.com.