As education institutions and public sector organizations continue to navigate through the critical process of adapting their IT organizations for the digital age, many look for innovative ways to align team members and streamline processes to help advance these objectives. To create an effective strategy, Christopher Markham, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, Edge, says starting with a few basic questions can help frame the conversation in how to move forward. “An important question to begin with is how does your organization view information technology? Do you view IT more as an engineering operation or as a service operation? Leadership must also determine if IT is viewed as an art or science, because there are plenty of institutions where IT is expected to be the primary change agent or innovator, not just in the administrative side of the house, but in educational technologies.”
“Organizations should also explore their return on investment from IT, including technology assets and staff,” continues Markham. “Do you have a return on investment and a rate of return? In addition, leadership must explore if technology is informing the business process both on the administrative and academic side, or is technology being informed by those business processes.” Achieving alignment across an IT organization involves several core axioms, including:
- Authority and accountability must match
- Specialization and teamwork
- Precise domains and clear boundaries
- The basis of a substructure
- Avoid conflicts of interest
- Cluster by professional synergies
- Business within a business
“The golden rule is that authority and accountability in an IT organization must match,” says Markham. “You want to define clear boundaries with no overlaps or gaps and divide a function into groups based upon its strengths. In addition, cluster groups under a common leader based on similar professions. Institutions must also view higher education and information technology as a business. Faculty, students, and staff are considered customers and every manager is an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is anyone who brings together all the different pieces to ensure service delivery of IT and high-quality services and solutions.”
“IT governance, funding and financial management, and enterprise data and data governance are among the top technology-related domains that impact digital transformation readiness.”
— Christopher Markham
Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, Edge
Achieving Digital Transformation Readiness
The first principle of aligning authority and accountability is of top importance and what Markham calls the golden rule in IT organizational design. “This alignment is essential to the success of every IT organization and institution that it is serving. In a particular case study, a CIO appointed a few process owners at the suggestion of process improvement consultants. Each was assigned a process that engaged people from various parts of the organization in producing a specific service. These process owners had authority over those processes, and while they were collaborative and involved stakeholders in designing and implementing the new processes, they were not process facilitators who served others by bringing teams to consensus on how they’ll work together. Process owners didn’t have matching accountability for their effectiveness of those processes and weren’t always the individuals accountable for delivering those services. They were accountable for the delivery of services, but they didn’t have the power to determine the processes they used to do their jobs.”
“If these service delivery groups failed, there was no way to know whether it was due to their own poor performance or due to a bad process,” continues Markham. “Nonetheless, they took the blame. Process owners implemented detailed, rigorous business processes and succeeded at their mission, but the organization became bureaucratic, slow, and inflexible as a result. This structure violated the golden rule. In re-envisioning and restructuring an IT organization, the CIO needs to decide the rules of the game and create the organizational ecosystem, including the group structure, the resource governance process, and the culture.”
Increasing the Pace of Innovation
Once the right structure is in place, leaders can take the opportunity to adjust domains as needed, arbitrate any disputes, create a healthy environment for teamwork, and develop talent through recruiting, inspiring, and coaching efforts. “Leaders should manage performance including negotiating staff’s objectives, giving frequent feedback, measuring the results, deciding rewards, and managing performance problems,” says Markham. “CIOs can leverage performance programs and evaluations to restructure, reorganize and incentivize. They must also manage commitments and resources which includes assigning work within the group and coordinating shared decisions, like common methods and tools and professional practices. In addition, the CIO must make decisions when consensus cannot be reached.”
Markham shares another case study where the CIO in a large insurance company was tasked with addressing complaints from the business executives regarding the IT department’s opacity, unresponsiveness, and poor understanding of their business strategies. “The leadership in this organization was frustrated that they couldn’t control IT’s priorities and did not understand why many of the requests were not being fulfilled. There was a trend toward decentralization and many business units had started their own small IT groups, which the CIO disparagingly called Shadow IT. These groups only existed because business units did not want to do business with corporate IT. In response, the CIO dedicated a group to each business unit and divided his engineering staff among them. Each group was relatively self-sufficient with all the skills needed to deliver.”
“The senior managers also served as the primary liaisons to those business units,” continues Markham. “The CIO felt this structure would appease the business units and stave off further decentralization, while holding senior managers accountable for business results and client satisfaction. Unfortunately, technical specialists were needed throughout the organization, and since technology subspeciality was scattered among the various client-dedicated groups, this limited their professional exchange. When the sales team, for example, ran into technical challenges, they may not have known that someone in another group already had encountered that issue and knew a solution. Their peers were busy with other priorities, costs rose, and response time slowed, and everyone was reinventing solutions to common problems. Meanwhile, there was little impetus for standards, and individual teams built systems that were optimal for their specific clients, not for the enterprise as a whole.”
Markham continues, “The pace of innovation also slowed, and the organization could not hire an expert in an emerging technology until demand grew across the whole enterprise. As a result, business opportunities to build customer loyalty were missed and the impacts extended beyond IT’s performance. Over time, the structure led to multiple general ledger systems and multiple records for the same customer. Synergies were lost as the company lost a single view of its customers, resources, and suppliers.”
Including productivity specialists can bring efficiency to an IT organization which can translate into cost savings for return on investment. “Specialists have ready answers and don’t have to climb the learning curve with each new challenge,” says Markham. “Quality specialists know the latest methods and technologies in their field and understand how their products are more capable and have lower lifecycle costs. Competence and experience deliver results with fewer risks. Innovation specialists can keep up with the literature and be the first to learn about emerging technologies and techniques. As a result, the pace of innovation improves. Since they are confident in their abilities, specialists experience less stress, are more productive, and are more likely to excel in their career.”
“An important question to begin with is how does your organization view information technology? Do you view IT more as an engineering operation or as a service operation? Leadership must also determine if IT is viewed as an art or science, because there are plenty of institutions where IT is expected to be the primary change agent or innovator, not just in the administrative side of the house, but in educational technologies.”
— Christopher Markham
Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer, Edge
Driving Organizational Change
Creating an IT strategy that optimizes processes and technology and fosters a culture of innovation includes several domains of enterprise architecture. “IT governance, funding and financial management, and enterprise data and data governance are among the top technology-related domains that impact digital transformation readiness,” says Markham. “Each of these domains represent specializations of the IT reference disciplines or olive branches from those IT reference disciplines, and the business architecture is an olive branch with each of the functional offices in both administration and academics. But without labeling these domains properly as a CIO, it’s very difficult to reorganize, restructure, or re-envision your organization. The cost of overlapping these domains and clustering by professional synergies is reduced specialization, redundant efforts, confusion, product disintegration, less innovation and teamwork, and lack of entrepreneurship.”
Edge’s E360 assessment is designed to provide a holistic, 360-degree view of an institution’s current-state technology program with a focus on the technology-related domains. Taking a diagnostic and prescriptive approach to evaluating the technology organization, Edge looks at four key areas. “We first identify any unreliable processes and if there is reduced specialization as a result of these gaps,” explains Markham. “We also look if that reduced specialization leads to conflicts of interest. The E360 assessment also focuses on the professional exchange between the domains, if there are domain overlaps, the level of coordination, and whether it is a whole business. Lastly, we explore the substructure and the results of reduced specialization, domain overlaps, and inappropriate biases. E360 produces a final report that not only includes outcomes and analysis, but a three-year roadmap for an IT organization to drive organizational change, improve their technology landscape, and achieve digital transformation goals successfully.”
Ready to achieve operational efficiency and digital transformation? Learn more at njedge.net/solutions-overview/digital-transformation
