THE ROLE
OF IT MANAGEMENT
IT management skills are critical to an organization’s
ability to incorporate the technologies that are ‘out there’ and use them to
best advantage. However, IT staff are often
left out of the core decision-making processes and treated as implementers
rather than strategists. The solution, we believe, is to ensure that IT
management skills are present not only with IT departments, but all over the
organization (see box).
Sambamurthy and Zmud (in Sauer and Yetton, 1997) say:
In our experience the most valued IT management skills tend
to require lengthy development periods as they are heavily dependent on local –
for example organization-specific – knowledge. We have also found that not all
firms are equally endowed with the most valuable IT management skills.
Furthermore, in order to be effectively applied, a firm’s IT management skills
must be intricately woven into the complex milieu of an organization’s
structures, roles, processes, culture, and the many relationships among a firm’s
business and IT managers.
In today’s organizations the responsibility for managing IT is
widely dispersed. It no longer sits solely with the IT director, but is shared
amongst group-level IT people, business-level IT people, business line
management, vendors, partners, consultants and contractors. This web of
interconnected individuals somehow needs to sustain the organization’s ability
to innovate, plan, design, develop, implement, integrate and maintain IT
systems.
So what are the unique skills and knowledge areas required by an
organization collectively to ensure that IT is used to improve business
processes, enable changes in organizational structure, add value to its
knowledge base and create or support the development of new products and
services? Sambamurthy and Zmud carried out a four-year research programme in the
early 1990s, out of which emerged seven categories of IT management
competencies:
-
Business deployment. The key competences in this area are
the ability to examine, visualize and communicate the value offered by emerging
IT. This needs to be coupled with the use of multi-disciplinary teams, with a
good shared understanding of IT, to rapidly implement innovative IT
solutions.
-
External networks. This area of competence refers to the
need for the organization to develop close partnerships with external parties to
increase their awareness of emerging IT.
-
Line technology leadership. Users such as line managers and
senior managers need to participate actively in championing IT initiatives. This
area of competence concerns the ability to take technical leadership, which line
managers may delegate rather too quickly to IT people through lack of
understanding of the technology.
-
Process adaptiveness. This competence refers to the ability
of all employees to relate to IT and the way it can transform business
processes. It is also about the organization’s track record in restructuring its processes, and
the existence of an environment where employees can discover and explore the
functionality of IT systems. This means anything from the existence of a help
desk, to online tutorials, to devoting time to training. For instance Deloitte
and Touche has an innovation centre where employees can experiment with new
technologies such as Web services to decide whether or not they could be
useful.
-
IT planning. This competence concerns the ability of
managers within the organization to link strategic plans with IT plans, and to
plan and execute individual projects.
-
IT infrastructure. This competence is about the
appropriateness and flexibility of the underlying infrastructure which allows
innovative IT practices to emerge and to be capitalized upon.
-
Data centre utility. This competence concerns the ability
of those within the organization to build, maintain and secure fundamental
information processing services.
We would add one competence to this list, as many organizations
have completely outsourced IT operations and development, just leaving
themselves with project managers and business analysts:
Sambamurthy and Zmud asked 230 senior IT executives to assess the
levels of these competencies in their own organizations and to rate their
organization’s success in deploying IT successfully. This research revealed a
strong link between the level of these competencies and the organization’s level
of success with deploying IT in support of its business strategy and work
processes. The organizations in the group of respondents characterized by the
highest level of IT management competency were also those demonstrating the
highest success rate in deploying IT.
We offer the following three-stage process for moving towards
better IT management.
Step one
Bring together a task force including senior management,
line management and IT people. Start a discussion about how IT strategy will
link to organizational strategy over the next five years. Select the IT
management competencies that you think will be most important.
Step two
Conduct an audit of the key IT management competencies,
involving as many people as possible. Use internal (good development for them)
or external (better access to benchmarking data) consultants for this process.
Feed back the results and identify hot spots where competence is low, but
importance is high.
Step three
Plan how to raise the level of the most significant
competences, allocating resources, responsibility and defining a specific
timescale.
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