An ongoing discussion with colleagues (and in most IT organizations, I suspect) is how best to use the people and resources at hand to deliver services and support to customers. While many on the outside look at IT as being all about technology, the reality is IT leaders and professionals need to continually examine themselves and their teams when figuring out what's next. As Brett Anderson at CIOUpdate.com puts it, "it always comes down to people" when IT change is in the wind.
In the not-too-distant past, IT professionals could find a niche specialization, lock themselves in an office or back room, and happily work in a virtual vacuum for years or decades. Now, the trend toward unified infrastructure, managed IT services, and cloud computing have all forced the question of "what are our IT people actually doing?" to bubble up, and appropriately so. Many services that once required specific and local controls to add value, such as messaging and collaboration, have both become commoditized and increase in value when allowed to take full advantage of network effects. The results are predictable: more institutions are shifting commodity (and sometimes competitive) services to the cloud or other third parties, and IT organizations are getting a little lost in their focus as their world has started to transform.
The general response from experts has been, "Retrain your people and focus them on business-facing issues." Great in theory, but not exactly easy in practice. Though not quite as drastic as turning manufacturing workers into knowledge workers, telling someone who has spent 10+ years in say, systems administration, that now it's time to be a business analyst is not going to help you or your customers. Offering training or guidance isn't enough either; what if being a sysadmin was the end goal for that person? It takes relatively little time or effort to develop routines and habits, and faced with (possibly extreme) change, those routines and habits become both havens and crutches. My hunch is that any IT organization facing change (i.e. almost every IT organization) contains people with varying levels of ability, knowledge, and willingness to redefine themselves in a new context.
And to be clear, we're ultimately talking about people changing themselves. Communicating visions, mission statements, or value lists are necessary, but likely will not on their own accomplish the kind of shift from "support the technology" to "enable the business" that is increasingly required. Even hands-on management has its limitations, as a key tenet of management is that a person cannot change another person. The only lasting change for a person is one that is self-realizing and self-actualizing. A leader's role, then, is to create a situation for each person that helps him/her to understand both what change is necessary and how to start moving in that direction.
If a vision of the post-change organization has not been communicated, that needs to be done. That post-change vision also must include some detail about the roles that are most valuable to the business and what those roles entail. At least as important is communicating the incremental improvements on the road to the end-state, so people can both see how the organization will get to the end and start to understand their role in doing so. Feedback should be encouraged and the incremental steps may need to change over time to accommodate shifting external conditions, though the end-state should remain consistent.
Leaders and managers then need to commit to one-on-one interactions with each person to engage in a personalized feedback loop and aid in understanding new roles and responsibilities as they arise. This will also help managers to assess the person's ability and willingness for change, and create the optimal situation accordingly. Like most management techniques, fairness will not mean equality here; be prepared to adopt different approaches and time commitments for each person. Issues may range from developing analytical skills to improving verbal communication to overcoming fear of failure, and managers must be ready to help address them all.
At the same time, leaders need to find opportunities to extend some of the same techniques into a group setting and have people start helping each other to change together. There is a lot of value in peers finding shared meaning and finding ways to solve common problems, as this ultimately helps people to truly internalize the organization's vision/mission/values. You know you're on the right track when your team comes to you with shared ideas for improvement that they have already started to execute on. Encouraging those results lead to the desired virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.
Re-reading the paragraphs above, it still sounds too easy. It's not - and it's hard because real personal and behavioral change is the hardest thing anyone can do, and your ability as a leader to effect such change is minimal. But it's also the most important thing that can be done to enable the organization to move forward, and often yields more than enough reward to justify the effort.
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