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:
Managing outsourced services. This concerns the ability to evaluate potential service options, manage the transition to outsourced IT services and manage service levels and service evaluation.
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.
IT MANAGEMENT COMPETENCIES
Business deployment:
- examination of the potential business value of new, emerging IT;
- utilization of multi-disciplinary teams throughout the organization;
- effective working relationships among line managers and IT staff;
- technology transfer, where appropriate, of successful IT applications, platforms and services;
- adequacy of IT-related knowledge of line managers throughout the organization;
- visualizing the value of IT investments throughout the organization;
- appropriateness of IT policies;
- appropriateness of IT sourcing decisions;
- effectiveness of IT measurement systems.
External networks:
- existence of electronic links with the organization’s customers;
- existence of electronic links with the organization’s suppliers;
- collaborative alliances with external partners (vendors, systems integrators, competitors) to develop IT-based products and processes.
Line technology leadership:
- line managers’ ownership of IT projects within their domains of business responsibility;
- propensity of employees throughout the organization to serve as ‘project champions’.
Process adaptiveness:
- propensity of employees throughout the organization to learn about and subsequently explore the functionality of installed IT tools and applications;
- restructuring of business processes, where appropriate, throughout the organization;
- visualizing organizational activities throughout the organization.
IT planning
- integration of business strategic planning and IT strategic planning;
- clarity of vision regarding how IT contributes to business value;
- effectiveness of IT planning throughout the organization;
- effectiveness of project management practices.
IT infrastructure
- restructuring of IT work processes, where appropriate;
- appropriateness of data architecture;
- appropriateness of network architecture;
- knowledge of and adequacy of the organization’s IT skill base;
- consistency of object (data, process, rules) definitions;
- effectiveness of software development practices.
Data centre utility:
- appropriateness of processor architecture;
- adequacy of quality assurance and security controls.