Highly visible IT

In this week’s CTO Connection, my colleague Chad Dickerson paints a picture that will look sadly familiar to many readers. Dickerson notes that as information technology performs ever more smoothly, the IT department becomes ever less visible. Others don’t see the immense labor that goes into reliable data systems. “Unfortunately,” he says, “invisibility is more or less equivalent to success.”

He’s right, of course — and Chad should know. Besides writing a terrific weekly column, he’s also InfoWorld Media Group’s CTO and wise pilot of its technology strategy. But as the person accountable for business strategy, I’d like to offer one additional perspective on the complicated but creative partnership between business and IT.

Twenty-five years ago, IT — or MIS, as it was known — was a priesthood as much as a profession. When a technology choice had to be made, the priests would go off together, recite some chants, offer a sacrifice or two, and then emerge with a decision. Everyone else in the company had to like it or lump it.

That changed in the 1980s and early 1990s, in part because of the personal computer. Many IT departments shunned PCs at first. But in time, they came to embrace them — often under pressure from users and tech-savvy business managers who demanded it (think “I want my MTV,” a contemporaneous ad campaign).

Thanks in part to this revolution, by the early to mid-1990s, it was pretty much accepted that business managers should have a say in IT decisions.

Then came the millennial madness of the technology bubble. Some businesspeople — including a few self-proclaimed visionaries — grabbed control of the IT strategy. Consider the CEO who went to the CIO/CTO in late 1996 and said, “We’ve got to have e-commerce by next quarter.” If the CTO were prescient, he might have replied, “E-commerce hasn’t really been invented yet, and the company should wait a few years.” But in the real world, that argument didn’t fly. The result was a handful of spectacular successes — and lots more busted budgets and failed companies.

Today, the relationship between business and IT is more equal. Businesspeople are responsible for business strategy; they rely on technologists to make decisions about IT. But each knows enough about the other to offer creative suggestions. That collaboration produces the best ideas — at least in companies that understand this principle.

So IT folks will never become invisible. Instead, they’ll be responsible for increasingly challenging parts of the company’s strategy and for increasingly important input into the decisions that make the business a success.