Next-gen IT: It’s not about BYOD

Read the industry press and research firms, and you might think next-gen IT revolves around the cloud and mobile computing — or agile or BYOD (bring your own device). But these are consequences for only next-generation IT organizations where these trends make business sense. For other organizations, not so much.

So what is required for a next-generation IT organization? In a word: collaboration. More specifically, it has to be on every level of the organization. All IT departments, every workgroup, and every IT professional must collaborate with their business counterparts frequently and informally to help the business be more successful.

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Let’s start BYOD, a policy that can reduce IT expenditures, increase user satisfaction and effectiveness, and encourage innovation throughout the business. It has a lot going for it — unless you’re a CIA subcontractor, or you work in an environment where hermetically sealed information security is an entry-level requirement for doing business. For these organizations, support for BYOD isn’t in your immediate future, nor should it be.

Collaboration, on the other hand, is always in good taste. It doesn’t sound like a radical idea, and it shouldn’t be — but it is. Compare the nature of collaborative interactions to the supplier/internal-customer alternative promoted so long and forcefully by most industry thought leaders. When you’re someone’s customer, your interactions with them are quite different than they are with equal partners who share a common purpose.

Next-generation IT requires a healthy business

Relatively few CIOs are willing to even consider a collaborative alternative to the “standard model.” While some reject it because they’ve been persuaded by the aforementioned industry thought leaders and others because it’s never been properly explained, there’s another reason for its lack of popularity: CIOs can implement the standard supplier/internal-customer model on their own, in any kind of business environments.

Collaboration, on the other hand, only works in a healthy enterprise. I’d call it a next-gen enterprise if that wasn’t such a presumptuous adjective for a very old-fashioned idea.

I once read this account of how businesses get sick (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s close):

An owner started a business. He thought he was important because he was. He sold products to customers, who thought they were important because they were. To take care of them he hired employees, who thought they were important because they were.

Then he hired managers.

The point isn’t that managers make a company unhealthy. It’s that as businesses expand, those who run them take their collective eyes off the ball, losing track of what’s important and why.

Healthy enterprises (in my less-than-perfectly-humble opinion) are, in most respects, diverse. There isn’t one way to organize and run operations well; there are no business panaceas that guarantee success in all situations. All healthy enterprises do, I think, have a few common characteristics:

Importance. Mission statements are misunderstood. Business leaders are told to make them inspirational or novel or worthy of a significant wordsmithing effort. Instead, a mission statement should be a simple, straightforward statement of what the organization does that matters. If, for example, the company is General Motors, its mission statement should be something like “We build cars people want to buy.”

The mission, not the mission statement, should be the inspiration. If it isn’t, it’s worth asking whether the business in question has any business being in business.

Commitment. A friend — a former naval officer — told me something about Admiral Mullen, until recently Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had served under Mullen on the U.S.S. Yorktown. Mullen considered the Yorktown to be the finest ship in the navy (and insisted on it), and he considered commanding it to be a privilege he had an obligation to live up to. Mullen also made it clear he expected every sailor and officer on the ship to consider serving on the Yorktown to be a privilege — anyone who didn’t was invited to leave.

Zappos — by reports a very healthy company — got the memo: It offers a departure bonus to all new employees at the end of their training period, paying anyone willing to take it to go away. Zappos’ leaders only want employees who want to work at Zappos.

Collaboration. Collaboration isn’t only for IT. It’s for everyone in the business. They’re all in it together, focused on the mission because it matters to them personally.

Collaboration doesn’t matter because it’s a moral imperative, “the right thing to do.” It matters because it makes an organization more effective.

A culture of collaboration is the opposite of organizational siloes and is a characteristic of healthy organizations for exactly the same reason that degeneration into silos is a characteristic of unhealthy ones. The reason: There’s no such thing as a perfect organizational chart.

Org charts and collaboration

Consider the org chart for a moment. An org chart divides and subdivide responsibilities. Superficially, this would seem to be a straightforward taxonomic exercise, nothing more complicated than creating a simple outline. As anyone knows who has tried to create one, no matter how you subdivide tasks, many responsibilities inevitably end up having more than one logical home.

Imagine, for example, a company that’s organized functionally: It has sales, marketing, product development, manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, accounting, human resources, and information technology. Who is accountable for what is as clear as it can be, isn’t it? It is, right up until the CEO wants to know who’s in charge of fixing the problem of lagging sales in South America. Answer: Right now, no one.

There are only two solutions. One is to reorganize, creating geographically focused lines of business. That will work, right up until the CEO wants to know who will repair the new problem of a globally fragmented brand.

The other answer is to foster a culture of collaboration: No matter what goes wrong or whatever opportunities the company wants to chase, those in a position to make it happen work together to reach that goal.

Your company is a computer with a buggy compiler

Leading a healthy business doesn’t sound complicated, does it? So why are so many businesses unhealthy, suffering from one or more severe business diseases (“dysfunctions” if you prefer 20-buck words)?

One answer among many: While leading a healthy business sounds uncomplicated, that doesn’t mean it is uncomplicated.

Think of it this way: Any organization is, in a sense, a computer — one with an incredibly buggy compiler. The CEO is the programmer of this computer, and as such, he or she has to figure out all the workarounds and bypasses to make it do what it’s supposed to do.

If you’ve ever worked with a buggy compiler, you know how difficult it is to get a program working with it, at even the most basic level — so cut those who lead large organizations some slack. You have, in a sense, lived their problems, though to be fair, you haven’t been paid as much to solve them.

This story, “Next-gen IT: It’s not about BYOD,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’ Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.