What IT can learn from marketing

Despite viewing stewardship as a critical responsibility, the majority of today’s IT organizations do not practice it. This fundamental oversight could prove a hindrance for IT going forward, as next-generation IT will be built on three pillars:

1. Stewarding the company’s information resources, as opposed to ownining them. Keep in mind that this will be a special kind of stewardship, as outlined below.
2. Empowering end-users to be innovators by opening new technological doors for them, motivated by user choice.
3. Supporting single-actor business practices as a strategic responsibility — a significant shift from years of paying attention only to core processes.

For forward-thinking organizations, this shift will be more than inevitable. It will be the mandate that defines how IT does its job.

The dirty little secret about IT stewardship

Last week’s tirade referenced a recent Deloitte survey that concluded that CIOs should shed stewardship in favor of a bigger and better role at their organization. The underlying assumption here is that, according to Deloitte’s respondents, CIOs have been acting as stewards all along.

The reality: While some renegades view their worlds that way, the general trend has been quite different.

According to Dictionary.com, a steward is “a person who manages another’s property or financial affairs; one who administers anything as the agent of another or others.”

Contrast it with the standard industry wisdom that’s dominated thinking about IT’s role in the enterprise. Call it the “standard model.” It’s built on three very different pillars than next-generation IT will be, as outlined above:

1. CIOs should run IT like an independent business.
2. IT’s responsibility is to deliver working technology that meets requirements to its internal customers.
3. IT measures its success by negotiating and then meeting or exceeding service-level agreements with those internal customers.

Do you see stewardship in there anywhere? It could be, I suppose, if the “contract” IT wrote with its business customer defined its responsibilities that way.

For the most part, though, that hasn’t been how it’s worked. In fact, even today the most popular IT organizational philosophy could likely be called the Hedgehog Principle.

No, not the Hedgehog Principle Jim Collins made famous in “Good to Great.” That principle was based on ancient Greek poetry — while the fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing.

The Hedgehog Principle I’m talking about is the strategy hedgehogs use to protect themselves from attackers: They curl up into a ball to protect their soft bellies, leaving predators nothing except an unfriendly collection of spines.

Today’s IT: Prickly and defensive

This metaphor sounds like typical IT to me: prickly and defensive, more concerned with keeping bad things from happening than with encouraging good things to happen.

Certainly, “internal customer” has devolved to nothing more of a catchphrase, devoid of actual meaning. Because if it actually meant that the folks outside IT who use what IT produces are customers, do you think we would lock down desktops and discourage or prevent end-user programming?

Let me ask that a different way: If IT ran a restaurant, would it serve people the meals they ordered? Probably not. Instead, IT would look at their waistlines, ask for their most recent body mass index, and then serve them a small plate of salad (1 teaspoon low-fat dressing) and cottage cheese. In other words, if IT were in the food-service business, we wouldn’t be restaurateurs — we’d be dieticians.

Stewards manage someone else’s resources for them. They don’t protect them from themselves, which is why we’re better off facing up to standard IT’s hedgehog mind-set. Because, as the folks in AA long ago pointed out, the first step in addressing a problem is acknowledging that we have one.

The new IT mandate: Shared service and steward

For IT, becoming a bona fide steward would constitute significant progress. But here’s the challenge: In the organizational context, IT is a shared service. As a shared service, IT supports other parts of the organization with technology and technological expertise. But as a steward, IT must maintain the value and integrity of a company resource. That sometimes conflicts with its shared-service role.

IT isn’t alone here. For example, in many companies marketing is a shared service. It writes copy, creates layouts, builds Web pages, and so on for the company’s various lines of business. In that sense it’s a shared service, which could (if its staff were less enlightened than Advice Line’s readers) consider the rest of the company to be its internal customers.

Marketing is more than just a shared service. It’s also a steward of the company brand, one responsible for ensuring all messages delivered inside and outside the company are consistent with each other and with the company’s image. As a shared service, marketing’s job is give other departments the help they need. As a steward, it has authority to protect and develop a resource. These two views of marketing’s responsibilities will often come into conflict — whenever a line of business asks it to do something that would violate its stewardship responsibilities.

If the potential for conflict isn’t clear, imagine you’re responsible for Neiman Marcus’s marketing department, and a store manager asked you to create advertising that says, “Everyday low prices.”

There is no structural solution. No matter how hard you work to develop clear boundaries and interfaces, the conflict will remain.

The solution isn’t structural. It also isn’t procedural. It’s something that’s easy to say and often hard to do when real human beings are involved. The solution is for the two parties to work together in a positive, constructive way.

Whatever else next-generation IT becomes, it will, for the foreseeable future, be a shared service and steward. It is and will be responsible for providing other parts of the business the tools they need to improve or transform how they operate. It will also continue to be responsible for protecting the integrity of the company’s IT resources.

These two responsibilities are just as certain to come into conflict as marketing’s dual service/brand management responsibilities. The solution is the same, too.

Clear boundaries? A well-defined interface? Save those for your service-oriented architecture. Working with the rest of the business requires the exact opposite: overlapping boundaries and, instead of an “interface,” trust and shared purpose. In a word: collaboration.

This story, “What IT can learn from marketing,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.