The challenge of IT leadership: big changes and small steps

By: Steve Hughes - 19/11/2013

Having joined Colt in 2008, Steve Hughes is the leading Cloud and Virtualisation specialist for Colt Enterprise Services. Catch up with Steve’s latest views at http://www.twitter.com/coltandthecloud.

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A recurrent theme at last week’s Gartner Symposium/ITXpo event in Barcelona was an impending IT leadership crisis and whether the CIO would or could step up to meet this challenge. Colt’s guest speaker at the event, Marie-Hélène Fagard (of CIONet) provided some telling insights and advice to an audience of CIOs based on her own corporate experience of embracing the digitalised world.

Marie-Hélène’s theme was that there were new actors on the stage – as well as new suppliers and opportunities to exploit – new ways of working to learn - and ultimately the CIO was best placed to help to educate, steer and lead the organisation into this future.

What struck me was the practical nature of her advice: educate and consult widely; keep momentum going with small tangible business relevant projects; and get buy-in of the IT department by trialling new services with them first.

When faced with the massive structural changes that Gartner is forecasting, it is understandable that organisations react by creating digital strategies and roles such as a Chief Digital Officer – both of which are necessary, as Marie-Hélène also touched on in her presentation.

But when faced with such massive changes, maybe the lesson to be learned was found in the practical examples from the presentation:
 

  • First, look for small wins. Give mobile tools such as camera phones to front-line staff in order to capture issues quicker.
  • Consider introducing collaboration tools such as Google Docs but make sure IT deploy and use them first. Once installed, get the business managers to own and champion the new IT projects.
  • Don’t worry about suppliers not being there for the long term – use them for the length of a project and think in terms of a 3 year project life.
  • Finally - drive rapid change. Deliver projects in 9 month timeframes and don't wait for requirements to be captured, use the time to build and deploy.

From the notable successes Marie-Hélène could point to, the conclusion certainly seems to be that, in a time of major change: ‘start small and start real’. And most important – start adapting now…


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