Transforming IT Culture

How to Use Social Intelligence, Human Factors, and Collaboration to Create an IT Department That Outperforms

Frank Wander

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118573082
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Strategia di business
• Index: Business

Practical, proven guidance for transforming the culture of any IT department

As more and more jobs are outsourced, and the economy continues to struggle, people are looking for an alternative to the greed-driven, selfish leadership that has resulted in corporations where the workers are treated as interchangeable parts. This book shows how the human factors can be used to unlock higher returns on human capital such that workers are no longer interchangeable parts, but assets that are cared about and grown. Refreshingly innovative, Transforming IT Culture shows how neuroscientific and psychological research can be applied in the IT workplace to unleash a vast pool of untapped potential.

• Written by an expert on IT culture transformation
• Considers the widespread "cultural blindness" in business today, and how it can be addressed
• Draws on the author's repeated success transforming IT divisions across major corporations by applying the human factors
• Explains why social intelligence, human factors, and collaboration are the source of harmony, shared learning, mutual respect, and value creation

Employees want positive change in business, something to stop the downward spiral we are on, both financially and emotionally. Transforming IT Culture shows how the essential ingredient to any high performing IT department is a culture where employees are valued and managed to their strengths. Using the Information Technology profession as a lens through which we can understand knowledge worker productivity and how to seriously improve it, this important new book reveals why Collaborative Social Systems are essential to every organization.

Chapter 1
A Shining Light
The Blind Spot Revealed

Humanity’s most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed.

—Josiah William Gitt

Corporate life is quickly accelerating toward an inflection point. Many people talk of feeling “it”: an uneasiness about the future and a palpable sense that a momentous shift of some kind is taking shape in the business world around us. Basic industries, and portions of our knowledge work, continue to move offshore, leaving a vacuum that must be filled. Even worse, selfishness and greed have grown like cancers, destroying iconic corporations and tearing at the social fabric of once great and caring companies. A house divided ultimately fails.

This inflection point represents an onrushing shift. As in past shifts, new businesses will assuredly spring up to replace those that fail or are commoditized. As the twenty-first century unfolds, knowledge workers will staff these new businesses, and their productivity will become the primary management challenge for America and the developed world.

Peter Drucker saw this coming:

The most important, and indeed the truly unique contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the MANUAL WORKER in manufacturing.

The most important contribution management needs to make in the twenty-first century is similarly to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

The most valuable assets of a 20th-century company were its production equipment. The most valuable asset of a twenty-first-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.¹

A Race to the Bottom

But this new dawn remains just a glimmer of light. In today’s information economy, a key lever of value creation—collaborative information technology (IT) projects staffed by knowledge workers—still fails or underperforms at an alarming rate. Decades of research, trillions of dollars of experience, and pundits galore, but we still have deplorable success rates and limited business satisfaction.

Although we have effectively created the raw materials of this unfolding era—semiconductors, storage, networking, software, process models, and lots of knowledge—we have not been successful at inventing a postindustrial leadership model to leverage its most important ingredient: the knowledge worker.

Something as essential as the productivity of our twenty-first-century workforce remains poorly understood. Knowledge doubles every few years, while our ability to store and retrieve information doubles every 18 months, but our ability to unfailingly leverage knowledge and experience across teams of highly skilled individuals remains stalled. As an economy, we must learn to reliably turn knowledge into opportunity. Today, teams of individuals do that; today, our value creation track record, as far as IT is concerned, is very poor because corporate America has ignored the social and emotional levers of productivity. We have been consumed with “self,” insensitive to the needs and feelings of others. The industrial era allowed us to master things, not people. Fortunately, this leadership blind spot will quickly disappear under the lights of applied science and human-centric leadership practices.

As we journey farther into the information economy, we look back and see that industrial-era capitalism has reached an evolutionary endpoint: double-entry accounting from the fifteenth century, process-focused models rooted in industrial engineering, command-and-control leadership hierarchies, and the commoditization of workers within a global labor pool. At this juncture we have perfected economies of scale, continuous process improvement, quality engineering, and supply chain management, which have in turn created the likes of Walmart, General Electric, IBM, and Ford—all leading players in their markets. But make no mistake, the endless pursuit of efficiency pits them in a human capital race to the bottom.

It becomes more difficult and costly to constantly squeeze further leverage out of a process-focused mentality and culture. Businesses both great and small have been created, and great wealth has been produced, yet we now see the undesirable consequences of our process orientation and our need to count everything: the dehumanization of the workforce. As Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be measured; and not everything that can be measured counts.” Just imagine if we had to quantify the return on investment of a hug?

Because of this dehumanization, our most valuable asset of all—our knowledge workers—are disillusioned, and corporate is unraveling. We have expunged all emotion and feeling so that our human assets more closely resemble industrial robots (which, by the way, come from the Czech word robota, meaning drudgery, or slavelike labor). Dilbert resonates far and wide.

The physical means of production—computers, corporate infrastructure, labor, and process methodologies—are now easily copied. As a result, a downward pricing spiral is in motion. Businesses are effortlessly replicated in low-cost countries such that supply often exceeds demand, technology improvements endlessly lower the cost of entry for new competitors, and the victory of capitalism continuously brings new countries and labor into a global free market. Industrial capitalism, we see, has itself become a commodity.

Human Understanding Enters the Workplace

Psychological research and neurological studies of the brain reveal that the mind is highly modular, and intelligence is a kaleidoscope of capabilities. Authors and researchers like Daniel Goleman, Martin Seligman, Howard Gardner, Joseph Ledoux, and countless others, are allowing us to see ourselves in the rainbow of a new light.² As with any emerging area of understanding, there are camps and debate. But the time has come for this research, and what it reveals, to be applied in business, creating a new branch of management science. The current body of research makes a strong case for a leadership style where the happiness and emotional well-being of workers must be a top priority, not just in thought but also in deed. We are entering a time where leaders will become the servants and productivity will flow like a wellspring.

It seems clear that Drucker’s challenge will be fully answered with a warmer, human-centric approach to management that is discernible in today’s research concerning mind and emotion. Literally, we are on the precipice of a productivity revolution, not unlike what was unleashed by Frederick Taylor³ and the Efficiency Movement. Our focus must now shift to building and managing productive social systems where our professionals can flourish; we must ensure that our “talent infrastructure” is operating as well as our networks and equipment; we must educate our leaders to understand the human factors, and apply them, just as they apply Six Sigma and process standards like COBIT and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL); we must finally heed the advice of Abraham Maslow⁴ and Frederick Hertzberg,⁵ who counseled that humanism was needed in the workplace.

But today, leaders are uninformed about the wealth of findings uncovered by decades of research into the most important part of every company: its talent. In IT, although 60 to 70 percent of operating expense goes to talent, that talent remains heavily underutilized.

Imagine a factory where 65 percent of your operating costs were for complex equipment, yet:

• You don’t have a single operators’ manual.
• You have no idea if it will work successfully the next time you use it.
• You can’t track return on investment for each unit.
• You have no idea how to measure and tune the equipment’s performance.
• The people responsible for networking your equipment together have never been trained to do this.
• There is a wealth of available research that describes how to optimize the use of your equipment, yet everyone ignores it.
• Your equipment is constantly replaced with less expensive units, even though the existing equipment has been painstakingly programmed over years, at great expense, with all of the institutional knowledge.
• Your equipment has to be networked together to create output, yet there is no wiring diagram, and no one has any idea if the connections are working.
• Each piece of your equipment is unique, yet your managers mistakenly believe the machines are interchangeable parts and move them whenever they feel it is necessary.
• Every year you invest money to add new capabilities to your equipment, but no one tracks this investment, so the increased value is ignored when replacement is evaluated.

If you run an IT organization (or most any organization for that matter), all of this is true. Even though the bulk of the expense is on talent, we have no human capital accounting; most of the research into social psychology and neuroscience is ignored; and we invest the bulk of our energy into maintaining and improving our computing environments, software, networks, and storage. In that case, we know every patch and configuration level for every server and device, yet we track almost nothing about our people. Our focus is unbalanced: The server is $5,000 and the database administrator is $100,000. We must be expert at both.

Shouldn’t we invest more time to optimize our talent infrastructure, given that it is the past, present, and future source of our competitive advantage? Shouldn’t we know vastly more than we do about our human capital? Shouldn’t we understand the opportunity cost of so inefficiently managing our human capital? Shouldn’t we eliminate this blind spot?

Yes, we should. Corporate America has simply failed to create a working environment where people count. According to research by Robert Hurely, published in 2006, roughly half of all managers surveyed did not trust their leaders (and the numbers are no doubt higher now), based on a survey of 450 executives across 30 companies.⁶

We Have Been Taught Not to See or Feel

Quite simply, our industrial past enabled us to perfect the use of the computing infrastructure but left us blind to the human infrastructure. The management beliefs and practices that caused this blindness have flowed from one generation of leaders to the next, forming an unbroken chain of inheritance back to Frederick Taylor and our industrial past. We involuntarily embrace the operational, organizational, and administrative norms that emanate from a time where the focus was unfeeling machines, assembly lines, and production processes and controls and where the sensations and emotions of the workers were inconsequential to the bottom line. This culturally transmitted blindness causes a condition where our knowledge workers and the social systems that bind them together are invisible, because we have been taught not to see them.

The source of this blindness is not just ...