IT may be central to modern existence, but the people and processes of IT remain a mystery to most business executives and colleagues. It’s time to change this.
I asked a group of business executives to take out a blank sheet of paper, draw a big circle, and label it “IT People and Processes.” I then asked them to draw a circle inside that circle representing the degree to which they understood IT people and processes. For the vast majority, that circle was a tiny period.
Dr. Robert Rennie, retired CIO of Florida State University Jacksonville and Southern Connecticut State University, observes wryly that some executives go beyond ignorance, fiercely adhering to inaccurate assumptions regarding what IT does.
Steven Narvaez, IT consultant and former CIO of the City of Deltona, Fla., laments the widely held erroneous perception that IT is a technology “drive-thru” where executives “order into a speaker and drive around to the window expecting to be handed the finished product.” Organizations want a “one click” technology solution but all too frequently lack the patience, discipline, and knowledge of what is required to make that “one click” solution a reality.
There is a huge understanding gap regarding who IT is and what IT does. Barbara Cooper, former CIO at Toyota Motor North America and one of the top CIO coaches in America, argues that the ignorance gap is more like an ignorance “grand canyon.”
The path to understanding
Since the 1730s, English-speaking playwrights and screenwriters have used dramatis personae — from the Latin meaning “person of the drama” — to list the main characters of the play or novel. Many executives would be hard-pressed to create a list of the major players in the IT organization.
To combat this, CIOs need to humanize IT. By this I mean the rest of the organization needs to attach a human face to the various aspects of the IT service factory.
Executives need to understand and hopefully have a respected relationship with the following IT dramatis personae: IT operations director, development director, CISO, project management office (PMO) director, enterprise architecture director, governance and compliance Director, vendor management director, and innovation director.
John Gough, SVP of strategy and services at Element Three, ran my IT dramatis personae question through OpenAI’s o1 model, which produced: “A modern IT dramatis personae can feel like an ensemble cast in a prestige TV show — each character essential, each with their own quirks and blind spots, all trying (and sometimes failing) to act as one.”
That may be a bit much, but you get the idea. Business leaders need to know IT’s leading “ensemble cast” at the least, and it’s on the CIO to help introduce them.
Another aspect of humanizing IT is through language. When IT speaks to the business, the business frequently has no idea what IT is actually saying. This is a self-inflicted wound.
Priscilla Emery, one of the top information management advisors working today, recalls a time when she was a project manager at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Virginia. IT at the time was communicating with buzzwords and technical jargon. A two-pronged remedy was put in place. IT was counseled to be sensitive to their use of technical terminology when addressing non-IT pros. The truly brilliant remedy, however, was a class for those same non-IT professionals to help them understand IT’s mysterious language and procedures.
The class was modeled on an already successful in situ “medical terminology” class designed to help non-clinical staff understand healthcare terminology. In the healthcare world, it was accepted as fact that you had to be able to talk and listen to “medical speak.” It stands to reason that in a technology-driven world individuals should be able to talk and listen to “tech speak” or have translators available.
An IT house divided
I reached out to CIOs who reported to CEOs during the course of their careers. The consensus was that less than 2% of their CEO bosses understood the totality of the technology stack.
Ben Pring, IT consultant/futurist and co-author of What to Do When Machines Do Everything,points out that not only does the rest of the organization not understand IT – IT doesn’t understand IT.
In a prescient 2017 article “The Two Diverging Tribes of IT,” Pring introduces us to the bi-tribalism of modern IT:
“The first tribe — the ‘Originals’ — are those that tend the servers, the databases, the compiler code, the Ethernet cables, that make the techno-centric world tick. They are the proverbial nerds, the geeks, the math savants, that loom large in the public imagination whenever the phrase ‘IT’ comes up. …
“The second (new) tribe — the ‘Digitalls’ — are those that write dating apps, music distribution platforms, accommodation websites, augmented reality filters, e-games, and machine learning algorithms.”
These two tribes inside IT don’t understand each other, Pring wrote — “Originals and Digitalls just don’t mix.”
So if there’s a lack of understanding even within IT, the CIO has a lot of explaining to do, in a lot of different directions.
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