7 Steps to Make Your Information Services Team “Change Ready”

6/20/2006

How well a business can assimilate individual factors into an overall understanding of change depends on the knowledge base, change management skills, and mindset of the organization. For your information services team, the challenge is two-fold: adapt to change with the rest of the organization while facilitating technology facets of the change itself. If your information services team is not prepared to help lead change well adapting to change, execution of your business goals is at risk.

Fortunately, information services groups can be made “Change Ready”. Here are 7 steps you can take to make your Information Services “Change Ready”.

1) Think “Services” not “Technology”

“Information Technology” organizations, whether intended or not, tend to focus on the technology – systems, software, services – in use. As such, plans and decisions are based on what your technical staff knows, uses, and is familiar with. Views of future solutions are tainted by unintended biases and personal comfort levels.

“Information Services” organizations, as the name implies, use a service-oriented approach. The Information Services team focuses on how to best meet the goals, objectives, and operational demands of the organization. Plan based on “what” information services are needed, not “how” the services will be provided. In this model, the costs of changing technologies – acquisition, migration, administration, training, etc. – become part of the cost/benefit analysis rather than a limiting factor.

2) Establish and Maintain your Information Services Architecture

Most technologists limit their “architectures” to a list of preferred hardware, software, and service components, often specifying standard configurations.

While identifying technical architectures and specific technologies is important, your Information Services Architecture should also establish how technology decisions will be made. Your IS Architecture should establish how you select and implement technologies, providing guidelines and process, such as the following examples.

• Preferences to “Buy”, “Buy and Customize”, or “Custom Build” your business applications
• Role and staffing levels for internal and third party resources
• Use of in-house systems versus “Software as a Service” type solutions
• The existence and role of an Information Services Steering Committee

Few successful business owners would ever say “I only make changes to my business once each year”. And yet, this remains a common attitude towards information services. Information services, like your business, changes in varying degrees throughout the year.

When you establish a Life Cycle Method, you create the structure to manage the scope, extent, and timing of changes to your Information Services. Doing so saves time and money, and helps ensure your IS infrastructure keeps pace with your business.

4) Analyze Requirements

For retail, it’s all about “location, location, and location”. With Information Services, it is all about “requirements, requirements, and requirements”.

Too many project and initiatives fail because the solution does not meet the actual needs of the business. By putting an “extra effort” into requirements analysis and documentation, you gain the ability to better plan projects, set clear priorities, obtain more accurate quotes from vendors, better analyze purchased systems and solutions, and improve your management of project scope and cost. The extra effort (and cost) of sound requirements analysis pays off throughout the life of the system.

5) Know What You Don’t Know Now

There I an old saying among technologists (and others), “If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And while this sounds like common sense, many organizations still use technology “hammers” to pound away at any technology project in their path.

Just as you would turn to an accountant rather than a payables specialist to design your chart of accounts, rely on appropriate expertise for your information services issues. Expecting a network administrator whose education and knowledge is highly focused on building, running, and maintaining networks and systems to provide high-level project functions is a setup for failure. While your network administrators are probably bright can highly capable, business process and requirements analysis, vendor analysis and selection, application and database integration, cost/benefit analysis, and large-scale project management are likely not areas of expertise or skill.

Investing in “executive” level information services skill sets, even a per-project basis, dramatically improves the likelihood of success. Resources that understand your business goals and objectives, and can map these to Information Services strategies and projects, bridge the business technology gap that often prevents successful change.

6) Solicit Objective Advice

If you only rely on vendors and the technology press, you will eventually buy what the vendors are selling whether or not it is right for your company. No matter how vendors present “strategic” recommendations as unbiased, vendor recommendations will eventually steer toward the products and services they sell. Vendors representing multiple products and services will, intentionally or otherwise, guide your decisions to the products and services most strategic to the vendor.

Similar bias can be found in most of the “technology” press. Like the “entertainment news” sources on newsstands and your TV, most technology market analysis and news begins with well-planned and orchestrated PR and media campaigns. All too often, the white paper from the “objective” analyst promoting a “concept” is funded by a vendor with a product solution based primarily on the concept.

Just as you turn to your accountant and legal team for objective, unfettered advise, so too should you turn to objective sources of technology information. While truly independent, qualified consultants are a primary source of objective advice, peers in your industry and your local business community can share effective strategies, solutions, and lessons learned.

7) Rely on Involved, Strategic Advice

If you wait until the IRS auditor shows up at your door before calling your accountant, you have missed the point of the “trusted advisor” relationship. Similarly, strategic technology advice is best when given by persons deeply and broadly familiar with your business. While technology advice need not come from an expert in your industry, your advisor should understand your business goals, objectives, and operations, as well as your business’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Like the relationships with accountants, lawyers, and other trusted advisors, investing in a trusted technology advisor relationship returns better advice and an improved ability to prevent potentially costly missteps and problems.

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