In this episode, Nicole and Ben discuss the single most important tool any leader should use when setting up an IT team, having a Strategy.
YouTube video of Jeremy Petranka, Assistant Dean of the Master of Quantitative Management (MQM) and Master of Management Studies (MMS) programs and Associate Professor of the Practice in Economics at Duke University, discussing IT Strategy:
https://youtu.be/vzB1HVt6_sk
Transcript Mayhem & MISfits Episode 8 – IT takes a Strategy
Nicole Grimm
Hello and welcome. My name is Nicole Grimm.
Ben Rockey
And I'm Ben Rockey.
Nicole Grimm
And this is mayhem and misfits where we take a fun look at business gone awry. And the systems that save them. Today we're going to talk about. It's strategy or IT strategy?
Ben Rockey
That's good cause when you have an IT strategy. It's a game you can.
Nicole Grimm
Win for sure. The objective and origin and why we would care about this subject. Other than the fact that we love it strategy, but for everyone else, why would it be important to them? Most likely you probably want a good IT strategy to align with your business strategy. And you probably want a good ROI on your investments in IT. Winning projects that actually get done on time. Meet the goals that you outlined. Those are all the side effects of having a good IT strategy.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, I always like the term conservation of movement. The idea that you have this. Certain amount of. Energy and you want to make sure that you're using it towards. Your objectives and goals the best way possible so you you can keep some in reserve.
Nicole Grimm
Right and IT projects don't tend to be very inexpensive or simple.
Ben Rockey
Oh God, they they are rarely. Inexpensive, but money well spent when you. When you plan. For it
Nicole Grimm
Right, so if you have a good IT strategy, those investments that you're making in it will have more positive, consistent outcomes that are all kind of going in the same direction and hopefully aligned to your business goals. So you could see those business goals reflected in the IT projects that you end up. Implementing successfully.
Ben Rockey
You know it all really starts though. First is making sure you have a business strategy. It's important that you actually communicate. What your business strategy is and making sure that you understand what your business strategy is for your business.
Nicole Grimm
Yes, So what? Is strategy or business strategy to start with?
Ben Rockey
There is a professor from Duke's Fuqua business professor, Jeremy Petranka. He made this great little video and he he talks about this quite a bit about strategy and he defines strategy as. Defining what your measurable goals are. And those should be tied to things you are good at and be clear of things that you are not good at. Be clear on what it is you're good at and what you're going to do and the things you aren't good at, make sure. You're not doing.
Nicole Grimm
Right and people will use that definition in their life in career and these kinds of things where they have their genius zone and work in the genius zone and understand where your limitations are and that kind of thing. And don't put all your energy into trying to perfect what you're not good at.
Ben Rockey
And that really carries over to the the IT piece of it. The technology piece of it. This the business system solution aspect of it. If you're not clear on what your business is trying to achieve and how it's going. To achieve it. The IT team the IIS team can get. Very dispersed in their work that no conservation of movement. If you will, trying to do everything they can for the business. But if they understood the strategy and they knew the objectives, they could be very focused on their work.
Nicole Grimm
Right, so we go from firefighting to actually producing value and creating an ROI in the IRS department and through all their projects that they're doing. So if we take the definition of business strategy and we. Refine it down to what is IT strategy? What we would generally say is that the real function of it is to. Enhance and enable the business overall. When it comes to it, it needs to know what the business is actually good at and then how could they use their technology footprint to make their business even better. At that said thing, maybe be a leader in the pack or disrupt the industry in some way. Depending on where this business wants to go. Every business should take a cohesive and comprehensive approach to aligning IT with business strategy objectives, and usually you'd have your IT leader. Translating that for you so they kind of know how those languages should translate across a business general language to a technical, more specific and tactical approach to that. Need outlined in that language. All of these things. These strategic objectives should enable smarter systems and achieve more business value. That would be the biggest goal. If you don't see business value, you're not enhancing what the business has claimed that they're good at. And no, they want to be. Good at or a. Road in which they're traveling then. There's kind of no point. You may. You could do that anywhere.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, you you need to set a a a point in the sky if you will a North star.
Nicole Grimm
Right, that's what we're going to use for the rest of this podcast. Is that North star? Everyone should generally know what a North star is, but the North Star can be seen from many vantage points, and we can reference that as a. As a case in point, if you will. That people have been following for thousands and millions. Of years perhaps? What's my north star? That should be defined by the overall business goals, and then we would just put it speak over it for the IT department. To follow You're going to tie your goals and two objectives and objectives to actions, making it all measurable. As we mentioned before. To make sure that that strategic mission is being met and is actually pointing to the North Star that's been defined. Since everyone knows what a North Star is, they should all be able to see it from their vantage point. So if I am running a help desk ticket as an example, maybe. Getting a lot of issues or complaints that come in. I know that if a particular project or system something like that is super important to the strategic goals because they've outlined that for me, then I can escalate those tickets as an example and I'll know how to prioritize. Perhaps if I see a pattern of issues. With this strategic mission or software project that they have going on, I can make sure that I'm bringing it to the attention. Of my management and others because I know how important it is to the overall objectives so it helps to define daily work. It helps to prioritize the piles of things that are coming in, so then we can start planning more effective and measurable means to make sure that those things are working. At their best.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, it's it's a good way to empower your staff. I had a CIO many moons ago when I worked for a Children's Hospital and his strategic mission was stated to us every day. What did you do to help the life of a child? It took me a few years to really appreciate what that would do for the team. When you think about the IT staff, you don't really think of them as helping save children's lives, but what our CIO understood and what he was trying to get us to understand was our actions. Should help the rest of the organization serve children better. And when we weren't bring it to them and when we were find ways to enhance what we were doing, every one of us on that team understood what our strategic responsibility was to the business. We were there to help save children's lives and in our work. Work, although at times feeling menial if we understood the value of it and what it was, what it was serving. We knew what to care about.
Nicole Grimm
Right it it ties you to the business more closely and gets you more your heart into it more gets you more involved if you will. So IT strategy along those lines should be plain speak and understandable for the business to follow and give the technical team direction. So in that case it's a perfect case in point. Although you might have to explain to an IT team more about how is it that I contribute to saving the life of a child. Or producing a widget for the business. This kind of thing as long as you are repeatedly. Emphasizing what the business's strategies are, they can start to see those things connecting and knowing how to prioritize the work in front of them, how they should approach it right, what the priority of any daily tasks might be.
Ben Rockey
And essentially empower them to help you. It's surprising how a really good strategic mission that's understood will make better use of your employees.
Nicole Grimm
Right?
Ben Rockey
Well, maybe we should talk a little bit about what happens. When we. Don't set a North star.
Nicole Grimm
Right, so IT strategies that fail. We have a few stories. We'll highlight two of them to keep them short and sweet and get to the point. And then of course, we'll go into the misfit. So for mayhem today. We have one specific. Story that shows how you can have an IT strategy. And almost make an IT strategy. Try to be the business strategy so the business strategy might be a little bit cloudy, but the IT team might have had in this case a huge project to do so it took up all their time. That's really all they could see through, if you will. So they kind of knew exactly what their mission was, because this is such a huge investment for the business. And all these team members in it and blah blah blah. Then we just know this is all we can see. So this must be our strategy. From there, what is important inside of this implementation? What is it that we're supposed to actually deliver outside of a new software? There's tons of moving parts in a huge ERP implementation, so really having that North Star would have been ideal in this case since we didn't really have that North Star. We kind of had this Gray area and the issues and complaints or errors or what was really important to the project. Really got dill. The business knew it needed to grow. It knew that it was running out of capacity with its current software and current solutions. So it had to invest in something. But what wasn't quite clear is what that something is, what it looks like when it's done baking.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, what? What was the out what was supposed to be the outcome once you got through this project and and how was it serving the business at large?
Nicole Grimm
Right, so in this case it ended up being a one year projects turned into three and four year projects because of the. The amount of change requests and the never ending list of adjustments and needs. And yes, this is important to me because I just found this error message and the business has changed and it obviously business changes a lot. And when you go over three years it's constantly moving target ends up being that this project. Cannot go live simply because we just don't know what the end result is or how do we. Put a stake in it and say this is exactly what we need to do. We can move on from here, right? Go live and then we can adjust and continue to grow as we are with the software package now except that it's not actually enhancing the business. Day-to-day.
Ben Rockey
And I think the in in that story the the biggest piece of it was. The interpretation was deploying a thing. An application was going the to save, save the businesses time and energy and make them more profitable and more adept. But the component that was missing was understanding they had to also update their process and also help the people of the company reach towards what what changing those processes are going to look like. And since that strategy wasn't set and there wasn't a North star, we spent a lot of time. Spending energy trying to get this system online to no. There was no doubt that it was going to be of value once it was brought online, but so much energy is spent trying. To believe in the system and understand the system without actually changing how they work.
Nicole Grimm
Right and we had conflicting measures and conflicting North stars between different departments. Or who was the most important or one was actually ready and another one wasn't. And and these kinds of moving targets throughout that project.
Ben Rockey
There was no single single North star.
Nicole Grimm
Right, right, another example we have is 1.
Ben Rockey
In that project.
Nicole Grimm
When the business has a strategy but forgets IT.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, yeah, that's a that's a gap we we understand our business we know where. We need to head. We'll just buy a.
Nicole Grimm
Thing ohh IT can't be that hard right? You can run it from your phone in your pocket. All these things don't need a lot of thought. We don't even have an IT department, so who should we explain this to, right? These kind of things can. Come up, but when you have. Systems that are tightly integrated into your daily business. If you make a big business change in this case, our client made a huge business change and actually added. A whole new. New business offering and to their marketplace. So they were selling things more on a brokerage and now they wanted to go to like a open market.
Ben Rockey
Our new channel.
Nicole Grimm
Kind of a selling point and the industry has an appetite for that. There's many other competitors that are doing it. They wanted to do it better. Well, all those other competitors have software that manages. The sales that way and manages the whole framework that way. So it was a huge change to their business. How they tracked inventory, how they valued inventory? I mean it went into all kinds of nooks and crannies within the business. They had initially decided to try and just use the software and the technology the way it was and just create new orders and kind of report on it differently. But the underlying logic and the way the system would calculate things or think things through or report things wasn't designed to meet those strategic objectives. So it was an abysmal failure. It's a lot more work for the user community to try to track it and try to kind of duct tape bailing. Meyer hodgepodge this thing together to make it kind of proof out and. Work for the overall strategy. Of the business and sales and.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, I mean you would argue that the the change they want to make. They made the channel they wanted to create the new sales channel they wanted to create was created. But what was left was. Massive amount of of work being done through people using spreadsheets to compensate for having a system that actually manage the business. Now people are just managing tasks to try to meet the requirements of that new business.
Nicole Grimm
Channel right it was, it was painful. So the next. Season around since we tend to help agriculture businesses, you hit the next harvest and you have to, you know, take your punches and make it to the next round. And then there was a realization like, oh shoot, we really need to catch up the system to our strategies and make sure that it is actually aligned and a lot of times you can check with your IT department to even see if you're about to step off a ledge or step on a a landmine if you will that you don't necessarily know is there, but they should know. Your team should know your support systems should know your vendors should know however you have it structured to support your business with IT and IS they should be able to give you direction. If you're about to make a bad turn without them. In this case, the next season came around, we launched a redesign of their software platform and it was quite a bit of effort. Ended up doing pilots and conference room pilots and these kinds of things so everyone would be able to, you know, mock a harvest. This is how it's going to run differently for this. Kind of business and run differently for this older kind of business, legacy business and the new business, so they'd have an idea of how this would go along. And then everything went off much smoother when it came to harvest time. Everyone knew exactly what they should be doing and the. Software was ready for it. So from there those are our fail. That's what it looks like when it's not aligned. We do have a few points so that we can go over to make sure that you have a misfit situation where everything is aligned and there's a few points that we can start with to make sure that we're all. Getting off on a good start and happy. So First off, Ben.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, the first thing to do is acknowledge you have an IT strategy. You you have an IT need at all times you have an IT strategy at all times. The question is whether you're acknowledging it and following it. We've said before that the the IT team, our business enablers, so whenever whatever you're trying to do in your business, your IT team there, whether they be on staff or through consultants. They're there to help make whatever you're doing happen. When you give them a strategy, that's clear that you've that you've said this is what we're doing with the business. This is where we're headed. How do we get there? Good IT leadership will take that, and as we've kind of said before, take those objectives. Take those goals, turn them into objectives, and then turn them into actions. That will actually deliver on the mission.
Nicole Grimm
Right and good IT leadership will share it. Like we said before in your example, for Children's Hospital that you worked at then you would constantly hear what is that business strategy and then as necessary your leader would in IT would connect those dots for you. How is your work actually affecting our overall? Strategy and then rinse and repeat it. Share it repeatedly. If we go back to the example of the North Star, you can always see the North Star. It's always there reminding you it's there every night, right? So we don't have to do this incessantly. Reminding them we all see the North Star at night, and that's our navigational beacon for that. For that time period, and then as we're going, it might dwindle a little bit. We don't. Exactly see it. But it can constantly be reiterated to you and clarified.
Ben Rockey
You know, I think it would be a good good moment to to point out when we've seen that be successful. When we've set that North Star. And there's a particular implementation you might remember.
Nicole Grimm
That's true, we did have an implementation of another ERP enterprise resource planning is huge, moving part software. Oddly enough, we had selected as an IT organization. This software with the business on our side. So the winning formula, I think, is that the business was next to us if not in front of the IT department. I would say and strategically so we knew that. They needed to pick it. They needed to be in it, right? It couldn't be an IT decision and this particular ERP was called SAP. It's rather huge and we implemented it successfully as an IT organization within six months.
Ben Rockey
Which is phenomenal, yeah?
Nicole Grimm
And all the different departments. Lots of moving parts.
Speaker
It was.
Nicole Grimm
It was a painful six months for sure, but it was done and we went live and materials shipped and we we survived it and we've adjusted after that and added more functionality change things that were a little bit off right all these kinds of things happen, which goes in tie with these kinds of projects.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, but I think the key, the key piece of it is as you've communicated, it started with the business saying we want to grow. We need a system that. Will grow with us. Here's what we're trying to achieve IT team. We think you need to go evaluate. Some systems, come back and let us know what you what you think we. Should go with. And then tell us what we need to to get there. IT team went off, evaluated some systems, brought them back to do some group evaluations, a the business selected which software to go with, and then the system committed, or the the business committed to making the change to the new system.
Nicole Grimm
Right, because we've all made this decision together. You may even arm wrestle over the points of who claimed that we need a newer system to enable the growth that we had outlined because it was so tightly integrated, you couldn't quite tell if the business was saying I don't think this system will make us grow, or if IT was many conversations said, OK, I can. See your overall. Strategy and where you want to go. And I already know. That this software will not support us at that level. Right, but perhaps because they worked so closely together, the business was already there and already knew that, so it wasn't a surprise, and it was a journey together.
Ben Rockey
The business was leading and it was enabling.
Nicole Grimm
Right and they are responding to at the end, which we constantly say in other podcasts. I tea should enable what business has already started. So that is the. A linchpin to what we use in our interactions with clients and customers now, and that's kind of same framework they should be with us. Pick it going in time. We're partners. All this kind of stuff is baked in together. So #2 is make sure your identifying and specifying what you need to be good at. What does. Your IT team need to be good at what skills should they have in order to support the business in specific problems, goals and objectives that they have identified. So as an example, if we use this. Poster child of an SAP implementation. We knew that we had to be good at supporting this kind of implementation and learning along with them with the business. So be one step ahead of the. The rest would start to fall into place.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, we needed to make investments into having staff that understood the application not just for this implementation, but this application was going to be a component of success for years to come. Well, then that means we need to invest into staff. Who will seek to understand how SAP works? How to take full advantage of it, and how to continue to work with the business on enabling features. Because as we know, overtime things grow, things change, there's going. The new ways of business that you might want to go into. Maybe the business itself changes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to change the application you're running on. What it does mean is that you have to have trusted advisors who can trusted team members who can take the system you're on and and adapt it to where you're going. And as long as you keep IT informed and IT has a clear. Strategy and you're investing in those resources internally. They're going to. Help continue to enable the business with this investment you've made.
Nicole Grimm
Right, this is where you figure out where vendors are better served than where internal skill sets are better served for the business. Another space might be with all the features and functions and moving parts that come with software and how complex and awesome and powerful can be you kind of had an idea where to start. In this case, we wanted to ship more wine. OK, how is anything that I'm working on today going to make that happen in this implementation project? Everything else is just noise from there. So we kind of had that as an outline or a North star for even just this one particular project, which also tied to the North Star of, you know, growing the business, having this growth trajectory, these growth. Goals overall, all of that can be tied back to is this task or this item in a meeting that we're discussing today aligned to that topic. And finally, the Third Point is of course what not to be good at. So in that same vein, if you're in a meeting and you're talking about something that is distracting from that North Star, or maybe perhaps goes the opposite direction entirely, you can know that that is for when you're bored. If that ever happens.
Ben Rockey
Or highlighting when you should be looking to outsource those components. For example, maybe this essay SAP implementation you're you know you're you're getting onto standardized equipment or standardized, standardized application. Maybe having a big development team doesn't make a lot of sense anymore to write a lot of custom code. You should probably begin to centralized on the application that you've you've purchased to run your business, so ask yourself questions about what kind of staff do I need to have and what should they be doing if we can. To grow the business is what I used to do. What I'm still doing if I've made this change?
Nicole Grimm
Right? It gives you an idea of how to be. Cognizant of the unimportant how to avoid being pulled into the unimportant. How to understand where those lines are right if we don't say that we don't want to be good at something, then maybe some could assume that we would want to be good at it because no one actually said. You didn't, so sometimes just saying something is. Helpful in clarifying. Oh, you don't want me to be good at that? OK so I will just focus on the items you told me to be good at. Yes oh alright, I just thought it was, you know. That, plus whatever.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, the it's and we can see it in funny ways. I think everyone understands that you need to have people who. Understand servers and databases and and that's true. But depending on how you do a deployment you you may hire up a a a number of people to be a part of your staff who are going to be there. For servers and networks, and that's fine, and that might be the right choice. You, but maybe you can take advantage of an MSP who could do it for you for less or maybe once you have a good leadership team and good managers who understand that well, a good chunk of what we're going to do is going to be online, so we don't need resources in the same way. You'll understand that you can put those resources somewhere else, moving them from, say, a technical team to a business analyst team who can spend more time understanding what you're trying to achieve and making sure they're enabling features. In some system for you.
Nicole Grimm
Right, one thing that comes to mind is something my dad always used to say he was a Jack of all trades and a master at none. And sometimes when you're a certain business size, you need to really focus on the master portion, because that's really what you're good at and what you're going to excel at and where all that business value is going to be driven. And the Jack of all trades. That's probably the space where you want to try to avoid it as much as possible. So this is the area where we're saying exactly what it is that you want to be a master at, and focusing on it. So from here, we'd probably summarize down to three additional or cohesive steps as to how to get started if someone wanted to get started on implementing their IT strategy to align with their business strategy. So First things first, we'd say, write it down or create a document. There's plenty of resources out there, and obviously everyone can always reach out to us as well, just to get an idea of how you can create documentation. Ideally A1 pager if you can boil it down. To that simple.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, I mean a strategy document should not be a a a tome. It should not be multiple pages. A strategy should be a very clear. High level mission. And and some goals that will get you there.
Nicole Grimm
Right easily found, easily followed, easily understood if you also plain speak like we've mentioned before, so you can say, oh, I get it and then maybe and listen to conversation from there of different ideas that come to mind to support it.
Ben Rockey
And that's really the next step, right? Once you have. Now to begin with, your strategy may already have some trusted members of your team involved. You may ask question, hey, how do we go to this this next step? How do we grow the business by 10%? How do we get into this market? There's a lot of questions you can ask that will help build that strategy, and most likely you'll have a few people in that team with you. Talking about that, but once you've got that strategy defined, now I need to open up the room, and in this case to the IT team. How do you bring in your IT resources to help you fill out that strategy and turn those goals into objectives and objectives into actionable item?
Nicole Grimm
Right, and this is where it leadership ideally would come into play so they they know how they're going to translate that higher level business speak into a high level, IT speak and not get too bombarded or pulled into the tactical weeds of the gigabytes and the ones and zeros kind of space. Where some IT professionals are, their genius zone is that space, and sometimes it's hard for them to. To come up a bit.
Ben Rockey
Higher, maybe it's a little cross functional. It may not be limited to just the IT team talking about IT strategy you may bring in other leaders from other parts and organization for them to help communicate what they need to be successful so the IT team can have a better understanding of how to enable the business. But that's the whole point. You want to open up the conversation about what are we trying to achieve.
Nicole Grimm
Right gather input, gather ideas, support and confirm how they are going to measure it, and make sure that they're actually contributing to that. Then from there, build the plan and measure that success.
Ben Rockey
Cannot overstate the importance of measuring, and you can't measure without a plan, so. When you get to the point where you understand what the mission is, and you've built your objectives and you've come up with a list list of actions and you put them to a plan, you also want to track against what you're doing so you can see if you're actually having success and find the blocks that are keeping you from success.
Nicole Grimm
Right, because just saying it, writing it down on paper and not measuring it. You may just assume everything's good. I just had a conversation with a partner the other day that they had a lot of meetings on a topic, so they just assumed everything was good. But if you cracked open all the details, it definitely was not. So we want to at this level for sure come up. With key performance indicators, some might say KPIs something to that degree where we're measuring at a high level to say, are we actually all going in the same direction, creating value of the same scale? People working on the things that actually matter and are making an impact to our overall strategy.
Ben Rockey
And they should be measured at. Levels that are. Both are we being timely? But more importantly, are we actually delivering what we said? We want to deliver? Did making this change? Bring about the growth we were looking for. Did making this change bring about the savings we were looking for? Did making this change bring about the efficiency we were looking for?
Nicole Grimm
Right? Right, so I think that's. A pretty good framework for everyone to follow and us to get started with. I suppose.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, I mean. If it, if it does nothing more than start the conversation, then success.
Nicole Grimm
Exactly these things should be a fluid conversation, and, uh. Constantly measured and. And disgust point to make sure that we're all meaning the same thing. Getting the same value and that we can just enhance what is working. Every time we get together and continuous improvement as we'd say in other spaces, right? This gives a definition of what is it that we are trying to continuously improve? Not everything, just certain things. All right, everyone? Well thanks for listening to this IT strategy session today. We hope you found some value in this conversation. Please join us next time for more mayhem and Misfits.