Why SoberCounsel, Why???

The Original concept of SoberCounsel was to be a source of sage advice for IT Professionals, but the speed of change in Business has triggered a need for an adjustment. It is no longer enough to simply plan a signalling system that will help avoid train-wrecks in the future. Someone has to go and warn the train drivers. It is time for an intervention. So the content will be coming faster and in a more structured way. I hope it helps you. I hope that it is taken in the positive way it is intended. I hope it makes a difference. I hope it can be interesting and fun.

So few shining lights…

One of the significantly talked about things in Corporates is how [Insert IT buzzword here] did not deliver on its promise, and quite possibly it is one of these in your organisation:

• SOA
• Big Data
• E-Commerce
• BI
• Intranets
• Collaboration
• IP Telephony
• Business Process Automation
• Document Management
• Mobile Work
• Help Desk (some staff asserting that the word “help” should be removed from the name)
• The IT project Office (ensuring that IT Projects deliver on time and on budget)

…and so on.

Are these things unworkable? Will they always be a problem? Are the technologies immature? Are IT People just unruly and unmanageable? Will IT Projects always overrun and under-deliver?

…so be better

We all know of organisations where one or more of them worked well. We have been to seminars where people talk about great successes. We see some organisation leverage a particular IT advantage to huge profit. We feel aggrieved that our own organisation seems to be incapable of similar success…but why do these successes seem to be so few and far between?

I have been in IT Management for over 15 years and involved in corporate IT for around to 22 years. In my experience the overwhelming majority of conversations about IT that corporate staff engage in, are negative ones. In truth the overwhelming majority of ALL experiences that people talk about seem to be negative ones – just look at the news and media.  So researching the anecdotal material available will simply confirm the sense we have that all is not well. My purpose begins to emerge:

• To bring IT into good repute in corporates
  • by helping them to be of good repute.
  • and helping them to be seen to be of good repute
• To have IT staff seen as the hardworking, capable, intelligent and focussed people that they usually are (exceptions excepted :-P)
  • To weed out those exceptions
• To have corporate IT departments seen as essential Partners in the success of a business.
  • To give the IT Management team the tools to bring that about.

As usual the answer lies in understanding leadership and strategy in an organisation. In this case, specifically how leadership influences and interacts with the IT Department and Technology in an organisation (And I include IT Leadership in the category of Leadership) and how Organisational and IT Strategies interact..

• Are you curious as to why these things seldom seem to work out, or what can be done about that?
• Could you possibly influence some of those outcomes in your organisation?
• Do you perceive the Performance of your Company’s IT Department to be suboptimal?
• Are you an IT Manager or CIO?

Then this blog is for you.

…or Die

There are a number of things that are inevitable in the long term (certain to happen, unavoidable, unpreventable even) that few would dispute. I will call them generally accepted inevitabilities:

• Businesses will depend more and more on Technology to function
  • therefore Technology and Business Strategy will become indistinguishable
  • therefore The IT Management Function and the Business Management Functions will be come indistinguishable
• The number of IT Functions that are considered Commodity IT functions will grow, and those considered Core Strategic Business elements of IT will diminish.
  • therefore outsourcing of commodity functions will expand
  • therefore management of Core Strategic IT functions will become more critical
• The IT Department will change to align with the above inevitabilities.
• Organisations (and people) that can embrace these inevitabilities early (but not too early) will have an advantage.
• Embracing these changes early, will cause them to happen faster, thus disadvantaging those who are not ready.

There are many ways to embrace these changes, but I believe the ideas in this blog, properly applied, will prepare organisations and people for these changes.  So unless you are just waiting to die, this blog is for YOU.