Three Causes of Overly Narrowed IT Management

 IT leaders have to learn and do the right and real things about organizations, not just via IT lenses, but via business or customers’ lenses. 

IT is impacting every business function and is becoming the very driver of digital transformation. With emerging lightweight digital technologies and overwhelming growth of information, forward-thinking organizations declare they are in the information management business to improve business competency and long-term growth. However, many IT organizations still get stuck at a low level of maturity, being perceived as a help desk or a cost center. Here are three causes of overly narrowed IT management.


Silo thinking and management style will stifle information flow: Many think silo happens when the business operates from a fear standpoint - fear of rejection, fear of competition, or fear of invisibility, etc. Often, the silo is one of the root causes of overly narrowed IT management. To run IT as a trustful business partner, there are negative conflicts when the organization has a communication bottleneck and little collaborative competency. CIOs need to broaden their perspectives, get full support from the corporate board and the top management team in order to break down silos and manage IT holistically. IT should explore the furthest horizon because digital transformation is an evolutionary journey. The breadth and depth of IT management include people (skills & capability), process ((workflow, process effectiveness & efficiency), information management, organizational structure design, and technology update. It is the responsibility of the leaders to initiate his or her team to break silos, enhance cross-functional communication and collaboration. In fact, IT management has to work both in IT and on IT, acts more like a digital orchestrator, to conduct an information-savvy and people-centric organization.

Running IT as a support function locks the full potential of the business: Many IT organizations stick to reactive mode, keep the lights on, but little emphasis on driving business change or innovation. If this is the case, often IT is perceived as an isolated support function or acts as a controller. To run a strategic IT for unlocking the full potential of the business, it’s important to make a smooth transition from an overly rigid and controlling type of IT department to a flexible and proactive IT. Organizations rise and fall, not on the quantum of plans and resources, but on the capabilities to lead and manage, yet most important to execute. IT leaders have to navigate the corporate strategy and lead the development and execution of the corresponding technical strategy for the company. They are able to identify the true cost savings, workflow optimizations, and additional revenue opportunities for the entire company and improve its competency. To broaden IT management discipline requires IT leaders to become business strategists, having high-proficient IT staff with both business acumen and technical expertise to solve business problems systematically and deepening IT influence continually.

IT loses the sense of creativity over a period of time: IT is critical, IT is complex. IT organizational development needs to manage emerging conflict between classic style and digital style of management. Hence, IT leaders have to learn and do the right and real things about organizations, not just via IT lenses, but via business or customers’ lenses. Often the IT department is so busy in the mundane day to day activities, they lose the sense of creativity over a period of time. IT management is both science and art. It takes a scientific approach to enhance the IT-business relationship, manage IT-business alignment, foster cross-functional collaboration, IT integration, and optimization, etc. The art of IT helps the business explore emerging possibilities and figure out alternative ways to do things. If IT gets stuck to “we always do things like this” mentality, they create blind spots, slow down the pace of change and jump to the wrong conclusions, and it turns out to be irrelevant for the long-run. The digital IT is not equal to IT modernization, it goes a step further, doing more with innovation and solving problems creatively.

Organizations rely more and more on information technology nowadays; the IT department has more and more to offer, also has a lot of obstacles to overcome. To fix the flaw of the overly narrowed IT management, IT leaders and managers need to leverage systems thinking, take the outside-in business lens, practice the multitude of IT engineering and management disciplines in a structural way for running IT as a business inside the business.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls,IT Transformation,Lessons from Failures