I Don’t Know Much About Strategy…
The famous, fatuous remark, “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like” has been riffed upon for at least a century. It derides the dull sensibilities of John Q. Public, oblivious to the richness that is exposed to him in oil daubed on canvas, a figure chipped from marble or the vibrations from air blown through a reed. It’s not saying that the unlettered can’t understand art. Of course they can, it’s part of the definition of art that it communicates with its audience. No, the ironic phrase condemns how we casually pass judgment on an expert’s labors, wrought with deep thought, hard-won skill and concerted efforts over time, without more study than a few second’s glance. It’s with that same level of analysis and authority – but even less humility – that I hear managers assessing their firm’s strategy.
Strategy, whether general business or IT, is one of those words that everyone thinks they understand but clearly few do. It’s a lot more than a “…either several paragraphs or… a set of strategic statements” that answer some key questions, as Entrepreneurship.org claims. wiseGEEK specifies that it’s a document with certain content; I’m not sure it necessarily has to be written down at all. Nor is it simply “long-term business planning” as this British site about business cases claims. Even Gartner doesn’t appear to have given it much thought, defining IT strategy as a discipline and leaving it at that. On the other hand, HBR is long-winded but accurate, as usual; and I do like strategy+business’s article that summarizes it as choices made on “where to play and how to win”.
Strategy is a big, abstract concept, not documents, rules or processes. Frame this, young MBA, put it on your wall: strategy is what you do to create the conditions for success; tactics and plans are what you do to gain success itself. Sure, it gets confusing because one person’s strategy is another person’s tactics. The CEO says “our strategy is to become the field’s leader in customer intimacy, the plan is to identify and focus on our customers with the most complex requirements”, so the CIO says “Our strategy is to to identify sophisticated but under-served customers, and we’ll do it using deep analysis of our corporate data” and so on down the hierarchy.
The important thing for IT strategy, as this example illustrates, is that it be aligned with the corporate strategy. The objectives of the IT department have to reflect those of the overall organization – and more than reflect, they should directly support those goals. But this is something upon which books have been written. My point here is simply that strategy needs a wide perspective, careful thought and be harmonized in all its components. It’s much more than today’s directive from the boss. Yet the term “strategy” is frequently thrown around by those grasping for gravitas, seeking to lend authority to a decision or an approach to a problem.
But that brings us to the awkward dichotomy in the CIO’s role. The senior executive’s job is to compose, refine and execute strategy. Having done so, it is transmitted to less senior executives who derive the tactics they use for running business operations from that strategy. But running an operation these days invariably means dependency on IT systems that we hope are full-featured, stable, and reliable. CIOs , and indeed most IT managers, are daily expected to reassure the other departments that the systems they rely on will get better, and become or remain stable. Any suggestion that IT is not that interested in delivering ever more speed and reliability is unsettling. I’m arguing that we are not, or not mainly, because doing so undermines any serious work on strategy.
Certainly a big part of the IT department’s function is to deliver stable and reliable operations; but at the same time we’re beavering away on new-and-improved tech that is bound to upset somebody’s apple cart. We need to promise both certainty and change at the same time. Underpinning the DevOps movement are techniques for improving transparency and communication between all the roles in a business operation supported by an IT system and the staff who develop and maintain it. By bringing the back office closer to the front these mechanisms, among other things, reassure business stakeholders that IT systems are good and getting better. If the DevOps approach works in your organization then good for you, it’s the kind of thing that’s needed to resolve the CIO’s dilemma and lets him or her get on with the real job, which is change.
Developing strategy is about determining what to do next, what needs to get moved around or ripped up. If we’re doing our job, we’re disrupting at the same time as we’re smoothing and improving. What change, when and how do we manage it? That’s the interesting question. If the operations would just run like a finely tuned train set, then we could get on with the business of building, enhancing and innovating, that is, implementing our strategy. So the CIO is in the position of envisioning, promoting and directing change while also promising efficiency, stability and reliability.
As IT managers we may be doing a disservice by working so hard offering these reassurances. Implicit in any IT strategy roadmap is change. Some of the changes we talk about are to enhance performance, usability, stability and so on; but that’s not where strategy lies, those aren’t the game changers. What the organization should expect is that the systems will be torn up by the roots, moved around, cleaned and polished and plunked back down in another part of the room. If you were trying to get your job done in the middle of that, you are going to find the process inconvenient. But rather than apologizing, let the CIO own it (“it’s a feature not a bug”) and urge the rest of the business to embrace it. Don’t downplay the disruption, pull the rest of the business in so they expect it and become part of it. Contaminate the status quo-loving culture of your organization with the technologist’s delight in innovation. Implementing strategy is how we build the business; upgrading the infrastructure is incidental.
I may not know much about strategy, but I know it is art: interesting, beautiful, and sometimes scary. Above all, it will shake me up and make me think about things in a new way, and new ways are how the organization advances and survives.
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