Inc. Doug Lynn Even the best-laid strategies and initiatives of leading IT organizations and technology companies to remove the human component of planning, building, and running IT services are not proving effective. While patterns or models of infrastructure and operations are helping IT organizations to leverage such resources, similar developments in human capital are woefully behind. However, CIOs find that IT organization culture change is problematic for several reasons. Individual work habits, thought patterns, etc. are difficult to change.
Turnover remains high as IT personnel swarm to the highest bidder.
CIOs have not been adequately trained to promote culture change because of its highly intangible and psychological underpinnings. Beyond 2005, CIOs should plan to further evolve culture change models and processes to address the needs of increasing cultural diversity within globally distributed virtual workforces. Because perceptions of the IT organization are the CIO's responsibility, it is mandatory that CIOs understand how all individuals affected by a culture change perceive how effective a CIO or IT executive can be in bringing about change - cultural or otherwise. For peer assessments, we find that informal assessments through conversations are most valuable. Indeed, culture change is cyclical and sometimes inconsistently dynamic.