The IT Utility Trap
By: Daniel Jacobsohn
Tags: It, Organizational Culture, Leadership, Technology, Strategic Planning

The IT Utility Trap

Casting IT as a Strategic Resource

Photo by James Pond on Unsplash

“There are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t”

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You’re in charge of an IT organization. Your employees and customers have high expectations for your group, and you want to deliver on all fronts. You want your people to keep up with the state of the art, provide secure and stable systems, and meet your customers’ needs.

You’ve got a reasonable budget, awesome employees, and you stay on top of all the trends. So what’s keeping you up at night? Do you feel like your group is doing everything it can to help the organization reach its goals? How do you know? And how would you even make all of that a priority when there’s already a mountain of work? Besides, weren’t you hired to make sure your technology stack runs seamlessly so other people can get their work done?

Digital technologies are so important to our lives that you’re expected to be something more than a utility. Your public dashboard for service up-time is great, but your customers don’t really care about it until one of the boxes shows anything but green. So, naturally, you invest in the best data center space. You use excellent virtualization tools and a hybridized backup suite. Everyone in the organization is cross trained on multiple technologies so you don’t even have a possible human single point of failure. You buy high quality end user machines with the best endpoint management. Your redundancies have redundancies. It’s turtles all the way down...

Only problem is, where’s your time and money for organizational and technological innovation? It’s all been consumed by your pursuit of up-time. So now you’re seen as a utility service — one with a fixed budget and ever-expanding customer expectations. In addition, the more an organization standardizes, the more it is seen as a prime target for outsourcing/offshoring/shared-servicing/whatever-the-new-euphemism-is-for-your-job-is-going-somewhere-else.

But you’re in technology for more than making sure the bits flow when someone opens the virtual tap. You’ve been trained in strategic planning and leadership, and you see ways your team could contribute in more significant ways to the organizational mission.

So you have lunch with your CFO and tell her you want to be seen as a strategic resource for the organization. She looks at you like you’ve grown a second head. She groks how human talent and money advance the organization, but you just said that something that fades into the background (unless it’s broken) can help her meet goals. You finish lunch and go back to the office and pull up the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic plan. “Using the most advanced backup technologies” isn’t one of the goals. Neither is “Finding the optimal development environment for our programmers”. Huh…

So what’s one to do? Have more lunches with the important people in your organization. They’re not necessarily the ones with the CxO titles, but they are the ones that can get things done and know how things really work. Tell them you want to make sure your IT group is doing everything it can to support their needs. Further, you’d like to hear what kinds of processes they dream about implementing, but there’s just never enough time or resources. Thank them for their time and ask for another meeting in a couple weeks.

Go back to your team and discuss how technology can help make those dreams reality. Investigate how your ideas fit into the overall goals and vision for the organization. Put a weekly meeting on the calendar to bring new challenges and ideas you glean from your lunch discussions. Maybe it’s a new Friday afternoon (aka The Land That Productivity Forgot) ritual.

When you have critical mass on these projects and ideas, wrap them up into your budget and planning process, and see what happens. Maybe your CTO will start seeing you and your people in a more strategic light. And that’s usually a really good thing when budget cuts are handed out.