The IT blind spot for Value
By: Mateescu Marcel
Tags: Startup, Value Creation, Information Technology, Chaos, Digital Transformation

is Chaos. Which pops up everywhere, all the time.

I used to have the cynical attitude of most IT professionals. Business people show magical thinking when they talk technology. Bring them down to earth and deliver something reasonable.

Then my boss threw me to the lions, in the quixotic search of a fantastical treasure. It had to be dug out using Artificial Intelligence and Analytics. And said "why don't you just do it".

I have found a treasure, learned how, and the experience thrilled and humbled me.

Imagine the conversation. With competent, hard-working business people. It actually happened.

"So, what is the problem you're trying to solve?" — "We are overwhelmed".

"Why?" — "We work very hard, but we almost always do something useless because we don't know what we do"

"You don't know what you do?" — "We kind of know what we do but we're not sure how. But we have some data."

"Data?" — "Yes, we have written a hundred Word files."

"Word files?" — "About what we worked on. But we would need rather a million.”

"A million? How so?" — "Oh because if we screw it, we'll have financial losses north of a hundred millions dollars."

"So how can I help you?" — "Well, we feed all this data, and all the other data the company has, to the Artificial Intelligence so then it tells us what to work on."

Run away! is the instinct of most professionals faced with such chaos.

We learn and follow decision making and project management frameworks. Scrum, Kanban, Design Thinking, Lean Startup, you name it. Keep an eye on cost to at least break-even: enterprise IT is expensive. It's already tough to explain to business that you burnt all the budget and delivered halfway because we're Agile (yes, don't try this at home when cooking dinner). Empathise with the users, map the journey, test stuff, repeat…

What if nothing makes sense? No given problem to solve and segment. No clear action to deliver anything remotely useful. No repeatable behaviours from users, no same two conclusions from apparently similar starting points. Hey, try managing your way out in this total Chaos, you're in for a burnout!

Decision Making in general and Project Management in particular breaks for high uncertainty, low agreement problems. They call this area “Chaos” and discard it.

A good post on those recommends an Act-Sense-Respond cycle:

In hindsight, stick with "Just do it". Act — even unilaterally. Learn. Re-act. Learn some more.

Now on the blind spot of IT and IT organisations: their mortal flaw is being business driven. By some business requirements, or needs, or bounded problems. These are rare sightings in Chaos. You see pain but not pain points; waste but no residue; risk with no clear cause. Execute… on what? Deliver…what exactly? IT relies on business people for input. Those might have none, just big, fuzzy problems — or sell on an outsized ambition.

IT's blind spot is being totally business driven. For “chaos”, the business may sense there is a fuzzy problem or market opportunity but they cannot segment or locate it for various reasons. This leaves IT clueless on what to do.

I worked on internal use digital products. For a large blue-chip company, such opportunities are galore. Like many others, my company is well siloed: functionally, geographically… you name it. Most "bounded problems" expressed by business people are local optimisation within a silo or domain.

Yet the fuzzy, chaotic problems I've seen have a common denominator: they occur at transitions between silos. How to act on the border, in the organisational "no man's land" — what can one find, and what can one do?

unclear accountability, unclear authority => take the lead and be accountable yourself: credibility beats authority

strangled information flows, shaky data => invest in data recovery/archeology, immerge and expose parties in each other's information world

collapse of understanding of various team's missions => identify or define a common, overarching mission and sell it to everyone

inefficient, complex processes criss-crossing value streams (to spice it up, they are usually obfuscated by ISOxxxx bureaucracy to look good on paper) => disrespect the processes, respect the people. They probably have the insights to build a better world already.

politics, money, and power playing out => ride the wave and sell the vision.

For internal products, or improvement projects, a pattern of finding fuzzy problems is at transitions between domains or silos.

What else lays hidden in this zone?

MASSIVE VALUE.

Maybe 30 years ago replacing a pen-and-paper process with IT created massive value. Maybe 10 years ago updating first-generation IT with more user-centric products and methods (Agile) led to massive improvements. This is 2020. Today these wells get dry, how can one squeeze massive value from a move-to-cloud or a software rewrite. The value motherlode lurks there in the hardest zone: the Chaos.

There is method in madness, and its name in Chaos is to experiment. Lean Startup is a good start. Awesome, so let’s go in a Proof-of-Concept spree, test the market for shiny new product concepts!

Wait, then why do so many digital transformation initiatives fail — or get bogged down? Most start with a distorted focus on technology, while losing sight of business problems. “Where can we apply this cool tech?” should be rephrased as “Which cool tech can help with the problems we face?”.

Focus on stuff that brings tangible value, instead of only technology enthusiasm. Keep eyes wide open for learning new value opportunities. The problem to solve may shift, or pivot to something more valuable during the experimentation journey.

I was thrilled to see how digging, months in a row, an uninspiring sub-product touched the vein of a company-critical initiative and literally blew up. "Just do it" — thank you boss, humbly and gratefully. Because surviving and thriving in Chaos is a humbling tightrope walking exercise. One needs resilience — and sometimes a hefty air cushion down there- to re-bounce and pivot.

To all the IT people exasperated by Chaos, especially as a Digital Transformation by-product: don't run away yet — be bold. Does your management provide you air cover when in Chaos? Dig deeper. Have fun.

Just do it!