Boost your IT department’s success. How? Look how Steve Jobs, Apple's chief exec, manages and communicates. In the IT industry we tend to speak geeky language; Steve doesn’t. Most IT professionals use technical buzzwords to impress; Steve doesn’t. Here are my top four lessons:
1) Quit the buzz factory. Avoid buzzwords, tech ones such as SOA and cloud computing and business bullshit bingo such as mission-critical and synergy. Be open and use statements that show you really care about your customers – aka the business and users – needs, problems and opportunities. CIOs and other senior IT managers have to learn to express strategy by storytelling, not death by Power Point.
2) Stop ticking off users. Love your user community. The PC in today’s modern business isn’t personal at all. USB drives are shut off, users can’t download apps and are not allowed to access social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. At home – and often outside the corporate firewall – users share files, chat and collaborate. Users don’t do that because they want to violate the rules corporate IT imposes on them. They simply want to do their job. Why are we making users angry? Users are our customers whose productivity highly depends on IT. We can’t police corporate IT users. OK, we need security rules. But you can’t force users to not-use the devices and apps they love.
3) Don’t innovate; improve what already exists. Sounds funny, but Apple rarely creates anything completely new. They look for the next thing and then make it better. They didn’t invent the MP3 player or the smart phone; they made it better. The supposed story on the iPhone is that Apple execs were at a meeting when they were all complaining about their cell phones. In the midst of the discussion someone said: “We’re all bright people, so we should be able to improve this.” IT departments should focus more on improving existing services and taking counter measures to solve problems. Forget completely new solutions.
4) Create an Apple store experience. We are entering the buy your own device era. BYOD is the first step in the democratisation of corporate IT. Forget one-size fits all chucky black desktop or notebook. Users will buy devices themselves according to their lifestyle. Next is the personalisation of functionality. We already do that on our smart phones. Users will download apps from online corporate service catalogues. They order services, do their e-learning, fill out incident tickets and help each other with social media and wiki’s. Create a great online – and offline when users visit IT outlets – experience.
More than 90 percent of all the money invested in IT flows to B2C. Enterprise IT is lagging the technology we use in our personal lives. Consumer technology causes havoc for the IT department. Change that. It’s a great opportunity and not a threat. The future of the IT department starts tomorrow; embrace it.
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