I was speaking with an Army Ranger recently.  He mentioned that his son was interested in a military career. The Ranger explained to his son that, if he joins the military, it will be as a Ranger.

I immediately understood why.  I said “because that’s where he’ll be safest”.  And the Ranger agreed, acknowledging that nobody is better trained -- better prepared – than those in Special Operations (Rangers and SEALs).
 
Preparation is a Differentiator
The legendary college basketball coach, Bobby Knight, said “most people have the will to win but few have the will to do what it takes to prepare to win”.  Rangers and SEALs do what it takes to prepare to win.  Do you?
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Prepare to Win
Special Ops and winning basketball teams never engage without a plan.  Many IT organizations, and companies, have a great strategy.  Yet, as Bain research shows us, most fail to achieve the desired results.  Why is that?  In my experience as a CIO, head of corporate strategic planning, and a trusted advisor to CEOs and Boards, I’ve seen a consistent pattern.  It’s poor preparation.

Moving IT Up the Maturity Curve
Your IT strategy is really a roadmap for your journey up the IT Maturity Curve.

But the roadmap is only as effective as your ability to execute. And your ability to execute is clearly dependent upon – you guessed it – preparation.

Break Down the Barriers to Flawless Execution
​So what separates the best from the rest when it comes to flawlessly executing our IT strategies? Consistently, I find that there are five obstacles or pitfalls. You address these and you and your organization are going to drive IT farther up the business value chain.

The five obstacles to flawless execution that I see most frequently are:

• Metrics
• Action Plans
• Resourcing
• Shiny Object Syndrome
• Culture and Talent

Manage the Metrics
We’ve all heard that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Well, it’s true. Metrics not only tell us when we’ve achieved our goal, but they also give us visibility into progress toward that goal.

Translate all of your strategic objectives into measures and targets for those measures. How about improving customer satisfaction by four percentage points by the end of the year while reducing the average cost of resolving a ticket by seven percent?

Those metrics can be cascaded to your team as performance objectives and they can be tracked throughout the year so you know if you’re on pace to achieve your goals.

Don’t Stop at the Goal Line – Build Actionable Plans
Many leaders that I speak with will tell me that they have a great strategy but never extended the strategy down to Action Plans or projects. The strategy is esoteric to most of the organization. Strategy is “management speak” that doesn’t translate to what I, as a team member, need to do every day to achieve our goals.
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Once you have your strategy and metrics (the What), engage members of your team, at all levels, to come up with the How. Let them define action plans to support every strategic objective, based on the metrics. I’m always amazed at how well the people who do the job every day can describe how to achieve lofty goals. It creates employee engagement. And the peers of employees that help develop the action plans also increase their engagement because they see that management is listening.

Manage the Precious Resources
The next major obstacle to executing strategy is Resourcing. How many times have you come up with a great plan, gotten six months down the road, and then had the shattering realization that you don’t have all of the resources you need to deliver the results?

Once the action plans have been developed, work with your team to estimate who needs to work on each project and how much time is required. Use these estimates to figure out who is overloaded and identify the resource gaps.
Now you have two choices. Either eliminate some projects – and adjust your strategic objectives and metrics – or get more resources. Often, you will find that the cost of a few contractors will be more than offset by the profitability of the associated project.

Make Shiny Object Syndrome Work for Everyone
The metrics, action plans and resourcing are the preparation that gets you ready to flawlessly execute your strategy. But just like the Special Operations and the basketball team, unexpected stuff happens during execution of the game plan. In business, that’s usually the Shiny Object Syndrome —or chasing squirrels. New initiatives come in, either opportunistically or in response to a competitive threat. Do you have a way to deal with Shiny Objects without jeopardizing the entire strategy?
Here’s a simple but effective technique to deal with Shiny Objects. Once the strategic plan is in place and you begin execution, treat every new initiative as a trade-off. Who needs to work on that new initiative? What are they working on today? With those answers in hand, team up with your IT Steering Committee or executive sponsors and determine if the new initiative will earn back the sunk cost of any initiative that you stop, and still be profitable. And determine if the current projects can be stopped and still deliver value. (That’s the beauty of Agile software development. We can often stop an initiative after 30% of the features are delivered and still provide great value to the business while saving the cost of the other 70% of development).
If the shiny object doesn’t create more value than what you’re currently working on, then it has to wait.

Granted, managing shiny object syndrome requires a great relationship with your business partners. Remember that we’re all on that journey up the IT Maturity Curve. Having worked with thousands of IT organizations worldwide, we find that organizations that are higher in the Maturity Curve have better relationships and more discipline. And they drive the smart, albeit difficult, conversations that ensure that we are truly operating as strategic partners and Innovative Anticipators TM, and no longer as order-taking IT suppliers.

Which brings us to the fifth major obstacle to flawlessly executing your strategy…

Culture and Talent
The Gartner Global CIO Survey reported that Talent and Culture are the #1 and #3 obstacles to achieving the CIO’s goals. We know the talent crunch is starting, reminiscent of the dot-com era. But the culture gap may be even bigger.
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Let’s start with talent. We’re moving, or have moved, to Agile, DevOps, Cloud, increased Cyber Security, and more. Have you done a gap analysis on your team’s skills versus your strategy? Are you full of “A” players or do you expect your “B” and “C” players to transform your business? I can’t think of any basketball team that won a championship with “B” players and I can guarantee you there are nothing but “A” players in our Special Operations units. (Call me if you want to discuss techniques for shifting your team to all “A” players).

Now let’s discuss culture. O&A research with 130 leading CIOs – people operating at or near Stage 4 – uncovered 14 core competencies required of IT organizations to operate at Stage 4. Surprisingly, 13 of the 14 competencies have nothing to do with technology. We call these the human side of technology. What historically had been referred to as the soft skills are now determined to be core competencies for IT success.

As you develop your strategy and prepare for flawless execution, think about the culture of service in your IT organization. Think about the entire IT organization and their communication skills, ability to influence others, business acumen and collaboration skills. Is there a culture of innovation embedded in the DNA of your team?

Every member of your team is an ambassador for IT. Your credibility comes from, not just your achievements, but also from the conversations that your team has with your clients, internal and external, every day.
Leading CIOs have told us that it’s not enough for IT leadership to have the required culture. The entire IT team needs to live the culture every day.

Changing the Conversation
O&A Unleashes the Power of IT by Developing the Human Side of Technology and Changing the Conversation About IT Strategy, Culture and Talent. Strategy, flawless execution, innovation and a service culture are fundamental requirements of every IT organization today. We prepare every member of the IT team to take their game to the next level, to move IT up the maturity curve to become the Strategic Partner and Innovative Anticipator TM that doesn’t just align with the business, but drives the business.

Two Special Offers
Offer #1: See how you can drive flawless execution of your strategy. Follow this link to register for the March 14 webinar and use discount code ARTICLE.
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Offer #2: Be one of the first 15 people to call O&A at (603) 623-7373 or email Tracy Dinu at [email protected] and choose either an O&A review of your strategy or a 60-minute call with Larry to discuss how you are going to flawlessly execute your strategy in 2017!

Break dancing, boom boxes, big hair.  The 1980’s called.  They want their stuff back.
Speaking of the 80’s, do you want to know a bigger mistake than the mullet hairstyle?
IT-business alignment!
As soon as we started talking about aligning IT with the business, we actually furthered the divide.  We continuously emphasized the disconnect and established it as the norm.  Well, gag me with a spoon, dude.  That’s just grody.
Words like stoked, veg out, and chill have been replaced with a new vocabulary including  Netflixed, Amazoned and Ubered.  Technology is defining whole new business models and disrupting the daylights out of old ones.
So, if I just stated how gnarly technology is today, then why question the significance of IT-business alignment?  Don’t get me wrong.  Alignment is important but it can no longer be the ultimate goal.
Does your CFO or CMO wig out about aligning Finance or Marketing with the business?  Of course not.  We need to embed the philosophy into our collective IT DNA that says "We ARE the business!"  When IT organizations start to do that, they find their stock rising, moving higher up the value curve.  Based on our latest research with top tier CIOs, we call this journey "Moving IT up the Maturity Curve."

The IT Maturity Curve
Today’s IT organization has to be comprised of Innovative Anticipators TM that don’t just partner with the business, but actually drive business opportunities.
And IT talent can no longer focus on just technical skills.  Every IT team member needs to be business savvy, consultative, value driven and innovative.
Ouellette & Associates (O&A) developed the IT Maturity Curve based on a year-long study with Babson College.  This, along with over 30 years of O&A experience transforming more than 3,500 IT organizations worldwide, tells us that there has never been a better time to be in the IT profession.
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Stage 1 of the IT Maturity Curve is a basic supplier of IT services.  These IT organizations generally don’t know about new business initiatives and are highly subject to outsourcing.  Stage 2 are the order takers that are building efficiency and effectiveness.  Stage 2 IT organizations do, eventually, get called when a major business initiative is underway and they are able to receive and process the order.
Stage 3 is where most IT teams aspired in the past.  These are strategic partners and trusted advisors who are embedded into the business. They become part of the corporate fabric, no longer a piece of lint to be plucked off.  They are agile, innovative and good at leading the business through change.  As a CIO, we liked being at Stage 3 because we got invited to the first meeting when an opportunity arose.
Today’s leading CIOs are at Stage 4.  They are the Innovative Anticipators TM that have built a culture of innovation throughout IT.  These are the people that are calling the meeting to discuss business transformation.  They are true business leaders.
Stage 4 IT organizations excel at all four stages, with an emphasis on continuous improvement.  They never lose sight of service excellence, consulting skills or communicating the value of IT while they are leading the business to new opportunities.  They build a solid foundation with a focus on IT culture and talent – and ensure they are good at every level.
Our own research with the CIOs of organizations that are high on the Maturity Curve sought to uncover the secret sauce of these high impact IT teams.  We asked these CIOs, all separately and without a list to prompt them, what the core competencies are that they focus on today.  What are they developing in their current workforce and what are they looking for when hiring new colleagues.  Remarkably, 13 of the 14 competencies are “human factors”, not technical skills.  The research underscores the long anticipated cultural revolution occurring in IT today.

Looking Forward
Businesses, educational institutions and government agencies that achieve Stage 4 on the IT Maturity Curve are thought leaders that re-shape their industries, avoid disruption, and enjoy a measurable competitive advantage.
Where is your IT team today?  What stage do you need IT to be in for you to successfully compete, differentiate and sustain growth?  Do you want to be the disruptor or the disrupted?

The Journey
As much as we want to accelerate the journey, we can't skip stages.  And, there is always a risk of backsliding, so we need to keep our game strong at every stage.
We are fortunate to have an end-to-end view of how our companies operate.  Using this unique seat at the table, and by studying the trends in our industry, we can look around the corner and "anticipate" (not align!!!) new opportunities for our companies.  We can bring new innovation and thought leadership that drives new revenue streams and orchestrates a new customer experience.  We can be the game changer.  We can be the disruptor.
Obviously we have people in our organizations at each stage of the maturity curve journey.  Savvy CIOs are focused on the percentages of people we have at each stage.  They are executing new Talent/Workforce strategies that move more resources higher up the curve. For example, if you have 70% of your IT workforce in stages 1 and 2 and only 30% in stages 3 and 4, imagine the impact you could have on the business when you shift this from 70/30 to 60/40 to 50/50 or better!
So, how do I catch myself? If I find myself using the word "alignment" or anything related to the words "the business," stop right there!!  IT is the business.

Changing the Conversation
​O&A focuses on Developing the Human Side of Technology.  We prepare every member of the IT team to take their game to the next level, becoming Strategic Partners and Innovative Anticipators TM.  We are changing the conversation about IT strategy, culture and talent by employing the new "core" competencies and an attitude of "we ARE the business."

The Result
Today’s leading executives are leveraging The IT Maturity Curve to change the conversation about IT strategy, culture and talent.  Don’t be bogus.  Start your rad journey today!  To get your copy of the 14 Core Competencies that set apart leading IT organizations, call O&A at (603) 623-7373 or email Tracy Dinu at [email protected].

Technology is redefining entire industries.  Just look at what Amazon did to retail and what Uber is doing to taxi cabs.  Does anybody remember Blockbuster?  They were "Netflixed" right out of business.
There are countless more examples.  In fact, Gartner reports that the industry disruption cycle has shrunk from 10 years to just three years.  We all know that the trend will continue to shrink, which begs the question every savvy leader needs to ask every day – "how do I help my organization become the industry disruptor rather than becoming Ubered”.