Don’t let them grind you down

Company boards say that they want IT directors to be more skilful with their strategies. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But there’s a problem.

While much of the technical side of the IT director’s job can be and has been outsourced, modish titles – chief information, knowledge or even privacy officer – do not guarantee that IT managers have the skills to play a genuinely strategic role.

Since Enron, much strategy has been revealed as merely financial re-engineering. As a result, in a UK where shop keeping and transactions still dominate the corporate psyche, strategy for IT directors is often reduced to migrating customers to IP-based channels to lower costs.

Boards often ask IT directors to “get strategic” only because boards themselves are often unsure of what direction to take. But they also want IT directors to guarantee the continuity of their business in the face of dangerous employees, terrorists and seekers of competitor intelligence.

Thus does paranoia about survival threaten to become a ‘skill’ more vital to IT directors than professionalism in wealth creation.

Then, on top of strategy and continuity, there is a third area of expertise opening up in front of IT directors: the management of partners and brands. As Andersen found out to its cost, supply chain, customer relationship and brand management are strongly inter-related. All IT directors now have to take these things seriously.

They lack familiarity with brand management in particular. Worse, they find out the hard way that brand communications are more and more aimed not at customers, but at staff. In turn, this forces IT directors to help lead ‘change management’.

IT directors will increasingly have to take on tricky human resources matters in general and facilities management and work-style organisation in particular.

They will have to devote themselves to knowledge management and e-learning, which are now regarded as the essential antidotes to stress and a pervasive feeling of a lack of direction at work.

In this cause, IT directors will be asked to protect intellectual property. That will confer legal duties upon them that they are not presently used to.

Reaping the real benefits of IT appears merely as a footnote in the IT director’s expanding skill set of the future. Under this footnote the contribution made by IT is reduced to achieving a measurable return on investment and better usability.

So far the quest for predicting the return on investment on IT has proved fruitless, and that for usability shows little sense of ambition. IT can do a lot to help innovators collaborate and make breakthroughs.

Tomorrow’s IT director will probably be confronted by an agenda too broad to be realistic. So it’s time that IT directors started fighting not for particular technologies, but for some general principles.

The first must be that realism is needed about what IT can and cannot do, to limit the growing burden on IT directors. Unless IT directors ruthlessly discriminate between the wheat and the chaff of their jobs, they will lose legitimacy.

Unless they reject the wrong remedies, they will be overwhelmed by work. Real strategy, Harvard’s Michael Porter notes, is about making choices. It means deciding who you do not want to serve. IT directors need to remember that.