Don't Let Tech-Savvy Business Execs Do An End Run Around IT

WHAT EVERY MANAGER NEEDS
Businesspeople in almost all roles are aware that IT is an integral part of their jobs, says Jeanne Ross, a researcher at MIT's Center for Information Systems Research. These days, IT is "what every manager needs to be good at," Ross says.

"You can't be in business today without being tech savvy," says John Rough, CIO at DBL Distributing. For Rough, working with a group of technically astute execs, including his CEO, means he spends less time selling the why of a project and is instead able to concentrate on the how. If the company needs to expands its external bandwidth, Rough doesn't need to explain the details to the president or the CEO. "It's the same thing with applications or network hardware," he says. It probably doesn't hurt that Rough works at a technology company: DBL is a consumer electronics wholesaler, recently purchased by Ingram Micro.

Game Tactics

Take Control
Make it a corporate policy that all IT contracts must be co-signed by IT

Stay Close To Business
Build relationships so you can keep track of what's going on IT-wise

Remain Open
Innovative ideas can come from anyone and are sometimes just what's needed

Build A Test Bed
Tech-savvy employees can be your best R&D lab

Provide Options
Employees feel more in control when they have a say in what technology they use

Be Direct
Set meddlesome bosses straight, but do it tactfully

"Definitely, executives are savvier," says Joseph Santamaria, VP of enterprise business applications at Pitney Bowes. For him, though, it's not necessarily better or worse, just a different environment, one where management is "less willing to accept trade-offs" from IT, he says. A collaboration portal the company recently built came from a request by the business side. In that way, IT projects are "more of a pull, less of a push" these days, Santamaria says.

Question is: Who's pulling and how hard? Tech-savvy senior executives can be sympathetic and "provide the broad support that an IT department needs to be effective," says Aaron Lapat, a tech recruiter with executive search firm J. Robert Scott. They also can be "meddlesome," their expectations "too ambitious" around budgets, timelines, and what IT can deliver, he says.

Ask Bruce Simons, CIO of USAlliance Federal Credit Union. Simons describes his CEO, to whom he reports, as "somewhat tech savvy," having been involved in technology earlier in his career. "He uses some of the terminology--rightly or wrongly at times," says Simons.

On the other hand, the company's CFO isn't technical at all. "He only knows three words: 'Do not spend,'" Simons says.

The CEO, the CFO, Simons, and a couple of other executives make up a committee that determines rate structures for loan and savings products. They all have their roles: It's Simons' job to bring the IT perspective to those meetings, he says, to show what he can do "from a technology standpoint" to help design, implement, and support new products. Unfortunately, it isn't always that straightforward. "Sometimes there are misunderstandings," he says, like when the CEO believes an IT project is "simple to implement" and doesn't grasp "how it will ripple through the organization."

Senior executives who are IT vets can cause other problems. "People who passed through IT, did a little C programming back in the day--they think they know how to design a reporting system," says an IT director at a large consumer goods company who requested anonymity. They don't, and too often she ends up getting handed a design that isn't going to work. And the senior exec who designed the project isn't going to pay for it unless the IT department does it the senior exec's way.

That's when you need to be "appropriately direct," says Russ Edelman, an IT consultant and co-author of the book Nice Guys Can Get The Corner Office (Portfolio, 2008), which will be published this summer. CIOs must learn how to educate top execs who have a tech background or might have picked up tech tips at a conference or from talking with colleagues. "Address their concerns without slamming them," he says.

Dealing with a second-guessing boss is a necessary skill in any occupation. More troublesome for IT, though, are managers who take technology projects into their own hands.

Liam Durbin, CIO at Heinz North America, thinks the tech know-how of today's business execs is mostly skin deep. They're "gadget savvy," he says, but certainly not knowledgeable about how an IT organization is supposed to operate. For example, Heinz has standardized on Siebel's CRM software, yet instead of business managers asking how a particular business function can be accommodated in Siebel, he still gets requests to implement Salesforce.com's online CRM software service as a quick-fix point solution.

Business units going off on their own with tech projects is one of Durbin's recurring nightmares. Just recently, he stumbled over the fact that his marketing department was having something called a "digital age boot camp." He got a heads up about it only the day before, and scrambled to get a couple of his people there. "In the long run it would have been a lot more dangerous if we hadn't had people there," he says. "I'm not saying we're here to say no, but to steer the conversation toward what we can do."