2012 planning is in high gear for many financial services organizations, so it’s top of mind in my conversations with technology and business unit leaders. Ron Shevlin put up a post earlier in the week that I left a comment on regarding disconnects between the CEO, CIO, and business leaders in a case study. One of my points was that the CIO (or CTO, Director of IT, or whoever the senior IT leader is) is set up to fail if they are essentially the sole owner of project prioritization.
As strategic plans and technology plans are updated, now would be a good time to think about your IT governance process and how it might evolve in the coming year. Time and time again I have conducted reviews of technology organizations where the primary source of business unit dissatisfaction was a lack of communication with IT and a lack of transparency in the IT project approval and prioritization process.
Whether you’re leading IT for the entire company or just a business unit, if you and your team aren’t out communicating with the business on a regular basis, how do you have a clue about how well your people, process, and technology are serving the business unless they complain? I couldn’t be everywhere at once, but I did make sure to have people called Technology Relationship Managers (TRMs) that were aligned with each business unit. Between me and the TRMs, we had a proactive outreach program throughout the year to communicate, understand how we were performing, anticipate needs, and assist business leaders with getting their projects through the business case approval process.
Approval and prioritization processes should be transparent. Dissatisfaction is rampant in organizations where it’s normal for business leaders to go to the CEO or CFO, get a project approved, have the project show up in the IT queue, and have the CIO prioritize. In these cases, business leaders don’t know what projects are going on elsewhere in the company and much of the time don’t know where their own projects are in the queue. With an open governance processes, leadership throughout the company participates in a rigorous project vetting and prioritization process. I’ve said before that this kind of process won’t prevent managers from being unhappy about where their project is in the queue (or unhappy their project wasn’t approved in the first place), but they can’t blame the CIO for these things.
These are just a couple of elements of an IT governance program that attempts to anticipate technology needs and shed light on the portfolio of projects that IT is being asked to execute on. A transparent prioritization process also makes it more likely that the “right” things are being worked on, assuming management has a reasonably coherent strategy and committee members are looking beyond their narrow interests. These elements would have helped in the case study I referenced earlier and they can help your financial institution, too. CIO’s can’t go it alone.