IT Leadership Alignment

Technology is both the reason for disruption throughout many industries and part of the solution to remaining relevant for years to come. According to a recent survey, 82% of CEOs believe their average competitor won’t be in business in ten years unless they update their business model. And over 70% of executives intend to use technology to make these structural changes.

That makes it even more important for IT leadership to be aligned — within the technology team, with business leaders, and with the executive team. Alas, this is easier said than done.

How many meetings have you been in to “get on the same page” around a technology initiative? Which individuals come to mind when we mention feuds between teams or individuals around technical delivery? Have you seen specific business groups tackling their own tech projects, working around the main IT function? We’ve unfortunately seen each of these quite a bit.

The potential reasons for disconnects around information technology are numerous:

  • New faces (or recently changed responsibilities) within technical and business leadership roles mean that we’re not yet firing on all cylinders to deliver technology enablement

  • Distrust between technology and business, which may be based on years-old actions or perceptions, makes the default posture for one or multiple teams defensiveness and protecting the status quo, rather than curiosity and problem-solving around what we’ll need going forward

  • Personality-related conflict between key leaders hinders effective collaboration on common challenges

  • Executives or business leaders don’t think of technology as an important enabler

  • The list goes on…

Misalignment around technology is both ineffective and rather un-fun. So, what do we do to actually get on the same page? We recommend getting clear on these four items, to start. (And, note, we need both leadership and team members to consider these clear, so the next step is sometimes to share key information more widely!)

What is your organization after for the next year or so? What does success look like? How will you know if you’re off track, preferably with enough time to course correct?

If you aren’t able to describe overarching targets with specificity, work to understand (or work with leadership to define) specific firm-wide objectives and key results for the medium-term. You may also benefit from breaking down objectives into their component parts to make them more helpful as incremental guides.

1: Medium-Term Organization Goals

How is technology expected to enable organization-wide objectives? Can you draw a direct line from company objectives to specific IT initiatives and offerings?

If no, work with technology leadership to make it abundantly clear how IT is set up to support overall objectives — or what is needed to make that true. This may include building up capabilities, streamlining intake processes, or making clear what the top priorities are among various activities.

2: Technology Objectives

Who’s responsible for each aspect of tech-related visioning, design, planning, and delivery? When we have disagreements or competing priorities, who decides on the path forward?

The cross-functional nature of technology efforts can make it difficult to know who’s covering what, and hold each individual and team accountable to delivering as expected (or provide helpful resources if we’re missing the mark). If you have questions here, consider working with a cross-functional subset of leaders to draft proposed execution and decision-making roles, and ratify or refine with the wider team’s input.

3: Role Definition & Decision Rights

We bet there’s more on your “want-to-do” list than is possible to accomplish in the desired timeframe. And it can be tempting to go after some progress in lots of areas, rather than put all your eggs in a few baskets.

Let us offer a friendly amendment to that approach: have a few (like three!) very clear focus areas for near-term (like the next quarter or six months). Then take an experimentation approach to making progress toward these focus areas.

This way, we aren’t investing too much in a completely untested area. Rather, we know generally what we’re seeking to accomplish, and we take on a series of experiments to identify the best way to go about it.

4: Execution Priorities

How Dan works to align culture throughout stakeholder groups:

“We are very transparent – that’s part of our culture – so we communicate weekly, monthly, semi-annually. We have a leader-to-leader message that we send out to all our customers, keeping them informed on what we do.

We do a diagonal slice meeting where we go out and buy some pizza and get a cross-section of people from our organization to come in and just get to know each other. I think that getting on that human level and understanding what’s motivating people – the intrinsic value that they see, that makes them successful – helps them buy into the culture. Those have been pretty important for us.”

— Dan Ritch, CEO at SunStream Business Services

Interested in learning more?